A Lexical Motivation Analysis Of The Hyphenated Compounds In American News English:A COCA-based Study

As a mass medium,news influences the English language in such a considerable way that one important lexical feature of American News English is the wide application of hyphenated compounds.Compounding,as a common method in word-formation,serves as an important way to create new words and express new ideas.Based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA),this research initially extracts hyphenated compounds from the news sub-corpus of COCA and also presents an in-depth lexical motivation analysis of the hyphenated compounds in American News English.This thesis takes an attempt to present the typical pattern and internal mechanism of the hyphenated compounds in American News English by adopting both qualitative and quantitative analysis and then initiates with a further attempt to delve into American values and social system by studying theses hyphenated compounds in American News language.This thesis carries out a lexical motivation analysis of the hyphenated compounds with high use frequency in COCA,all of which come from the News sub-corpus of the corpus COCA.Based on the lexical distribution of the sub-corpus and the definition of English compounds,the author builds a new small-sized corpus with the chosen hyphenated compounds.In this thesis the hyphenated compounds are tagged based on the classification of lexical motivations for the convenience of a statistical analysis and a comparative analysis as well.,the author carries out an in-depth research into the hyphenated compounds with different lexical motivation and an observational study of the specific lexis to further analyze the characteristics of theses hyphenated compounds in American News language.With the help of the corpus software Concordance,the study attempts to adopt the quantitative analysis as a main method to analyze the data,with qualitative analysis as a supplement.The results show that among all the collected hyphenated compounds from COCA,most of them are morphologically motivated.The main reason behind the phenomenon is that the plainly constructed hyphenated compounds serve better for the efficient conveyance of news message.Those hyphenated compounds that are semantically motivated rank the second,which will bring vividness to the news reporting language.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction concerning background information,corpus introduction and as well as the features of American news English.Chapter 2 is the literature review about the related domestic and abroad researches,which elaborates on the research and development of news English,especially the American news English at home and abroad.Meanwhile,it indicates the related academic researches of both lexical motivation and compounds.Chapter 3 discusses the theoretical framework and methodology,including the lexical motivations classification,hyphenated compounds classification and relative data collection and classification.Chapter 4 deals with the results and discussion which is also the vital part of the whole thesis.It firstly shows the results of the data collected from the Corpus and then carries out the discussion according to the different motivation classification.Moreover,Chapter 4 analyzes the reasons.Chapter 5 is the conclusion including the findings of the research as well as the limitations and further study of the thesis.