The Study Of New Words And Expressions

The study of Chinese new words and expressions sprung up in 1980 s, with the continuous development of the field of investigation, and the continuous progress in research methods and theory, new words and expressions research began to show a trend of multi-angle, multi-level and three-dimensional. The study of new words and expressions mainly concentrated in contemporary Chinese, rather than those terms before the founding of the PRC. The publication of “100 years of Chinese neologism dictionary” provides a rich corpus for our research of new words and expressions from 1919 to 1949. The research method in this paper combines quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, expected to make some beneficial explorations to the study on new words and expressions of this period.This paper consists of five parts:In the first chapter, the prolegomenon, we define the new words and expressions, comb the research history and summarize the research status. We believe that the Chinese new words and expressions should accord with the following criterions: first, appeared in a certain period of time, exist in vocabulary system of modern Chinese. Second new words and expressions includes terms with both new form and meaning, new words created by the inherent words or the ones only get a new idea and new use, or the terms only with new forms. Third, new words and expressions include fixed structure. In the study of modern Chinese new words and expressions rarely involved in the period from 1919 to 1949, "100 years of Chinese neologism dictionary” provides reliable corpus.The second chapter describes the overview of the new words and expressions from 1919 to 1949: lexical distribution bases on nouns and verbs, adjectives, adverbs and quantifiers and interjection as supplement; from the word length, terms with the length of the two or three syllables, two syllable words which accounted for the largest proportion; the proportion of semantic categories the larger is the cultural and sports class, economics, politics, science and technology.The third chapter investigates where new words and expressions from 1919 to 1949 were stemmed from: creation and absorption both are the general characteristics, newly created words is the primary source of new words; source language of loanwords is English. The transliteration words are quite humorous, quite of them follow the trend to paraphrase, there are multi word translation and localization phenomenon; main dialect words from the Beijing dialect as the representative of the northern Mandarin dialect and Shanghai dialect as the representative of the Wu dialect; and the neology follows the economic principles.The fourth chapter studies the coinage of new words from 1919-1949. People mainly used four word-building methods: the description method, simulation method, reduction method and comparison of the rhetoric method.The fifth chapter analysis of the linguistic mentality reflected by the new words and expressions from 1919 to 1949: respecting vernacular; the pursuit of innovative attitude; advocating progressive attitude.