A Study On Chinese Internet Neologism "X+ing" Based On The 4-M Model

As an outcome of code-switching between Chinese and English,"X+ing" appears more likely on the Internet or in spoken language.Due to the characteristics of novelty,brevity and conciseness,"X+ing" has developed as a substitution of expressions of the progressive aspect in Chinese context,especially in less formal circumstances.Moreover,with an increasing frequency of application,"X+ing" has gained more acceptance and enjoyed particular popularity in language community than other Internet neologisms.Nonetheless,it is worthy of noting that Chinese grammarians demonstrate that "X+ing" is still unable to be absorbed into Chinese grammatical system on account of its informal surface structure.Then,studies on "X+ing" have primarily attached greater significance to its formation mechanisms and motivations,characteristics of the surface structure,grammatical meanings,syntactic distribution,pragmatic functions,and also comparative studies(the distinctions between "X+ing" and "X+zhong").Additionally,the research data of "X+ing" in previous studies are merely a few listed examples,to be specific,fewer studies have been implemented to investigate "X+ing" based on larger corpus on the web.And theoretically,considerable efforts have been made to interpret "X+ing" with the assistance of Construction Grammar,Categorization Theory,gestalt psychology,metaphor,metonymy,and multi-language play.Consequently,based on previous studies,this study aimed to address two concerns.First,the major concern was to discover the evolution of "X+ing" in Chinese context.Second,the other concern was to investigate the main linguistic features of "X+ing".As for these two concerns,through a web-as-corpus approach,we established a large set of data which was composed of 1554 texts and drew a distinction between three genres with the aim to render a comparative analysis,that is,newspapers,social media,and individuals.The texts contained "X+ing" in this study were retrieved from Sina Weibo in a time period of nine years(2009.8-2018.1).Besides,we determined to pick out fifty satisfactory websites in each genre.More importantly,the obtained results would be interpreted within the framework of the 4-M Model.The conclusions obtained in this study were reported as below:(1)Regarding the evolution of "X+ing",it went through three stages in nine years:preliminary development,sharp increase,and stable state.Additionally,in terms of the influence of the three genres in the information spreading process of "X+ing",newspapers proved to be highly effective in increasing the spreading speed due to an advantage of a larger quantity of "X+ing" over the other two genres.Given that the variation trend of "X+ing" showed a continuous growth in the genre of social media,therefore it was more beneficial to the steady frequency of use of "X+ing".Whereas,compared with them,it appeared that the third genre of individuals had no appreciable effect on the information spreading process of"X+ing".Furthermore,there was considerably more evidence in support of the idea that expressions of the progressive aspect in English("Be+V-ing")and in Singapore("Spelling for dialect+ing")also had the effect of promoting the conventionalized processes of"X+ing",by virtue of commonalities in surface structures and the same grammatical meanings associated with "X+ing".(2)Based on the 4-M Model,X was classified into the category of content morphemes,while ing was part of the early system morphemes.In terms of parts of speech,in "X+ing",an overwhelming majority of X were verbs.Moreover,the most frequently-used ones in these verbs pertaining to mental verbs expressed language users' inner feelings or intentions.Nouns,adjectives,numerals,adverbs,and conjunctions owned far smaller proportions than verbs respectively.With respect to the constructions of X,in accordance with the developing trend of Chinese lexical system,X was predominantly consisted of two-syllable words;the second place was occupied by the poly-syllable words,among which,the verb-object constructions held the biggest share as a result of the characteristics of productivity and openness of its surface structure.Nonetheless,confined to the lower ability of conveying information,only a rather small percentage of mono-syllable words were discovered in "X+ing" in this study.