A Contrastive Analysis of Word Formation of English and Chinese Neologisms

Neologisms refer to the words created to express new things, new concepts and new ideas in written and oral communication. Since the 1980s, the world has entered into an information age. The world has witnessed great changes in political, economic, cultural field. At the same time, China has been carrying out a series of political and economic reforms, which have brought about amazing changes in all social aspects. As a result, a great deal of neologisms have appeared both in English and Chinese. There are three sources of neologisms both in English and Chinese: creating new words with native word elements, adding new meanings to existing words and borrowing new words from other languages. This paper focus on the first one of these three sources: word-formation, and analyzes the similarities and differences of three major ways of word-formation of neologisms in both English and Chinese: compounds, affixations, shortenings.