Comparative Motivation Patterns in English and Chinese Neologisms

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-589-8_52How to use a DOI?

Keywords

English Neologisms; Chinese Neologisms; Lexical Motivation

Abstract

General Background: Language evolves alongside social development, with vocabulary representing the most dynamic component reflecting new concepts and realities. Specific Background: Neologisms in English and Chinese emerge through identifiable linguistic motivations involving phonetic, morphological, semantic, and etymological processes. Knowledge Gap: Despite extensive lexical studies, systematic contrastive analysis of motivational mechanisms across these two languages remains limited. Aims: This study aims to compare and analyze the motivations of English and Chinese neologisms through a multi-level rationale framework. Results: The findings indicate that Chinese neologisms demonstrate stronger lexical motivation due to their predominantly compound structure and semantic transparency, while English neologisms exhibit greater adaptability through extensive borrowing and diverse morphological processes. Both languages share mechanisms such as compounding, derivation, metaphor, and analogy, yet differ in their reliance on transliteration, free translation, and structural logic. Novelty: The study provides an integrated contrastive model combining phonetic, morphological, semantic, and etymological perspectives to explain differences in lexical motivation. Implications: These results contribute to a deeper understanding of linguistic structure and cultural representation in vocabulary formation, offering insights for comparative linguistics, lexical semantics, and cross-cultural language studies.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Kaniya Toktarbek
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/18
TI  - Comparative Motivation Patterns in English and Chinese Neologisms
BT  - Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Communication and Digital Multimedia 2025 (ICCDM 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 655
EP  - 661
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-589-8_52
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-589-8_52
ID  - Toktarbek2026
ER  -