| Borrowing is a universal linguistic phenomenon.In language contact,one language,more or less,borrows words from other languages to enlarge its vocabulary and enhance its expressive power.Language contact results in borrowing inevitably.English has borrowed numbers of words from Chinese in language contact.This paper concentrates on the Contrastive Study of the Chinese and English, and pays much attention to Factors Contributing to Borrowing and Historical Development of the Borrowing from Chinese into English and source language from Chinese into English.It also attempts to explain the source languages of the Chinese loan words in English.From these studies,the essay tries to explain why some of the Chinese words can enter English and become a member of it while others cannot.Based on the previous studies on motivation,a classification of motivation is made.It can be classified into phonetic motivation,morphological motivation, semantic motivation and etymological motivation.In order to understand their motivational characteristics of the borrowed words,a list of Chinese borrowing words made by Garland Cannon has been analyzed in this study.The study shows that most borrowed words in contemporary English are highly motivated.Among the four types of motivation,phonetic,morphological,semantic and etymological motivation,morphological motivation is the most frequently used one.Lexicology is a hard task in language learning and language teaching. Borrowing words are even harder because they always have the characteristics of their source languages,which can cause big troubles for language learners.This paper hopes to have some practical value.It is written in the hope that it can help English learners develop an interest and appreciation for English borrowing words from Chinese and help them enlarge,their vocabulary efficiently.The relationship between word form and word meaning is identified and hopefully it can be applied to promote vocabulary acquisition and teaching. |
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