1 Introduction
1.1 Significance of the Study
Language has always been taken as an animate mirror of the whole human society. It existsjust like other living things and reflects even the tiniest changes brought about by the outsideworld. As the most essential element of language，words play a distinctly important role in its life.From the time a new word is bom, it starts to undergo a Darwinian struggle of survival of thefittest. Without exception，every language and its words go through such a thing. English, as anextremely important language, changes and develops at a breakneck speed and never seems tostand still. Sometimes, even the native speakers have to be confronted with the urge to keep upwith the new words' development and avoid being obsolete. As second language learners, wemay find difficulty in comprehending some new words when we read books, magazines,newspapers or listen to radio broadcasts. Even if we have our dictionaries in hand，they do notappear to be that helpful because the one you need may not be defined yet. Though it seems thatnew words are coming up through unpredictable conversations or accidental inspirations，therestill exist some word-formation rules for us to comprehend the processes of new word building.Therefore, if you have the knowledge of word-formation, you will be able to deduce the probablemeaning of the word. It will be quite helpful when we meet new words in our daily life oracademic study. Just as the existence of new words，the patterns of word-formation also differfrom time to time. In order to grasp the dynamic tendency of word-formation, the analysis ofnew words seems to be quite necessary.
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1. 2 Methods of the Research
Towards the study of neologisms, there are several directions. While, this paper mainlyfocuses on the analysis of word-formation based on both synchronic and diachronic methods.Four steps have been taken in this study including data collection, classification, analysis andcomparison.1680 neologisms have been collected from OED which aims at complete coverage of theEnglish word stock and each of these neologisms has the earliest known attestations dating from1983 to 2006. After the year of 2006，no neologism with first citation can be found in OED，since editors in OED need enough time and evidence to prove that a neologism can live longenough to be accepted by this language. In the meantime, the year of 2006 represents the latestdate of occurrence for the neologisms in this sample and 1983 means to connect with the date ofBauer. All the neologisms have been classified into four main types of word-formation whichcan be fbrther divided into thirteen processes of word-formation. All the detailedsubclassifications will be listed and analyzed one by one. Ultimately, as a whole, the result willbe compared with that of Bauer.
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2 Literature Review
2. 1 Study Abroad
In 1902，it was Leon Mead who first proposed the research on neologisms and his book，Word-Coinage: Being an Inquiry into Recent Neologisms was thought to be the earliest seriousstudy on neologisms. Leon Mead listed a large number of words created by American writers andtheir related articles. Not only this, he also recorded the attitudes towards neologisms of thesewriters. Though one hundred years have passed, the book is still reprinted and found in sale.About forty years later，an American linguist named Dwight L. Bolinger who had beenwriting a column on neologisms with the name of The Living Language for a magazine in LosAngeles and then transferred the column to American Speech (a quarterly academic journal ofthe American Dialect Society which was established in 1925 and published by Duke UniversityPress). After that, a new name was given to this column: Among the New Words. In this column,quite a few neologisms are elected regularly and introduced with information from both Britishand American sources in detail. What deserves to be mentioned is that，so far，this column is stillalive in this journal. Algeo (1991) used to claim that it is the longest running documentary recordof English neologisms[4].At the end of World War II，Majorie Taylor who was a librarian in New York collectedvarious types of neologisms that appeared during the war and each neologism was explained.Later after that, in both 1953 and 1955，two dictionaries about war and new technology weresuccessfully published: one was Dictionary of New Words in English by Paul Charles Berg andthe other was The Dictionary of New Words by Mary Reifer. Both of these two dictionaries werequite welcomed at that time.
