Language Contact And Transfer

As the famous linguist Sapir pointed out, language, like air, is never self-sufficient. Intercommunication between different nations and cultures inevitably brings forth language contact. In the long history of human beings, commercial transactions, cultural exchange, emigration as well as immigration definitely caused inter-linguistic contact. Language contact appears especially when at least one of the languages is influenced by the contact. This influence is very likely to spread when the languages are spoken in the same or adjoining regions and when there is a high density of communication between the people speaking them. The influence may affect linguistic forms at different levels (phonological, semantic and syntactic), or communicative strategies such as address forms and greeting forms and so on. The effect of this influence is commonly referred to as language transfer.This research is mainly focused on the phenomena of language contact and outcomes of language transfer between English and Chinese. It is designed to find out to what extent the Chinese language and English influence one another, what role the first language plays in the EFL by Chinese learners and the ways in which the similarities and differences between English and Chinese can influence the acquisition of grammar and vocabulary.It is found out that language transfer occurs at all the levels in the course of contact between English and Chinese. Analyses were made to testify the extent to which the two languages contact with each other and how learners' first language influenced their interlanguage performance. Detailed discussions of L1 transfer were also made in terms of the structural features of transfer phenomena. Based on the findings of language contact and transfer phenomena, two issues wereinvestigated in this thesis, aiming at working out insightful implications for the EFL teaching and learning in China. The issues covered in the investigation were 1) Lexical Borrowing: The Language Contact Between English and Chinese; 2) Language Transfer Between English and Chinese ~ The cross-linguistic influence.