| This thesis analyses the influence of English language on Hong Kong Chinese in terms of lexicon and syntax. Linguistic variations caused by language contact are diversified, and there are numerous studies on this topic. It is also easy to find discussions about different linguistic phenomena in Hong Kong, a multilingual society with special historical background. Nonetheless, only a few scholars have explored the specific issue discussed in this paper. Generalization and contributions are made on the basis of the available research findings. This thesis consists of five parts: the introduction gives a brief account of the present research findings, defines several concepts involved in this paper and introduces the study approach applied in this thesis. Chapter one comprises two parts: the first part sketches out the timeline of the British colonial history in Hong Kong; the second part describes the past and present status of both English and Chinese in Hong Kong society. Chapter 2 detects the English influence on Hong Kong Chinese at lexical level. Such an influence is manifested in code mixing, loan words, homographs and word collocations. Code mixing is an important feature of Hong Kong Chinese. This chapter provides abundant examples to illustrate such a common phenomenon in Hong Kong and looks into its social cause. The fact that the loan words, especially the transliterated words in Hong Kong Chinese outnumber those in standard Chinese constitutes another evidence of the effect of English on Hong Kong Chinese. Literal translation and oversimplified translation have given rise to certain Hong Kong Chinese words that are morphologically identical but semantically different from those in standard Chinese, and this is again attributed to English. For the same reason, some word collocations in Hong Kong Chinese have deviated from standard Chinese. Chapter 3 examines the English influence on Hong Kong Chinese at syntactic level. It first mentions the... |
PDF Full Text Request