Study on Morphological Motivation on English and Chinese Noun Derivatives: Taking American National Geographic and Chinese National Geography as Examples

Abstract

Linguistic motivation remains an important theoretical issue in language research. Lexical motivation, as the most basic level of linguistic motivation, has always been a hot-discussed topic in the study of motivation, but there is little study on the comparison of lexical motivation between English and Chinese, especially on noun derivatives. Therefore, this article, using corpus research and qualitative analysis, aims at finding, describing, and explaining the similarities and differences between English and Chinese noun derivatives in morphological motivation. The corpus, selected by the principle of authority, equivalence, timeliness and feasibility, is built on American National Geographic and Chinese National Geography on which a few researchers delve from the perspective of motivation, so it is worthy of more exploration. Theoretically, this study will explain the inherent laws of language and promote the further development of linguistic motivation theory. Practically, this study may improve the efficiency of vocabulary teaching and learning.