| In today’s society, not only cooperation in the fields of economy and politics are being paid more attention to but also that in the fields of language and culture among countries in the world. Since China’s reform and opening up in the1980s, China’s politics, economy, culture and other fields have been open to the world, and new things and new ideas have been imported into China, including a large number of foreign words. Though loan words are guests in the language, they are an indispensable part of Chinese vocabulary system. This special status makes them an important object of Chinese language study.This study is dedicated to the study of letter words in Chinese journalistic language. News is an activity of issuing factual information that occurs recently based on the needs of the audience. Journalistic language is a very important aspect of the Chinese language, whose development has brought more and more linguistic problems. Letter words are entering into the Chinese journalistic language at an unprecedented rate and gradually become a hot issue in the study of the Chinese language. The study uses corpus analysis and questionnaire to investigate the status quo and the trends of letter word use in the Chinese journalistic language as well as attitude towards the use of letter words. It describes the original appearance of letter words in journalistic language, analyzes their change trends in the Chinese journalistic language, examines their features in the current context, and studies their influence on the Chinese journalistic language and the acceptance of news audience of letter words. It further discusses and proposes standards for letter word use in journalist language.In the study, purposeful samples of two newspapers at their August2005, August2008and August2011have been selected respectively. One is Oriental Morning Post, a local newspaper and the other is China Youth Daily, a national newspaper. After data analysis, the paper investigates and studies the trends of letter words use in Chinese journalistic language as well as the attitudes towards use of letter words adopted by the general public including journalists, public officers, teachers, college students, senior high middle school students, middle school students and the elderly people. As many as1400people from different industries are chosen to be respondents who need to finish the questionnaires about the attitude towards letter words within two months. In order to guarantee the authenticity of questionnaires answers, the method of personal interview is adopted.Results from the research show different distributions of letter words in different news media and an increasing tendency on the whole. From the point of word formation, there are the following kinds of letter words:pure letter words, letter words with Chinese characters, letter words with numbers and Chinese pinyin letter words. The total number of letter words is enormous while the number of high frequency ones is small. Besides, the rate of one-time letter words is high. All this illustrates that the use of letter words in Chinese lacks stability. Moreover, it has found from the questionnaires that the attitudes of various social groups towards letter words differ greatly among different groups. All the seven social groups investigated, except the group of public officers, support the use of letter words. Most elderly people are neutral about using letter words. The number of Science major college students who support the use of letter words is more than that in Arts. It’s worth pointing out that most of students major in foreign languages support the use of letter words. Higher grade students hold more positive view of letter words than that of lower grade students and there are more male students who prefer to use letter words than female students.Finally, the thesis summarizes the research and relevant conclusions, puts forward the implications with the issues about the standardization of letter words and the incorporation of letter words into dictionaries. Finally, the limitation of the study and some suggestions of the future research are provided. |
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