A Cognitive Study Of Loanword Categorization In English And Chinese

Loanword has always been an important research topic in the linguistic field. Since the20th century, scholars have obtained remarkable achievements in the study of loanwords. For instance, under the framework of language contact, scholars at home and abroad have studied loanwords in English and Chinese in depth. Studies have been proved particularly fruitful from cultural, social and linguistic perspective, mostly focusing on the borrowing time, phonemic speech elements, etc. and Chinese studies on loanwords mostly concentrate on manner of borrowing and loanwords translation from the perspective of Chinese traditional culture. Contrastive studies between English and Chinese loanwords in recent years are largely on the differences between languages and socio-cultural and psychological aspects. These have provided us many valuable references.However, some issues concerning English-Chinese differences are left controversial or unexplored. As mentioned above, Most researches are concerned with the analysis of cultural, linguistic and socio-linguistic reasons for the discrepancy in loanwords between the two languages. More efforst are needed to explore linguistic machenisms of loanword production, particularly semantic change of loanwords when they have entered another language. The obvious problems in the researches in English and Chinese loanwords are summarized as follows:1) Insufficient research into the changes of loanword meaning and the mechanism of its semantic development;2) Inadequate researches into the dynamic nature of loanwords;3) Lack of cognitive studies from the contrastive perspective.The present research employs a multi-disciplinary empirical methodology, which combines both inductive and deductive methods, and a qualitative approach as well. The English and Chinese materials used in this research are a personal corpus built on authentic languages facts. Under the framework of cognitive linguistics, the research attempts to study the intrinsic link between loanwords and human's cognition, and make a more reasonable and comprehensive interpretation of the semantic change of loanwords in English and Chinese. At the same time, the research makes endeavour to illustrate the internal mechanism of the loanword meaning formation and expounds the similarities and differences between English and Chinese loanwords in terms of cognitive mechanism, national cognitive psychology and cognitive models in the dynamic processing of occurence, assimilation and integration.The theoretical values of the research are as follows:Loanwords are the results of repeated cognitive processing in different cognitive contexts according to cognitive experience combined with cognitive model and encyclopedic knowledge. Meanwhile, the meanings of loanwords, which manifest cognitive prominence, highlight the cultural and cognitive motivation. Loanwords result from the categorization of the social development in different. A category of the new loanword is established through individual cognitive activities, then it undergoes the process of categorization by target language users. The cognitive activities are based on the social conventions of experience cognition, and conceptualized from the known cognitive experiences as well as the exchange with gained information, which is strongly influenced by cognitive selection by means of, such as perceptual choice, frequency selection, psychological schematic option, etc. Loanwords fill the lexical vacancies to meet the changes of the objective world.Loanword is a continuum of categorization. The change of the meaning involves the change of a lexical category, including the change of the prototype, ad hoc category construction and the interaction between new and old categories. The mechanism of the lexical category changes is decategorization. Loanword is a interconnected cognitive process with the same cognitive mechanism, which embodies the human thinking modes of metaphor, metonymy and analogical inference. The thinking modes with such cognitive mechanism are subconscious cognitive activities, i.e. actual repeated routine cognitive operations. The categorization and decategorization of loanwords conform to "The Economic Principle of Language". The changes of loanwords start people's cognitive behavior, activate their encyclopedic knowledge and socio-cultural patterns in their minds, and fill the needed information in the words borrowed according to the context, which results in the old forms with different meanings from their original.The major findings of the present research are as follows:The categorization and decategorization of loanwords are the same both in English and Chinese. The research results lend support to one of the cognitive linguistic theories that human beings'mind, as the other functions of the human body, are not autonomous. It will frame and limit the potential experience roughly. The abstract concept and imaged world are rooted in the body experiences from the real world, so the results of the human mind, even in a different cultural environment, are all commensurate and same.Though constrained by prominent cognitive universals, the dynamic process of loanword categorization in English and Chinese exhibit distinct cultural peculiarities at the same time. It is found in the present research that the penetration and influence of the English language and culture into Chinese language and culture is much larger than vice versa. This process also reflects the differences in their thinking modes because their different geographic locations, social histories and the national cognitive psychology have created a different way of thinking. The research shows the cognitive mechanism of loanword categorization and its epistemological implications. Drawing insights from previous studies, the present research makes further inquiries into the cognitive mechanism of loanwords in English and Chinese. It is first proposed in the present research that loanword is too complicated to be accounted for by a single cognitive mechanism, but motivated by different mechanisms in different phases of categorization. The cognitive mechanisms of loanwords are significant in epistemology and philosophy, because we can see most clearly the embodied nature of similarity in association and activation, which is extremely helpful for us to have a better understanding of the relationships between perception and conception, and between experience and knowledge.The originality of the present research lies in three aspects:(1) it provides the first large-scale empirical investigation and analysis of English and Chinese loanwords in the latter half of the20th century in the form a small-scale corpus;(2) it is the first contrastive study of loanwords in English and Chinese under the framework of cognitive linguistics, and is therefore important in exploring the similarities and peculiarities of the cognitive modes of loanwords;(3) the contrastive study provies an integrative and multi-dimensional interpretation and exploration of loanwords. In addition, the research makes further exploration of the commonalities and peculiarities of cognitive models of human beings. The present research has its theoretical and practical values in the study of lexical enrichment in English and Chinese. And the results are applicable to English-Chinese translation, vocabulary teaching and lexicography as well.