A Comparative Study Of Loanwords In English And Chinese In The Perspective Of Language Contact

According to the theory of "Contact-Induced Language Change" proposed by Thomason and Kaufman (1988), the intensity of language contact is considered as a measure of borrowing scale and different categories of linguistic borrowing are the outcomes of different intensity of language contact correspondingly. Apparently, lexical borrowing is a basic and typical category of linguistic borrowing. It is argued that lexical borrowing constitutes the major "gateway" to all of the other aspects of contact-induced language change. Due to language contact, both English and Chinese have borrowed numerous words from each other and amultitude of words from other languages. At the same time, there are also great dissimilarities between the loanwords in English and Chinese. At present, most researches on the causes of these dissimilarities in the academia are descriptive, with no systematic principles to guide the work in this aspect.Based on the theory of language contact, this thesis presents a comparative study of loanwords in English and Chinese for the sake of finding similarities and dissimilarities between them, and makes a cause analysis of the great imbalance of loanwords in English and Chinese from the perspective of language contact. It first reviews the loanwords in English and Chinese caused by language contact through the analysis of the borrowing climaxes of English and Chinese, which also lays a foundation for the later analysis of the similarities and dissimilarities between the loanwords in English and Chinese. From this part, we can clearly see that language contact as a driving force has triggered and facilitated the process of lexical borrowing in the development of English and Chinese. And then it analyzes the similarities between the loanwords in English and Chinese from the perspective of language contact. It proceeds with a detailed cause analysis of these dissimilarities from the following three aspects: the ways of lexical borrowing, the types of languages in contact with English and Chinese and the range of languages in contact with English and Chinese. The main findings of the cause analysis show that the imbalance of language contact between English and Chinese is the main cause of the imbalance of loanwords in the two languages, and that language contact is at last caused by cultural contact. Therefore, in essence, it is the imbalance of cultural contact that causes the great imbalance of loanwords in English and Chinese.Finally, the thesis comes to the conclusion that no matter what the degree of nature of contact between neighboring people may be, it is generally sufficient to lead to some kind of linguistic interinfluencing. Linguistic borrowing is an important result of language contact and lexical borrowing is a major part of linguistic borrowing. In the aspect of lexical borrowing, there are some similarities as well as some dissimilarities between English and Chinese. Language contact is the main cause of the similarities and dissimilarities between loanwords in English and Chinese.