畢業(yè)論文：On the Rapid Increase of the Chinese Content Words from Sociolinguistic

On the Rapid Increase of the Chinese Content Words from Sociolinguistic Perspective

Abstract: There are many changes taking place within language, among which the changes in le*icon strike our eyes most quickly and easily. The most obvious le*ical change in Chinese language is the rapid increase of new words, like 給力geili, 雷人leiren, 小清新*iaoqing*ing, and so on. One thing deserves our attention is that these newly-appeared Chinese words are mainly content words, while function words remain relatively stable. Why? This paper attempts to give a reasonable account of this phenomenon and probe into the deep aspects behind this phenomenon from sociolinguistic perspective, offering a brand-new understanding of the new Chinese words in th
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ntent Word and Sociolinguistics
With Chinas rapid social development, there are many new words appearing in Chinese every year. Before e*ploring this issue further, we must get clear ideas of what content word is and what sociolinguistics is. First, let us turn to content word. In contrast to function words which e*press grammatical meanings, such as conjunctions, prepositions, articles and pronouns, content words are the words which have le*ical meanings, that is, those which refer to substance, action and quality, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. As for sociolinguistics, it is the field that studies the relation between language and society, between the uses of language and the social structures in which the users of language live.
1.2 A Brief Sociolinguistic E*planation to the Phenomenon
From the above brief introduction to content word and sociolinguistics, we can first give a general sociolinguistic e*planation to the rapid increase of Chinese content word. To begin with, why the words increased are the content words. The distinction of function words and le*ical words leads to the distinction of "closed-class" words and "open-class" words. A word that belongs to the closed-class is one whose membership is fi*ed or limited. New members are not regularly added. Therefore, pronouns, prepositions, articles,etc., are all closed items. While the open-class is one whose membership is in principle infinite or unlimited. With the emergence of new ideas, inventions, etc., new e*pressions are continually and constantly being added to the le*icon. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and many adverbs are all open-class items. So it is clear that the newly-appeared words are more likely to be content words. Second, why the society has something to do with the increase of words. Language is part of culture, and culture is part of the society. So language is also part of society that will vary with the change of society. There are mainly three sources of new English words: 1) the progress of modern science and technology, e.g. desktop(桌面）home page(主頁）；2) the change of political and economical situation; e.g. since watergate has become a general noun, many words with -gate as suffi* have appeared; 3) the development of other aspects of society. E.g. visual pollution(視覺污染). These three sources are all related to society. The sources of new Chinese words may not be e*actly the same as those of English, but it is certain that new Chinese words are derived from social change.
1.3 The Definition of New Word ……（未完，全文共18277字，當(dāng)前僅顯示3288字，請(qǐng)閱讀下面提示信息。收藏《畢業(yè)論文：On the Rapid Increase of the Chinese Content Words from Sociolinguistic》）