A Descriptive Study Of Englishization Of Chinese Syntax In Academic Articles Written By Teachers Of English

With the worldwide spread of English, a large amount of scholars are devoted to the study of "world Englishes", while a few researchers are shedding more thoughtful light on the dynamic relations between the intruding English as a foreign language and their mother tongues, that is, the Englishization of the native languages. In the Chinese context, debates concerning the purity of modern Chinese have been frequently held in various Chinese media. The author makes a tentative study of the influence of English on modern Chinese syntax.Discussions about Englishization of modern Chinese can date back to the early 20th century, but the earliest systematic study is the one conducted by Chinese linguist Wang Li. The lexical influence of English on Chinese was the main focus of the studies from the 1950s to the 1980s, and various aspects of Chinese have been discussed since the 1990s. However, a large proportion of the studies are undertaken by scholars in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore. In addition, in Mainland China, most of the studies explore Englishization of modern Chinese in general from the perspective of language contact and the data are mainly from popular articles or literary works. Few studies take the factor of the Chinese learners of English in the Chinese context into consideration.This thesis proposes a study of Englishization of the Chinese output of Chinese teachers of English with the main focus on word order. The data are from sixty articles in two of the English core journals in China. The majority of the examples of suspected English influence found in the articles are rechecked by scholars in Chinese in order to make the data more objective. In addition, the author refers to the National Language Committee of China's "Core Corpus of the General Corpus of Chinese" to extract the frequency of some suspected new deviant structures. The main procedure is comparative analysis. With regard to the language norm, this study refers to the Chinese classical grammar books that are written mainly by Wang Li. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk, et al., 1985) is taken as the English norm. Based on the categories of previous studies, mainly Wang Li's, the present study illustrates the syntactic influence of English on modern Chinese: i) head nouns with long premodifiers; ii) use of the pronouns; iii) use of parenthesis; iv) inverted position of some subordinate clauses; v) addition of the verb 'shi' (是); and vi) some new deviances. To analyze and give explanations to these deviant structures, the present study employs the multi-competence theory and the Competition Model. Within multi-competence concept, the second language learners are regarded as second language users and they have multi-competence in their minds. The relationship of the two languages in the same mind is in an integration continuum, so the two languages to a lesser or larger degree influence each other. As to the Competition Model, it provides the processing mechanism. Due to the limit of the brain in language processing, competition between cues arises. In production, forms compete to express underlying intentions. The cues whose strength is relatively strong may intrude into the user's first language.Though this study is far from being perfect owing to the limitations in methodology and the specification of language norm, it has some implications: the study can contribute to the universality of the two theories (the multi-competence theory and the Competition Model); the study can enhance our understanding of the general features of the influence of second language (English) on first languages; it enables us to have a better understanding of the reasons of the changes of modern Chinese; and the findings of this study imply that it is necessary to pay attention to the Chinese proficiency in second language learning.