Formation and Features of Contemporary Neologisms in Mandarin Chinese

 

Chen Si (陈思)

Seton Hall University

 

With the development of technology and society, more and more new words have appeared in Mandarin Chinese. This paper seeks to identify the formation and features of Chinese new words, which are the outcome of the close connection between language and culture. In 2012, China Ministry of Education and State Language Commission of China published the Chinese Language Situation Report (2011). In this report, there are 594 new words for the year of 2011. From these new words, we can study the form and categories of the new words, the social reason that caused them, how they are formed linguistically and the life and applied situation of these new words. Specifically, this paper will deal with the social and cultural reasons behind the coining of the Chinese neologisms. In addition to the quantitative analysis of the new words from Chinese Language Situation Report (2011), this paper will present several figures about new words from the year of 2011, such as the distribution of word numbers and word formation, and based on these figures, we will draw a conclusion of the basic situation of Chinese neologism. Furthermore, continuing this analysis, this paper will discuss the linguistic features of Chinese neologisms, i.e, the increase of the syllables amounts, the dominant position of derivational words and the new word family phenomenon. From this study, we can identify that these neologisms are the production of language contact even though the life of new word is short, while the life of morpheme is long. Finally, we will examine how westernization of Chinese neologisms has become more and more obvious to some degree.