The Study On The Mechanism And Function Of The Loan Words From English And Japanese Into Chinese

In the cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries, many loan words have been introduced into Chinese language and are integrated into the Chinese language along with new things and new concepts.This thesis tries to classify the English loan words and Japanese loan words and make a comparison of the English loan words and Japanese loan words by exploring their borrowing mechanism and functions respectively. In addition, this thesis tries to make a contrastive analysis between English loan words and Japanese loan words in the perspectives of the borrowing mechanism, source characteristics and functions of borrowing.This thesis reports a linguistic study of loan words from the perspective of the theory of language contact and linguistic borrowing. The author employs the qualitative method as the main method and adopts the quantitative method as a supplement. According to the data collected from dictionaries and the corpus, we can find that English loan words and Japanese loan words involve all fields of social life. From the analysis, it is found that the borrowing mechanism of loan words from English into Chinese can be classified into five types:original English alphabetic words; words of transliteration; translation loans; hybrid forms of transliteration and loan translation; indirect borrowings from English via Japanese. The borrowing mechanism of loan words from Japanese can be summarized into three types: semantic borrowing, Japanese loanwords from English which are written in Japanese characters and terms invented by Japanese people and accepted by Chinese. As to the function of the loan words, it is found that the borrowing of foreign words will inevitably have great influence on China. These functions are concluded as follows:linguistically, loan words from English and Japanese enrich the Chinese language and the Chinese vocabulary. Culturally, loan words promote the development of Chinese education. Societally, new ideas and social reform in China, cause changes in Chinese people’s social life as well as improving China’s development in science and technology. The functions of the springing up and widely use of English loan words and Japanese loan words are so huge that it can be found in Chinese people’s daily life.The thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction of the research reason, research significance and research methodology. Chapter 2 is the relevant theory, an extensive literature review of previous researches on loan words both at home and abroad, the definition of loan words and the classification of English loan words and Japanese loan words. Chapter 3 is the methodology. Chapter 4 is the results and discussion. Chapter 5 is the conclusions as well as the research limitations and the reflections for future research.