| Semantic duplication is one of the distinguishing features of Chinglish which usuallygives rise to ambiguity in international communication. Semantic duplication is acceptableeven necessary in Chinese for various reasons: like to avoid ambiguity, reinforce meaning,provide syntactic balance or symmetry, or just to satisfy the ear. However, English, as alanguage focusing on concise and concrete expressions, has a lower tolerance forduplication. This discrepancy between the two languages profoundly influences theprocess of language acquisition, with a consequence of pervasive phenomenon ofsemantic duplication in the use of English produced by Chinese-speaking learners. Thespecial research interest emerges mostly due to the fact that previous researches mainlyemphasize the morphological structures and are in frequent scarcity of systematic andtheoretical explanations. This thesis, from the perspective of conceptual transfer, adoptsquantitative method together with intersubjective approach to investigate the phenomenonin question.There are two primary types of data collection for the current study. First, the dataused for demonstrating the phenomenon were extracted from The Translators’ Guide toChinglish; the second type of data is from SWECCL which has an overall size of2,000,000running words.Concerning the above mentioned facts, the current study selects five fundamentaldomains, which are claimed to be based on sensory-motor experiences and encoded inalmost all human languages, as framework and research areas. These are TIME, GENDER,NUMBER, EMOTIONS and MOTION respectively. According to this frame, the study,through the comparative analysis of English and Mandarin Chinese, testifies the generalapplicability of conceptual transfer in the phenomenon of semantic duplication andexplains the reasons of the phenomenon from the conceptual level.The result shows that the semantic duplications in these domains are the majorrepresentations because the second language learners rely on the conceptual system oftheir L1in the use of target language. In the domain of TIME, Chinese usually resorts tolexical means to indicate time sequence; in contrast, English employs both lexical andgrammatical means to express temporal concepts. This difference sets a gap for secondlanguage learners and semantic duplication in this domain is mainly caused by the learners’ reliance on the Chinese means of expressions when using English, resulting inthe lexical means of duplication with grammatical means. In the domain of GENDER, thephenomenon in question is primarily produced by Chinese-speaking learners when theyadopt the information combination method of their mother tongue to express genderedinformation in English. The conceptual transfer arises when gendered information isconsidered as independent modifying elements duplicating with the inherent meaning ofthe modified components. In the domain of NUMBER, Chinese employs lexical means toexpress numeral concepts while English adopts grammatical means as an obligatorydevice. When expressing such concepts in English, second language learners usually usetwo means simultaneously, leading to semantic duplication. As for the domain ofEMOTIONS, for certain concepts, Chinese may possess much fine-grained classificationwith no counterpart in English. When expressing such notions, second language learnershave the tendency to transfer the distinctions in their L1to L2, resulting the same meaningrepeated in a sentence. For describing concepts of MOTION, Chinese uses analyticalexpression, in contrast with synthetic expression employed by English. English canlexicalize manner, result, degree, path even the object into the verb, which should bedepicted by additional elements in Chinese. Second language learners usually rely on theexpression method of their L1, leading to the components like manner duplicate with theinherent meaning of the main verb. |
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