Formation and Features
of Contemporary Neologisms in Mandarin Chinese
Chen Si
(陈思)
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.