A Comparative Study Of The Socio-semantic Patterns Of English Cultural Neologisms And Technological Neologisms

People's continuous exploration of the objective world and the continuous emergence of new things promote the generation of English neologisms.For this paper,the author has collected 101 cultural neologisms and 83 scientific and technological neologisms as research materials from www.Wordspy.com,a relatively authoritative website for neologism.Based on the three social semantic models summarized by Dirk Geeraerts(Cooperative Semantic Model,Authoritative Semantic Model and Conflict Semantic Model),and combining with the two factors of word formation and word-formation prototype,this paper has analyzed the 184 new words one by one,aiming to find the differences of social semantic models between the two types of English Neologisms in the process of meaning formation.There are a few findings as follows: There is no obvious correlation between the use of word formation and the types of semantic models;the category(Expert Category or Natural Category)of the word-formation prototype and the category of new words largely determines the type of semantic model;for cultural neologisms,the proportion of Cooperative Semantic Model is significantly higher than that of scientific and technological neologisms.On the contrary,the proportion of Authoritative Semantic Model is lower than that of scientific and technological neologisms;conflict semantic patterns do not play a role in the process of meaning formation for both of the two types of neologisms.