A Study Of The Chinese Neologisms In The 30 Years Since The Founding Of The People’s Republic Of China(1949-1978)

The founding of new China in 1949 was an epoch-making event in China’s modern history.With the establishment of the new national system,China developed with earth-shaking changes and so did people’s language.This provides a broad space for the study of the modern Chinese language.From 1949 to 1978,the new China experienced many changes: maintaining social system stability in the early stages of the foundation,large-scale,wide-range and multiple layers of socialism transformation,the 10-year havoc,clarifying confusion and bringing things back to order,reform and opening up.In the first three decades after the founding of new China,society has been in continuous political movements.The relationship between language and society is inseparable.Language is one of the essential attributes of society,and therefore comes into being with the emergence of society and develops with the development of society.Among all the elements of language,vocabulary has the closest relationship with social life and is the fastest response to social life as well.Vocabulary is the barometer of social life,any change in social life may leave traces in vocabulary.In the period of rapid social development and change,the development and change of vocabulary are even more significant.The period of the first three decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China was a period with drastic changes in the history of modern Chinese.Therefore,vocabulary study in the same period is an essential subject in the modern Chinese history.This research goes into five chapters in total.The first chapter is the introduction,which briefly introduces the objective,scope,status,significance,methods and other basic contents of this research,laying a good foundation for the following detailed research.The second chapter is a survey of new words in the first three decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.This chapter mainly examines the lexical features,grammatical features and semantic features of new words in the period and analyzes the reasons for the characteristics of the new words from the perspective of social factors and pragmatic motivations.From the perspective of linguistic features,we have found that the new words in this period generally have long phonetic forms.The new words in the political field make up the largest number of vocabulary growth,and self-derived new words account for the majority.From the perspective of grammatical features,the number of nominal new words is the largest,most of which are formal word-formation types.Descriptive method,abbreviation method and rhetoric method became the high-frequency word-forming methods at that time.From the perspective of semantic features,a large number of new word meanings emerged,the word meaning structure is single,and the phenomenon of different words in the same meaning and synonym are prominent.The third chapter is the research of new common words in Chinese Dictionary and Modern Chinese Dictionary.This chapter mainly introduces the general situation of the current common words and examines the semantic and grammatical functions of common words.The survey found that only 26.9% of new words and expressions in the period of decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China have survived and become common words.Most common words have to adapt to the current life through their own development and changes.This change mainly occurs in common words in the semantic aspect,including the change of rational meaning of words and the change of emotional meaning of words.The change of rational meaning refers to the change of the number of common words and the change of deepening,expanding,shrinking and transferring inside a common word.The change of emotional meaning refers to the transformation between different emotions of common words.The development change of the grammatical function of common words mainly refers to the transformation between the different parts of speech of words.The fourth chapter is the study of the decaying words in the new words during the period of decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.This chapter mainly introduces the general situation of decaying words,mainly explores the causes of decaying words,and discusses the resurrection of decaying words.According to statistics,we find that most of the new words produced during the period of decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China are in a declining state in today’s language.We believe that the development and change in social life,the change in people’s values,the characteristics of new words,the principle of language clarity and the economy principle of language are the reasons for the decline of new words in the period of decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.The last chapter is the conclusion which summarizes the whole research and briefly discusses the possible areas of future research and other related issues.