Towards An Optimized Treatment Of English Neologisms Their Inclusion And Entry Arrangement In ECLDs

As an important communication tool,language changes with the development of society and the times.In the information age,the direct or indirect influences on language come from all aspects of social life,such as politics,economy,science and technology,and culture.The surge of neologisms,on the one hand,reflects changes in society,and on the other hand,meets the need of people to communicate with each other.Many definitions of neologisms are put forward and overall they can be classified into two main categories: new words and old words with new senses.From the semantic point of view,these words allow people to express their cognition of new things or new concepts,and contribute to the further comprehension of the existing things.So far,the researches on neologisms at home and abroad have generally focused on word formation,translation and pragmatic interpretation of metaphor.The dictionaries of neologisms are regularly published and a number of academic papers and monographs on neologisms have also been published.However,the research on the inclusion and entry arrangement of neologisms in ECLDs is still insufficient,mainly manifested in the lack of systematic treatment and pertinence.This study seeks to explore the neologisms from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and to optimize the inclusion and entry arrangement of neologisms in ECLDs on the basis of corpus evidence.This study focuses on the neologisms generated since the 1980 s,and the research data are selected from the New Word Supplement in the 4th edition of OALECD and the Word Spy Website.A statistical analysis is conducted to categorize approximately 1100 neologisms according to their motivations.Conceptual Integration Theory is applied to explain the meaning construction of English neologisms.A contrastive study is performed between two mainstream ECLDs(OALECD8 and LDOCE5)to find out the merits and defects in the inclusion and entry arrangement of neologisms.Then the Corpus of Contemporary American English is used to examine the neologisms and find useful information for the inclusion and entry arrangement of the neologisms.General principles and suggestions for the inclusion and entry arrangement of neologisms in ECLDs are provided in the thesis,and typical sample entries are illustrated to demonstrate the feasibility of the study.