A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CHINESE AND ENGLISH WORDFORMATION BASED ON NEOLOGISMS

Language as a necessary tool for human activities is undergoing various changes due to the progress of the modern world and human society. The emergence of neologisms is one of the most intuitive changes by humans. English and Chinese languages constantly renew themselves as the world changes. Therefore, the number of Chinese and English neologisms is growing, bringing certain obstacles to those who need to understand the culture behind the two languages or require cross-cultural communication. In addition, neologisms are very important for language learning. For Chinese and English learners who attempt to learn the target language better, the phenomenon of neologisms is an enormous challenge in language learning. Hence, based on the collection of Chinese and English neologisms from 2018 to 2020, a mixed research method is applied in the study to investigate and compare Chinese and English word-formation tendency and characteristics and find the similarities and differences in each type of neologisms word-formation of the two languages. After the analysis of data, the study found that there are four types of word-formation: affixation, compounding, abbreviation, and blending appearing in both Chinese and English neologisms in recent years, and affixation is the type of word-formation with the highest frequency in English neologisms, while compounding is the most dominant type in Chinese word-formation. In addition, by comparing Chinese and English word-formation found in the study, it is found that there are some same and different characteristics of each type of word-formation. These findings are expected to provide educators with suggestions that word-formation can be added to vocabulary teaching and expect directly to bring learning vocabulary to people who learn Chinese and English. Keywords: Comparative analysis, Chinese and English word-formation, neologisms