A Comparative Study Of Loanword Categorization In English And Chinese

Language is a dynamic and open system. Constantly absorbing foreign words isan important approach for language development. Loanword is an importantcomponent of vocabulary system in English and Chinese. Cognitive research ofloanword can explain language creativity and help us to understand human being’sway of thinking, psychological mechanism and cognitive characteristics in loanwordconstruction and loanword meaning development.The present study adopts a qualitative approach, which includes both inductiveand deductive method. A personal corpus built on real language facts are the materialsused in this study. Under the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics, the studyattempts to study the link between loanwords in English and Chinese and humanbeing’s cognition, and at the same time to make a more reasonable explanation of thesemantic change of loanwords. Moreover, the study tries to expound the similaritiesand differences between English and Chinese loanwords in aspects of cognitivemechanism, cognitive models and national cognitive psychology in the process ofoccurrence, assimilation and integration.The major findings of the present study are as follows:Loanwords result from different categorization of social development. Acategory of new loanword is first established through individual cognitive activities,and then it goes through the process of categorization by recipient language users.Loanword is a continuum of categorization. Loanword meaning change involveslexical category change, i.e. the change of the prototype, category construction andthe interaction between old and new categories. Changes of loanwords promotepeople’s cognitive behavior, activate their socio-cultural knowledge and patterns intheir minds, and fill up the needed information of words according to differentcontexts, which results in the old forms with new meanings.Categorization of loanwords in English and Chinese are the same to some extent.Human’s mind frames and limits people’s potential experience roughly. Abstractconcepts and imaged world in human’s mind are rooted in the body experiences from the objective world. Therefore, the results of the human mind, even in differentcultural environment, are still all commensurate to one another.With cognitive universal, the dynamic process of loanword categorization inEnglish and Chinese still show distinct cultural peculiarities at the same time. It isfound that the infiltration of English language and culture into Chinese language andculture is much larger than vice versa. The process also reflects the differences in theirthinking modes because of their different geographic locations, social histories andthe national cognitive psychologies.