A Study On Chinese Neologisms From The Perspective Of Emergentism

Emergentism, as a branch of complexity theory, emphasizes the interaction between the agent and the complex environment, holding that language behavior is the result of this interaction. Neologism is the production of the interaction between agent and environment from the perspective of emergentism. As the most important part of language, words, especially neologisms, are the earliest to perceive the social changes. Neologisms emerge in the development and changes of society, technology, economy and other fields, which we may find in Language Situations in China:2011-2013 published by Language Processing and Management Office of Ministry of Education, China. There are more than 500 neologisms in each of the three Language Situations which have aroused my great attention. The scholars at home and abroad analyze the classification of neologisms, features of neologisms, ways of word formation, reasons of appearance of neologisms and other perspectives. However, few studies concentrate on ways of emergence of neologisms and nature of the Chinese neologisms. In addition, no scholars study the Chinese neologisms from the perspective of emergentism, either. This dissertation deals with two questions: how do the Chinese neologisms occur in the complex environment from the perspective of emergentism? what is the nature of the Chinese neologisms in terms of emergentism?By the utilization of the combination of the quantitative method and qualitative method, the dissertation studies the Chinese neologisms from the perspective of emergentism, which are the 1678 neologisms from Language Situations in China: 2011-2013, in which they present the neologisms by three tables that list them with their explanations, examples, frequencies and the number of texts in the disks attached. In the aim of the solution of the first research question, the dissertation categorizes the neologisms into three ways: social emergence, technological emergence and economic emergence, lots of which have emerged from the hot social issues, the rapid development of technology and the number of economic policies.The dissertation also explores the nature of the Chinese neologisms in the situations.The Chinese neologisms in this research may be classified into four categories:globality,unpredictability,non-restorability and novelty,the first of which holds that the neologisms possess the global property which can not be further divided into parts in terms of meaning.For instance,the neologism“低头族”refers to a group of people who often lower their heads to play phones,in which you can not separate“低头”and“族”,and the meaning of which is“global”,the special quality;the second of which is unpredictability because the number of neologisms,the meanings of neologisms and the formation of neologisms can not be predicted completely;the third of which is non-restorability,which means that the meaning of the neologisms is also global,but whose meaning can not be restored by the meanings of its parts.For instance,the neologism“火箭蛋”whose meaning is that the price of eggs goes up sharply and the meaning of the“mocking term”does not have the combination of rocket(火箭)and egg(蛋)and the restorations of the meanings of the parts is problematic.Novelty is the last nature of the Chinese neologisms in question.The neologism,on the synchronic level,has the special quality that the existing words do not have.The neologism,on the diachronic level,emerges constantly in the complex environment and may obtain new structures.Finally, this dissertation copes with the major findings, the former of which states the three major sources of the three ways of emergence of the Chinese neologisms, the latter of which illustrates four properties of the neologisms: globality, unpredictability, novelty and non-restorability, which is the uniqueness of language, not fragments though the language can be disintegrated. As to the limitations, some of my data about the ways in terms of “how” can not be classified into the three ways in question and belong to political emergence, for instance, or other fields, which I have not dealt with and need further scrutiny. The four properties of the Chinese neologisms are only from the three books by Language Processing and Management Office of Ministry of Education, China, which should be testified by other Chinese or English neologisms in other sources.