Contact-induce Language Change And Variation

Embedded within the scope of variationist sociolinguistics as well as thehistorical linguistics, this study is an attempt to explore whether the diachronic changeand variation of bei passives is an English contact-induced phenomenon bypinpointing their semantic, syntactic, phonetic, pragmatic, and lexical characteristics.In addition, it also seeks to examine the possibility of grammatical borrowing betweentwo totally different language systems.This study is based on a corpus of608naturally occurring Chinese passiveconstructions, which are then coded in terms of such variables as semantic prosody,humanness of patient, agency, syntactic function, information status of the agent andpatient, syllabication, and verb constraint. Variable rule analysis, an analytic methodof Labovian quantitative sociolinguistics, is performed to explore the characteristicsof bei passives identify which of the contextual factors significantly influence thechoice of bei passives.The findings of our study reveal that the frequencies of bei passives in modernChinese have quadrupled those prior to English-Chinese language contact. An orderlyvariation also displays itself in such aspects as the disappearance of the negativesemantic constraint on bei passives, a striking preference of short to long passives, therising tendency of nonhuman patients, and the increasing emphasis on the newinformation of the agent. All the above changes and variations of bei passivesmanifest an obvious tendency to go in line with the grammatical rules of Englishpassives, testifying that language change and variation of bei passives is an Englishcontact-induced result and that grammatical borrowing is possible between twodifferent languages.Our findings also indicate that although the negative semantic constraintfunctions no longer as an influential factor in the choice of bei passives, there are stilloverwhelmingly more bei passives connoting negative meaning than neutral orpositive meanings. This evidenced that the application of bei passives in modern Chinese has not been completely detached from traditional Chinese grammarconstraint, serving as the main reason for the Europeanized grammar to be acceptedby Chinese speakers.In addition, the multivariate analysis fails to exhibit any significant differencebetween the modern Chinese and the translated Chinese in terms of application of beipassives. This result further confirms bei passive has evolved into a fairly mature andstable grammar system in modern Chinese. It is thus hypothesized that no furthernoticeable variation will occur regarding bei passives in future contact betweenChinese and English.