A Comparative Study Of Morphemisation In Chinese And English

Every living language is in a continuous state of variation across time, and language change occurs at all levels of linguistic systems, including sounds, word structure, sentence structure, etc. As the smallest units of a language, morphemes are not stable. Thus the morphological systems of a language are dynamic. In both Chinese and English, there exists a type of morphological change called "morphemisation", which has become more and more prevalent in the two languages. Hence it's a linguistic phenomenon that should not be ignored. However, it has received very scant attention in the academic circle. Previous studies mostly focus on just one type of it in either English or Chinese, and no one has ever made a detailed and systematic study of all the types of it in both Chinese and English. Moreover, previous studies more often than not emphasize the description of it rather than deep analysis of the factors that trigger it off. Up to now, no one has made a comparative study of this phenomenon in Chinese and English.This thesis adopts qualitative approach and aims to make classifications of morphemisation in Chinese and English respectively and conduct a comparative study to find out the similarities and differences of it in the two languages. With regard to the similarities and differences, this thesis attempts to interpret them from linguistic, psychological and social perspectives. The linguistic data of the present study is mainly derived from the books and articles that the author has consulted. In addition, more examples were collected from current newspapers and magazines.Based on the previous studies, this thesis first offers a definition of morphemisation and defines it as "a linguistic phenomenon that syllables which were not meaningful originally or multi-morphemic words which used to stand alone and were not word-building elements now contain semantic information and are capable of combining with other morphemes to form new words". According to this definition, morphemisation falls into two major categories, namely, morphemisation of syllables and morphemisation of words.On the basis of the definition of morphemisation, the thesis makes a detailed description of all the types of it in Chinese and English respectively. The present study classifies morphemisation in Chinese into two categories, namely morphemisation of syllables in phonetic borrowings and morphemisation of syllables in binomes. According to the different origins of the phonetic borrowings, the first category is further classified into two subcategories, namely, morphemisation in phonetic borrowings from Sanskrit and those from English. As to this phenomenon in English, this thesis classifies it into two types: morphemisation of syllables and morphemisation of words.After the classifications and detailed descriptions of this phenomenon in Chinese and English, this thesis analyses the similarities and differences of it in the two languages in terms of the materials, the results and the modes of it. The present study reveals that there are two similarities. Firstly, there exist a large number of meaningless syllables that are subjected to morphemisation in both Chinese and English. What's more, it has a great likelihood to occur in loan words in the two languages. Secondly, large quantities of new morphemes have come into being in the two languages as a result of morphemisation, with most of them functioning like affixes and being productive bound morphemes. The present study also reveals two differences of this phenomenon in the two languages. In the first place, morphemisation only happens to meaningless syllables in Chinese. In English, however, besides meaningless syllables, some words are also subjected to it. Moreover, phonetic borrowings are the major locus where morphemisation of syllables occurs in Chinese. Secondly, in terms of modes, in Chinese, morphemisation usually begins with the formation of monosyllabic morphemes, which then become word-building elements. On the contrary, syllables in English, while undergoing morphemisation, need not be shortened to be monosyllabic morphemes. Instead, they are directly extracted from their parent words to carry the meanings or partial meanings of the whole words.Enlightened by the explanations of language change provided by historical linguistics, this thesis interprets the similarities and differences of morphemisation in Chinese and English from three aspects, namely, linguistics factors, psychological factors and social factors. The present study shows that these three types of factors can satisfactorily serve as explanations of them and morphemisation is happening and developing just under the influence of these three types of factors.It is hoped that as the first attempt to make a comparative study of morphemisation in Chinese and English, this thesis will inspire more researchers to engage in the study of this phenomenon and facilitate them to understand the variable nature of language and to predict the development of morphemes. In addition, it is expected that the present study will be of some value to dictionary compilation and vocabulary studies of both Chinese and English language learners.