A Study Of Similarities Between English And Chinese Neologisms

Language is a tool for human communication. Among the three elements of a language, pronunciation and grammar are relatively stable and vocabulary is the most active element. It changes with the progress of time. Neologisms are created to express and record new things, new concepts and new thoughts. They are used both in oral language and written forms. Neologisms are new both in form and meaning or old in form but new in meaning. The continuous appearance of new words is an important social phenomenon. They play a role of mirror in the development of society and they are sensitive to the changes of society. It is significant to do research in this field. A certain period of neologisms in this paper is defined within twenty years. This thesis discussed the similarities of neologisms between English and Chinese through comparison. Then the research findings are applied to the practice of English teaching and learning.At the beginning of the thesis, present researches on neologisms are introduced, and then the definition and classification are illustrated. Next, the research is focused on the similarities between English and Chinese. Through the comparison, the characteristics of neologisms, the motivation of word-formation, general features of word-formation process, semantic shift of neologisms, socio-cultural mentality of neologisms and tendency of normalization are discussed. Finally, the significance of the research is talked about in English language teaching and learning.