2.2.2 Studies Abroad

Few foreign researches about English neologisms in the 21st century can be found in the website of CNKI. At present, the number of foreign books about English neologisms in the 21st century is also very small. Levchenko once investigated the neologisms that appeared in 2000 – 2010 years issues of the following British newspapers: The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist, The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, and Herald Scotland in his master’s thesis. His attempt was to investigate the neologisms in the lexical system of the modern English language and reveal the major trends and tendencies taking place within the processes of the new words formation and distribution. 

As for Levchenko, the appearance of neologisms in a living language is a constant and regular process, its word stock is always adopting new words as a result of social and linguistic changes, innovations and development. The language is rapidly reacting to the emergence of new social phenomena, objects and activities which immediately undergo the process of nomination. The suggestion that new notions appear simultaneously with their signifiers does not seem to be ungrounded, for the most of human mental activity is carried out with the help of verbal means. In addition, he also put forward two hypotheses in his research: first, the majority of newly created and borrowed words should be nouns; second, the prevalent word building type should be affixation (Levchenko: 2010).

Based on the previous studies, there are many studies on English neologisms and their developmental factors, but the research are not enough because English neologisms appear at any moment and research gap still remains though many scholars contribute to this field. Therefore, it is very important to join linguistic and extra-linguistic developmental factors of English neologisms in the modern linguistic research so as to catch up with the fast scientific and technological development, fashion changes and conceptual advancement. In doing this, we can have a better view of the world, and enjoy a better way of expressing emerging things.