A Tentative Study Of Chinese Loan Words In English From The Perspective Of Lexicalization

Language, like everything else, gradually transforms itself over the centuries.With the international communications and exchanges becoming more and morecomprehensive and salient, a great number of concepts, things and cultures areintroduced to different countries. Such communications between countries, nationsand social communities not only give birth to pidgin, creole, but also a good deal ofloan words. English is one of the most common languages in the world, and Chineseis the language with the most users. Chinese loan words in English are the products ofsino-western communication and of the Chinese influences towards English.The birth of loan words, as a way of word formation, is one dynamic process oflanguage change. Not a few Chinese scholars have addressed the issues about Chineseloan words in English, but seldom of such researches have discussed this topic fromthe diachronic perspective, i.e. the perspective of language change, which may raise alot of questions deserving our consideration in lexicology and language change.Diachronically, as a way of language change, lexicalization has been generallyconsidered as the process of lexical materials’ adoption into the lexicon.Lexicalization is becoming an abundantly occurring grammatical device inherent inthe grammatical system of English. But there has no direct correspondinglexicalization study on loan words, therefore, the rendition of Chinese loan words inEnglish poses challenging and interesting questions in the field of diachroniclexicology studies. The lexicalization theory will also help us to understand theformation and the status quo of Chinese loan words in English.This thesis tries to explore the lexicalization mechanism of Chinese loan wordsin English, and for this purpose, we divide the loan words into three types by theirways of translation and formation: transliterated loans, loan translated words and loanblends. Such division is made for the convenience of revealing the uniquecharacteristics in lexicalization, which is one of the results in discussing theirlexicalization process. The lexicalization of transliterated loans and loan translatedwords are examined by case studies of tea and face, both of them are energetic and active words in current English. This thesis has also analyzed the degree oflexicalization for each group, which shows that the degree of lexicalization for thetransliterated loans is higher than that of loan translated words and loan blends.Besides, in comparing the analysis of lexicalization degree and Cannon’s196Chineseloan words with high frequency in the eight desk dictionaries, we also find that thereis a positive correlation between the word’s lexicalization degree with its occurrencefrequency in dictionaries, and the high frequncy rate of loan blends is even higherthan that of transliterated loans.This thesis integrates qualitative and quantitative research methods. The loanwords are collected from Cannon’s Chinese Borrowings in English (1988), which isan authoritative work in this field. The example sentences are taken from the Corpusof Contemporary American English (COCA), which are all from the original andnative texts.To sum up, loan words are not only concerned with the forms, pronunciations ormeanings, but above all, they suggest the interaction between two languages andcultures, which is the key argument we pursue to prove. This thesis aims to depict theloan words in English from the perspective of lexicalization, in the hope that it wouldserve as a preparatory research for further studies on loan words, lexicalization,language change and cross-cultural communication.