An Analysis Of Europeanized Grammar In Contemporary Written Chinese

Sustained language contact between Chinese and English did not begin until the Opium Wars broke out, and the "Vernacular Movement ", which sprang up after the May Fourth Movement, intensified the Europeanization of Chinese. The wider and more frequent contact of Chinese with English in the years following China's reform and opening up to the outside world that began in 1978 adds new features to this phenomenon. Existing studies in this field have focused on modern written Chinese, especially on literary language. Based on the theories of language contact and language transfer, a study of Europeanized grammar in contemporary written Chinese, especially that after the reform and opening-up, is carried out by reference to pre-contact and modern Chinese. Data on three different periods, namely pre-contact, modern and contemporary Chinese are collected from literary works, latest newspapers and the Internet as well. A Chinese corpus is applied to gain useful statistics.The main contents of the thesis fall into four parts. The first part is a review of the previous studies on Europeanized grammar in Chinese by Chinese and Western researchers, on the basis of which the present research is mapped out. The second part is a general discussion of the historical, cultural and social factors of the Europeanization of Chinese and the criteria of Europeanized grammar. Theories of language contact and language transfer are introduced for a further analysis of Europeanization of Chinese in this part. The third part discusses two new trends of Europeanized grammar in Chinese at the morphological level, namely affixation and Latinization. The discussion concerns inherent affixes in Chinese, new affixes and quasi-affixes produced under the influence of English, and the causes of the formation of Latin letter words and their flexible syntactic functions. The fourth part begins with a discussion of syntactic borrowing and its criteria. Then, with the help of a Chinese corpus, various common Europeanized syntactical constructions in contemporary written Chinese are analyzed by reference to traditional and modern Chinese, whichare divided into two categories, those that are formed under the influence of English "xinghe" and those that have into being through some other factors.