The Meaning And Source Analysis Of Penang Hokkien Gramatical Loanword "Pun" In Malaysia

The state of Penang in Malaysia is a typical multilingual community. The local residents, especially Chinese, are able to use two or even more languages for daily communication, yet in this process, some phenomena of the language contact such as code-switching and lexical borrowing cannot be avoided. Penang Hakkien dialect (hereinafter referred to as PHD) is the result of the language contact, the most distinguished characteristic of PHD is a large amount of Malay loanwords has been used frequently. Not only the nominal Malay culture-specificed terms has been borrowed, but also the grammatical elements such as "pun" the adverb. Most of the previous studies focused on the Chinese loanwords in Malay language nor the categorizing of the loanwords, but there are hardly any research studies on the lexical borrowing of PHD from the Baba Nonya’s historic and cultural perspective, not to mention the research about the grammatical loanwords of PHD.This thesis will be discussed form two perspective, firstly, based on the language contact theory and the history and culture of Baba Nonya to discuss the reason of why PHD has been borrowing such amount of Malay loanwords. Secondly, focuses on describing the meaning and value of the Malay grammatical loanword "pun" used in Penang by corpus analysis and a comparison of synonyms, which refers to the approach Saussure adopts in defining "value". The corpus is collected through the internet, consisting of spoken word popular over the Internet rendered from Roman letters. So to a certain extent, it can truly reflect the colloquial use of Penang’s Hokkien. Another way of corpus acquisition is the self-examination corpus of the author as a Penangite.The main meaning of "pun" are "resemblance" and "generalization". Studies have found that after borrowed from Malay, the word "pun" gradually fully replaces "也 "(pronounced as "ya") and "嘛 "(pronounced as "ma") to express the meaning of resemblance. Whereas in expressing the meaning of generalization, since "pun" can only be used in the range of time, place, condition and arbitrary reference, "啰"(pronounced as "loh") or "拢"(pronounced as "long") is still employed in generalizing subject and target.This paper found out there are two reason that PDH widely using Malay loanwords: first, results from the contact of the Chinese community and Malay community. The second reason is the shift-induced interference occurred by baba during they language switching form baba language to PHD. Unlike the Baba culture and language in Malacca, Penang never have developed Baba-liked Creole language, this is due to the Chinese population has always been the most since its opening in 1786, and eventually formed the Penang Hokkien Dialect today.