Contrastive Analysis On The Word-formations Of English And Chinese Neologisms

The rapid development of social life and internet application provide solid foundation of the generation of neologisms. The large amounts of neologisms greatly facilitate people’s daily-life communication, enrich language vocabulary system, and promote the status of neologisms study in the field of lexicology research. Although word formation is an important component of lexicology study,the contrastive analysis between English and Chinese neologisms is still a weak link in lexicology study. Taking the English and Chinese neologisms in the years of 2009-2013 as the corpus, this paper aims to analyze the word-formation characteristics of English and Chinese neologisms comprehensively and systematically, to reveal the similarities and the differences between them, and tries to explain the reasons for the differences. The result of this study may predict the word-formation tendency of English and Chinese neologisms.In Chapter 1, the paper elaborates the status and significance of contrastive analysis of word formation between English and Chinese neologisms. Chapter 2defines “neologism” and summarizes three sources of neologisms, on the basic of existing definition given by both domestic and foreign scholars already, elaborates the definition of word-formation and distinguishes word-formation from word-creation. Chapter 3 analyzes word-formation characteristics of Chinese neologisms appeared in the years of 2009-2013 respectively, from the perspective of the nature of neologisms, the word-forming morpheme, and the syntagmatic relations. The analysis shows that compounding and derivation are the top word-formations in Chinese neologisms, while lexicalized sentences and lexicalized phrases presents new features of Chinese neologisms. There is no difference between the existed words and the neologisms from the perspective of neology. In addition to single-morpheme, loanwords take the other two word-formations—compounding and derivation. In Chapter 4, the paper respectively analyses the word-formation of English neologisms appeared in the years of 2009-2013, from the perspective of neologisms, the character of word-forming morpheme, and the syntagmatic relation. From the analysis we can find that compounding, derivation, blending, compounding+derivation,blending+derivation are the main word-formations in English neologisms.Acronym and paraphrase are two special types of English neologism, reflectingthe unique characteristic of word-formation in English. The small number of neologisms in neology and loanwords embodies the same word-formation feature as before. Chapter 5 contrastively analyzes the different word-formation characteristics between English and Chinese neologisms, summarizing the distinctive word-formation characteristics of the neologism in each language. It also compares the word-formation features of neologism in both languages. From the above analysis and comparison, we may find that word-formations in both languages share some differences as well as similarities. Blending,compounding+derivation and blending+derivation are unique word-formations in English, and blending trends to take the first word-formation method instead of derivation. Lexicalizing is becoming a new word-formation measure in Chinese neologism. The neology neologisms in both languages share the same word-formation features with the old ones. There are richer types of loanwords in Chinese than those in English. Chapter 6 analyzes the reasons that lead to the different and similar word-formation characteristics between two languages. The last part summarizes the study and points out that the quest for concise word-structure leads to the homoplasy of word-formation in English and Chinese neologisms. It lastly prospects the respective development tendencies of word-formation in English and Chinese neologisms.