A Study Of Europeanized Structures In Chinese

Almost no culture can be isolated from others, neither can language. In the constant evolution of human languages, each language is under impact of other languages temporarily or continuously, resulting in the occurrence of new language phenomena in constant language contact. Chinese has been in contact with English for more than 300 years, especially since the reform and opening up policy. Chinese and English contact has become more and more frequent and direct. A lot of English words have been incorporated into Chinese. It is noticeable that not only at the lexical level but also at the syntactic level, Chinese is facing an unprecedented impact. The newly-formed syntactic structures broaden the original Chinese grammatical principles. Moreover, some of them have penetrated into spoken Chinese, forming the new linguistic variation, thereby Europeanization comes into being.After Wang Li's comprehensive and systematic analysis of Europeanization, most studies are limited to the description and analysis of certain Europeanized structure. They focus on the description of linguistic facts, ignoring the exploration of reasons underlying the linguistic phenomena, especially the reasons of Europeanization.Based on the framework of language contact, this paper examines several typical Europeanized sentence patterns and explores the external and internal reasons evoking Europeanization. The reasons are as follows:①The external factors initiated by language contact are the trigger of language change. English-Chinese contact is the essential condition of Europeanization.②The internal factors are the inside linguistic characteristics causing the change at the syntactic level. The internal reasons can also be divided into three aspects. Firstly, from the aspect of different degrees of inflectional change, English and Chinese share proximal relationship in typology so the impact of English on Chinese is possible and available. Secondly, the existence of semantic opaqueness in Chinese makes the embodiment of English easier. Thirdly, the corresponding or similar English structures awaken the Europeanized sentence patterns which were once used in ancient Chinese but disappeared in history.Concerning the ancient Chinese structures of some Europeanized sentence patterns, diachronic and synchronic methods are adopted throughout this study, because diachronic method aims to provide an outline of the development of some typical Europeanized structures while descriptive synchronic research investigates the specific Europeanized structure, giving a general understanding of the status quo. The data used for analysis are collected from Guang Ming Daily and People's Daily as well as some famous literary works. Classical Chinese data are mainly collected from The Anthology of Literary Works of the Past Dynasties in China (《中国历代文学作品选》).This study consists of five chapters organized as follows:Chapter One briefly introduces the phenomenon of Europeanization, the purpose, the theoretical approach and the organization of this study.Chapter Two provides a review of the major studies on Europeanization.Chapter Three deals with some essential contents of language contact and the illustration of some linguistic reasons which make the development of Europeanized structures possible. It is assumed that language contact serves as the driving force of Europeanization and the linguistic reasons can provide explanations why some Europeanized structures can develop in Chinese.Chapter Four provides a concrete analysis of some typical Europeanized sentence patterns.Chapter Five draws the conclusion of this paper and lists some limitations and suggestions.