A Study Of Modern Chinese Affixation Under The Contact Between English And Chinese

Language is undergoing development with the passing of time. One language alwayscontacts with other languages on different occasions and at different degrees. Since the reformand opening up, the frequent contact of Chinese and English inevitably causes languagevariation either in phonetics, lexicon or syntax in modern Chinese. What calls for specialattention is that Chinese absorbs a large number of English vocabularies, which causes acertain influence on the word formation of Chinese. The new word-forming causes newlexical structure, which forms the new language variants.Language variation is embodied in lexicon, phonetics, or syntax, which is the core ofsociolinguistic research. This study analyzes the distribution of the quasi-affix variation inmodern Chinese from the perspective of sociolinguistic variation. Research methods insociolinguistics are adopted. First, type-recording the interviews of120informants fromXiangtan city and observing their daily speech are applied, through which sentence samplesof quasi-affix words are collected. Then, a questionnaire survey on peoples’ attitudes towardthe use of quasi-affix words is conducted as a supplement. Finally, with the mathematicalstatistics methods, the data are analyzed with help of software such as GOLDVARB X andExcel (2003).The study found that affix tendency mainly manifest as the emergence and the diffusionof the affix. It is determined by the mutual influence of language development and the socialfactors. By the interference of English, many words such as xing, hua, jia, zhu yi has beengradually losing the original meaning when used as affix, and these new affixes arecorresponding with the meaning of English affix such as "-ty","er","-ism".The use of quasi-affix words presents a certain distribution: the occurrence of quasi-affixin formal speech owns a higher tendency than that in casual speech. With the growing of age,the use of quasi-affix is becoming more and more frequent, which is the same as educationallevel. Male tends to use this structure more than female. Besides, because of the statusconsciousness, civil servant, manager and teachers accounts the bigger proportion in using thequasi-affix words. In all, people accept the use of these words and these words are widelyused. The appearance and diffusion of quasi-affix words results from internal causes oflanguage development and social causes. The internal causes focus on the self-adjustmentmechanism of language system and word formation, the external causes include theinfluences from English language, the economy principle of language use and the peerpressure.With the fast spreading of internet, new language varieties appear frequently on the internet and the use of them in Putonghua will bring challenges to the common language, sothe systematic analysis of new variety can not only help people hold a rational attitudetowards its use and enrich the language variation study, but also keep the development oflanguage in a harmonious way.