Contemporary Chinese New Words Research

The study of new words and expressions has a long history, which can be traced back to the 30s or 40s of last century. Since the 90s, former researching results have mainly focused on the following aspects:Firstly, meaning-study centered, to which several perspectives are available, like the perspective of the relationship between concept and word, the perspective of language domain, and the perspective of rhetorics. Secondly, the study of new words and expressions combined with the results of linguistic theory i.e. the cognitive theory of metaphor was adopted to explain the generation of new words. Thirdly, quantitative analysis was emphasized, which meant to describe the situation of new words and expressions on the basis of quantitative analysis.Although former research covered a wide range, but it still existed disadvantages, for example, its explanation of new words and expressions was limited within the traditional frame, which only studied the extension, deflation and the transition between the meaning of the word and the meaning of the morpheme; when it introduced brand-new theory to explain new words, former research usually only illustrated them with several examples rather than offering an overall statistics; when former research practiced quantitative statistics, the range of new words and expressions were too broad because the research did not observe them from the perspective of a certain period.Owing to the disadvantages of former research, this dissertation has the following ideas: with regard to the selection of language material, this dissertation sets the latest dictionary of new words and expressions as its study object, and then has a thorough inspection of the high-frequency new words and expressions used in the newspapers and articles during the period of 2000 and 2006; with reference to linguistic theories, it tries to use both traditional linguistics and cognitive linguistics to explain the types of formation, mechanism of creation, the development and change etc, aiming to have some breakthrough in the aspect of explanation and predication; as to the researching method, this dissertation adopts the combination of diachronic and synchronic investigation, static and dynamic inspection, description and explanation, analysis and classification; regarding the specific researching way of vocabulary, this dissertation adopts quantitative analysis, and count the selected new words and expressions from multiple perspectives and thoroughly, in order to achieve a scientific and general description.This dissertation introduces former researching results, and in addition, supplements them with the following contents:1. The new words and expressions from 2000 to 2006 are mainly formed in the original way, i.e. morpheme compound. As the distribution of word speech, the percentage of noun is much higher than before. The activity of morpheme is quite different from the past. Among the ten high-frequency morphemes, only two are the same as before.2. Explanations of phenomena like the formation of new words and expressions, words with new meaning, rhetorical transformation, words formed by transliteration and the semantic blending of new words and expressions, with the application of cognitive theories, such as categorization theory, metaphor theory, mental space and conceptual integration theory etc. On the basis of quantitative study, this dissertation intends to analyze and explain in order to reveal the cognitive mechanism of human being's way to create new words and expressions and the cultural mentality of the nation's characteristics.3. Predications on the developments of new words and expressions on the basis of data analysis and theoretical explanation. This includes the predication on the competition among synonyms, the individual analysis of the emergence of inexplicit words and the overview of new words and expressions in the future.The general idea of this dissertation is to describe, to explain and then to predicate.