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2.2 Study in China
At the end of 20th century, studies on English neologisms in China also became popular. 2.2 Study in ChinaAt the end of 20th century, studies on English neologisms in China also became popular.Quite a lot of works started to be published including the directions of sources, trend ofword-formation, and future prospects. As one of the most influential linguists in China, ProfessorWang Rongpei has done a lot in this field. His books, An Advanced Course of English Lexicologyand An Advanced Reader of English Lexicology are considerably well-known as the teachingmaterials in universities[B]. Furthermore, he also wrote a large number of papers about the studyand development of neologisms. However, there are also many other scholars like ProfessorWang who contribute so much in this field. Some of them studied neologisms from theperspective of phonology, morphology, semantics or pragmatics. For example，Xu Yulongpublished a paper about the morphological and semantic features of words with the type ofX-able. Some other scholars also took some certain type of word-formation like blending,compounding, or shortening as the object of study. According to the statistics of cnki.net, thereare totally 437 papers from 1978 to 2014. Among all these papers, there are only 1 doctordissertation and 31 master papers. Except these, the others are all journals or conference papers.However, in recent two years, only one master paper is published and the other 33 papers are alljournals.
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3 Theoretical Framework.......... 11
3.1 Basic Concepts Concerning Word-formation........ 11
3.1.1 Morpheme ........11
3.1.2 Word ........ 11
3.1.3 Neologism........ 12
3.2 Word-formation ........12
3.2.1 What is Word-formation?........ 12
3.2.2 Classification of Word-formation........ 13
4 Analysis and Discussion of the Neologisms........ 19
4.1 Analysis ........ 19
4.2 Results of the Data Collected........ 40
4.3 Comparison with Bauer's Study........ 41
5 Conclusion........ 44
5.1 Findings of the Study........ 44
5.2 Limitations and Future Prospects of the Study........ 45
4 Analysis and Discussion of the Neologisms
4.1 Analysis
In this chapter, detailed types of word-formation will be analyzed and investigated at greatlength，especially the ones that are considerably productive. The form classes of compounds may contain noun，verb, adjective, adverb, interjection,conjunction, preposition and pronoun，whereas no compounds have been found taking the lastthree types of form classes, and even adverb and interjection are also quite rare among the 268compounds collected in this paper. As indicated in Tab.4.1, compound nouns possess a totalnumber of 209 including 191 single-form-class compounds and 18 multiple-form-classcompounds and rank first among the others with an absolute advantage. Compound adjectives, asthe second major category of compounds, have 30 single-form-class compounds and 18multiple-form-class compounds among which 17 compound adjectives share the form class ofnoun. Both compound verbs and compound adverbs are single-form-class compounds with thenumber of 25 and 3 respectively. In contrast, compound interjections have no single-form-classcompounds and they just share the words with compound nouns and compound adjectives.Just as mentioned before, there are various methods of subclassifying compounds. In thispaper, the analysis will follow the clue of elements with different form classes that make up thecompounds. The tables below, from Tab.4.2 to Tab.4.6, give a description about the syntacticanalysis of compounds. The left vertical column represents the form class of the left element in aword and the above horizontal line represents the right element in a word. The correspondingnumbers represent the quantity of the combination of left elements and right elements. It needs tobe indicated that all the numbers italicized in brackets represent the quantity of compounds withmultiple form classes.
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Conclusion
1680 neologisms with the earliest known attestations in OED from the year of 1983 to 2006have been classified, analyzed and discussed in comparison with the study conducted by Bauerbefore. Some conclusions can be drawn as below:Affixation, the once most frequent type of word-formation in the first three periods(1880-1982)，has lost its top position to compounding after 1983，though suffixation alone，asone major part of affixation, is still the most productive one among the thirteen subclassifiedprocesses of word-formation. The descending of prefixation is directly affected by the rise ofneo-classical compounds and nowadays prefixation is less than one fifth of neo-classicalcompounds in quantity. Besides，a vast majority of prefixes are class-maintaining and only lessthan 20% prefixes tend to change the form class of prefixations. Differently, suffixes insuffixations are more powerful in determining the form class of words, whereas less obvious inrestricting the meaning of suffixation which can not meet the needs of accepting new things ornew concepts on large scales any more in the information-overloaded age.
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References (omitted)