Chinese Affixes in the Internet Era: A Corpus-Based Study of X-族 zú, X-党 dǎng and X-客 kè Neologisms

In the last few decades, under the influence of foreign languages and netspeak, many word-formation patterns emerged in the Chinese lexicon. This paper proposes a corpus-based investigation of three suffixes, i.e. 族 -zú, 党 -dǎng, and 客 -kè, which build words indicating persons with certain characteristics or behavior, or doing a certain activity. The paper aims at describing and comparing the three word-formation patterns based on these suffixes. It also aims at describing their evolution over time and their grammaticalization path. In addition, it discusses the diffusion of the three patterns in Chinese and compares their productivity.In the last few decades, under the influence of foreign languages and netspeak, many word-formation patterns emerged in the Chinese lexicon. This paper proposes a corpus-based investigation of three suffixes, i.e. 族 -zú, 党 -dǎng, and 客 -kè, which build words indicating persons with certain characteristics or behaviour, or doing a certain activity. The paper aims at describing and comparing the three word-formation patterns based on these suffixes. It also aims at describing their evolution over time and their grammaticalisation path. In addition, it discusses the diffusion of the three patterns in Chinese and compares their productivity