“a new word is any word, phrase, or sense that come into popular use or enjoyed a vogue in the given period.” [5] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th College Edition) gives its definition like this: “1. A new word, expression, or usage. 2. The creation or use of new words or senses. 3. Psychology a. The invention of new words regarded as a symptom of certain psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia. b. A word so invented. 4. Theology A new doctrine or a new interpretation of scripture.”
[6]
In Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese
Dictionary, “Neologism” is defined as “newly-invented word” [7], and in Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, “a new word or expression, or a new meaning for an older word” [8].
Nowadays, the term “neologism” is closely associated with linguistic neology, lexicology and terminology. In most dictionaries, neologism and neology are treated as synonyms and share the same definition: the act of inventing a word and a phrase or a newly invented word or phrase.
Neologisms are by definition “new” and as such are often directly attributable to specific individual, publication, period or event. The term “neologism” was itself coined in 1805. In linguistics, a neologism is word, term, or phrase which has been recently created—often to apply to new concepts, or to reshape older terms in newer language forms.
Scholars usually discuss neologisms from two aspects: the time perspective and the semantic perspective. From the time perspective, neologisms refers to words within a certain period of time, as long as those words, say appeared 20 or 30 years ago, are still used today, and have deeply rooted in people?s minds, they can still hold the identity of neologism. From the semantic perspective, neologisms refer to words that newly appear in communication and carry the new meanings. However, those old words that hold the new meaning are also considered as neologisms. So far a general criterion for defining neologisms can be found: 1) neologisms are the words which didn?t occur before and are newly built and currently enter into the common lexicons. 2) Neologisms are the words which within a certain period of time, have been widely accepted by people and still find their applications nowadays. 3) Neologisms are those old words which carry the new meanings.
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3. The reasons for the appearance of the Internet English
neologism
Internet is a global computer network, which is linked by the international telecommunication lines. Since its appearance, it is experiencing tremendous growth in the number of users, hosts, and domain names, which are the media most widely used. Internet is also known as “the net”, “the information superhighway”, and “cyberspace”. Because there is no central computer and no central authority which controls Internet, it then grew into an academic site. Now science and education fields use it as an electronic library and as a way to exchange information through discussion groups. With the growth of economy, productivity, commercial communication, etc., people widely use Internet for information exchanges because it is convenient and timesaving. Meanwhile, with the wide use of Internet, Internet English, a new language variety with its own style, is emerging. As we know, all living languages are constantly changing with the appearance of neologisms everyday, so is Internet English.
The Internet English neologisms include all the new words, phrases and language usages related to the emergence and application of the computer technology and network in the information age, which can be roughly divided into three categories: the first kind is the specialized terms related to computer and network; the second kind is the specialized terms related to network, or the new words produced with the development of network, for instance, cyberlover, cybercrime, e-cash, web TV, etc.; the third kind is netizens? commonly used words and symbols in the chat room, e-mails and BBS, for instance, clippings, emoticons, etc.
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4. The characteristics of Internet English neologisms
4.1 Semantic features
Many neologisms of Internet English are often formed by deriving from some frequently used words, combining familiar words together, or adding new meanings to the existing words. Thereby, these Internet English neologisms have the characteristics of being vivid, proper, terse and clear in semantic sense, which can help us to make better expressions of the thoughts and ideas. So these neologisms are easily accepted and widely used.
4.1.1 Terse and Clear
Different from the traditional media, people communicating on Internet want more convenience and more efficiency. Such communication does not merely require netizens to transmit information accurately and rapidly, and also to find out the useful information that oneself needs in a sea of information resources. Under such conditions, in order to get more efficient communication, the netizens surfing on line or engaging in e-commerce tend to make full use of the traditional ways of word-formation, for example, using affixes and clippings etc. and to utilize more innovative methods, such as emoticon. An emoticon is a textual portrayal of a writer?s mood or facial expression. They can be very effective toward avoiding misinterpretation of the writer?s intents, because we can easily know their meanings. Moreover, A lot of technical terms correlating with network and computer are tediously long, in order to simplify the text and save the time of reading, thus to meet the demand of the computer science and high-speed developing network technology, we can find acronyms and initialisms in large quantity. The common characteristic is that the two forms are succinct and the meaning of such an word is single and clear without associated and extended meaning.
The new word ?cybercrime?, ?cyberfiction?, cyberchat?, ?cyberculture?, etc. all have the affix ?cyber-?which means Internet, so the netizens know these new words all means something related to Internet. Then from the other parts of these words, they can clearly understand their meanings.
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Other examples like ?IT? (information technology), ?ISP? (Internet Service Provider), ?WAN?(Wide Area Network), these words are all shorter than the original words, which improve the inputting-speed and the efficiency of information exchange. But the meanings of these words are single and clear without associated and extended meaning, which is contributable to the communication on Internet.
4.1.2 Vivid and proper
The formation of the Internet English neologisms often comes from the common daily words. According to the study of their formation, especially from the way of adding new meanings to the existing words, the language users can find that the new things or concepts are similar to and have association with the familiar words. These neologisms are created meaningfully and vividly to describe the new things and new ideas.
For example, the word ?mouse? originally refers to any of numerous small rodents typically resembling rats having pointed snouts and small ears on elongated bodies with slender usually hairless tails. Now on Internet, it means a hand-operated electronic device that controls the coordinates of a cursor on your computer screen as you move it around on a pat, because the shape of this electronic device is similar to a mouse. Moreover, by analogy to ?couch potato? (the one who spends very much time on a couch watching television), ?mouse potato? is coined to mean the netizens indulging themselves in the cyber world.
4.1.3 Popular
Netizens need the communication in the environment of Internet to be swift and brief. And terseness and vividness, as it is mentioned above, which to some extent, determine the popularity of Internet English, i.e. it is easy to be understood. Especially, many believed that Internet English is written language with the characteristics of spoken language. Moreover, the differences between daily communication and communication by Internet are basically caused by the media, but without essential distinctions in the core. So, the majority of the neologisms in Internet English are popular, though some of the clippings, blendings seem odd to be understood, actually they are just contractions of rich meanings to fit the high speed of information exchanges online. Once the key is grasped, these neologisms are easy to understand in
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the realistic usage.
4.2 Formation features
Most Internet English Neologisms are formed in a traditional way, such as compounding, affixation. There are also large numbers of neologisms created in a new way related to the computer peculiarity, i.e., its keyboard.
4.2.1 Easy to remember and type
Many Internet English words are reshaped by the rules of word formation, such as roots and affixes, one can guess the meaning by studying their formation. Often, those words carry the characteristics of conciseness, easiness to understand and remember, which helps the netizens get rid of the verbose and complicated terms and jargons, improve the speed of typing words effectively, thus contributing to the dissemination of the Internet information. [2]84
4.2.2 Utilizing the symbols on the keyboard
The composition of new words with the combination of the symbols on the
keyboard is the most dramatic characteristic in the Internet English neologisms, also in the English language. Some make use of the partial tone and numbers to form words.
The partial tone is a phenomenon where the sound of letter or numeral acts as a syllable of a word, or a word itself. [9]86 For example, the word ?B4? is derived from ?before?, because of the pronunciation of the syllable ?fore? in ?before?, which is the same as the Roman numeral 4, and it is replaced by ?4? in writing.
In a chatting room, a special form of language—emoticon is widely used now. They serve as a quick way to get messages across, whether good or bad, happy or sad. These emoticons “show us that a way language is going back to where it all started: the use of picture to convey meaning” [10]. They complement the inability of words to express feelings exactly and conveniently.”
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