ABSTRACT

Since reform and opening-up, China's economy, culture and society began to develop rapidly, and new things continually appear. When the original words in the language cannot express the meanings of new things, new words will continue to be created. Since the 1980s, Chinese linguists has shown great enthusiasm to the new words. They analyze these words from multi-angles and multi-levels, but there are still many issues unsolved. Therefore, further researches on the new words of contemporary Chinese are needed.

Nowadays new words appear through the Internet, newspapers, and other media rapidly and have penetrated into every corner of social life. These new Chinese words affect not only people's lives, but also science, technology, politics, economy, culture, and so on. The Ministry of Education Language and Information Management Division published Language Situation in China every year, introducing annual new words which stand for the new things, new situations, new concepts.

In this paper, we do research on the characteristics of the Chinese new words based on the theory of ecolingustics. We have found that in terms of the word coinage, there are four ways to create Chinese new words, they are combination method, transformation method, giving new meaning to old words and load words. According to words’ length, there are two to seven different unit words. Considering part of speech, there are real words and functional words. 

    Language is the reaction of society. New words are the observation and record of the real life of language, and it will be a record of social life. The study of new words will help us to better understand the mechanism of word formation and social development and progress.

Key words：Chinese new words; ecolinguistics; language and society

CONTENTS

摘要

ABSTRACT

Chapter One: Introduction-

1.1 The Background of the Research-

1.2 The Purpose of the Research-

1.3 The Structure of the Research-

Chapter Two: Literature Review-

2.1 Definitions of New Words-

2.2 The Field of New Words-

2.2.1 Economic field-

2.2.2 Technological field-

2.2.3 Cultural field-

2.2.4 Political field-

2.3 Prevoius Studies on New Words-

Chapter Three: Theoretical Foundation—Ecolinguistics-

3.1 The Definition of Ecolinguistics-

3.1.1 Haugen’s Definition-

3.1.2 Halliday’s Definition-

3.1.3 Other Scholars’ Definition-

3.2 The Research Field of Ecolinguistics-

3.2.1. The Relationship between Language and Biodiversity-

3.2.2 The Relationship between Language Protection and Language Evolution-

3.2.3The Relationship between Language and Environmental Protection-

Chapter Four: The Investigation of Chinese New Words-

4.1 The Classifications of Chinese New Words-

4.1.1 Word coinage-

4.1.2 Word length-

4.1.3 Part of speech-

4.2 The Syntactic Features of Chinese New Words-

4.3The Reasons of the Appearance of Chinese New Words-

4.3.1 Social factors-

4.3.2 Linguistic Factors-

Chapter Five: Conclusion-

5.1 Findings of the Research-

5.2 Limitations and Suggestions-

Appendix-

References-

Acknowledgement-