Research On Lexical Borrowing

Under the context of economic globalization, the interactions among various nations become more and more frequent, and the contacts between different languages or language variants are increasingly rapid. Different languages have closer connections and interaction on each other. Language contact will result in the transformation of language construction and function. Language borrowing is one of the outcomes of language contact, which witnessed and performed the cultural exchanges among different countries.Japan is the neighbor of China with a long history of culture exchange. Abundant Chinese words and phrases were borrowed by Japanese as they are in ancient time, thus there are plenty of Chinese characters in Japanese. From China's reform and opening policy, the culture of Japanese anime affects Chinese deeply. At present,Japanese anime abound in the TV, films, internet and publications in various forms,and its slangs are translated and borrowed by some billiguals who love Japanese anime, then to be used and spreaded by a great deal of monolinugals in daily life.Under the guidance of the language contact theory and the research methods of sociolinguistics, this study explores the linguistic phenomenon of language borrowing. The data base includes almost half-thousand tokens, which are collected from three on-line forums (Tan Lan Da Lu Forum, Jin Sha Forum and Post Bar Forum) from 2003 to 2009. And then, all the data is analyzed by using the GOLDVARB 2.0 and another software Excel (2007).It is found that the major type of Japanese anime loanwords is graphic loanwords; the noun is the majority of grammatical category and the next is the adjective; the semantic changes of it were mainly embodied by meaning narrowing. And the Japanese anime lexical borrowing is also closely associated with some social factors. Those who use the Japanese anime loanwords are mostly the teenagers and young-adults ranging from 13-22, among which the females are more than males, and majority of the Japanese anime users come from urban area comparing to the rural area, nearly all these people are monolinguals. In these factors the growth place has the closest relation to the usage of the loanwords of Japanese anime. The steady increasing use of Japanese anime loanwords enriched the modern Chinese vocabulary system and also is the requirement of communication. The charm of ancient oriental cultures is drawing people's attention again, changing the dominance of Western culture gradually. In terms of the impact of some unhealthy elements Japanese anime loanwords may have on the youths, some measures should be taken to restrict the spread and use of such kind of words in a reasonable way.Due to the limitations of the present study, the findings and conclusion of this thesis are rather preliminary, which requires further research at a more general level.