Research On The Word-making Process Of Neologisms In "Language Situation In China Report"(2015-2019)

In recent years,the study of word-making methods of neologisms has attracted scholars’ attention.However,many scholars still tend to study stable new words that have been added in the Modern Chinese Dictionary.There are little researches done on the word-making method of neologisms that appear yearly.This article believes that the word-making research of these neologisms can better reflect changes in the words,society,and people’s thinking.Therefore,this article chooses the Language Situation in China report(hereafter referred to as the "Report")compiled by the National Language Working Committee as its corpus.So far,there is no widely accepted word-making system in the Chinese language.The systems built by scholars are the results of existing vocabulary characteristics.They haven’t paid much attention to the new words that have poured into Chinese in recent years.Besides,the existing word-making system has its shortcomings,so it is difficult for us to choose one for analysis.Instead,we choose to analyze the creation of new words from the perspectives of phonetics,grammar,and semantics based on the existing theories.This way,we can avoid the phenomenon of inconsistent classification standards.Analyzing the word-making characteristics of neologisms and the factors that affect them can help us follow the development trend of Chinese neologisms,word-making methods,social changes,and most importantly,it can be used as a reference for dynamic development of Chinese words.This paper selects new words from the last five years of the Report as the research object.We studied the 1702(2015-2019)words published in the 2016 to 2020 report through data statistics,descriptive,comparative,and other analytic methods.The first chapter is a summary of the features of new words,and the second and third chapters are the main body of the thesis.They mainly describe and analyze the word-making methods of neologisms and analyze the factors that influence word-making activities.In the first chapter,we made an overview of the neologisms.Based on external features,we divided them into two categories: new words created based on form and old words given new meanings.We analyzed the numbers produced yearly,syllable length,and frequency of use.Then used comparative analysis to find development trends.The numbers reflected the irregularities in the number of neologisms produced yearly.Multiple syllables are dominant,and four-syllabic words are the most,accounting for 35.01% of all new words.We divided the source of the word-making materials into linguistic and non-linguistic materials.The linguistic materials appeared to be the principal source.In the second chapter,we first analyzed the structure of new words and found that words formed by the modifier structure are the most,accounting for 60.5%.Then we divided the word-making methods into five from the phonetics,grammar,and semantics perspectives.They are the phonetic,lexical analogy,rhetorical,abbreviation,and parataxis method.According to statistics,rhetoric and parataxis from the semantics perspective account for the highest proportion,with rhetoric accounting for 34.5% and parataxis for 33.7%.The lexical analogy method accounts for 15.8%;the abbreviation method for 13.8%;and the phonetic for 1.8%.Some words are difficult to categorize,and some could not be categorized under any of the mentioned methods.While analyzing the lexical analogy method,we found that the productivity of existing quasi-affixes weakened,and new ones were formed.In the third chapter,we analyzed the internal and external factors that influence the word-making process.We corroborate the co-variability between society and language by analyzing how societal changes reflect on the creation of neologisms.Also,through the analysis of cognitive factors,we found that the theories of metaphor,conceptual blending,and image schema exhibit the characteristic of cross-influence in the creation process of new words.In summary,we found that although the word-making process exhibits new changes,it is still in compliance with the rules of the Chinese language itself.These changes are why the author thinks it is significant to do timely dynamic analysis.The word-making method of most of the 1702 neologisms is relatively explicit.As for those that are difficult to classify,we classified them according to their creation motivations.While for those who could not be classified,further research will be needed.