The Study Of Japanese Loanwords In Xiandai Hanyu Cidian

‘Japanese loanwords' refers to that portion of the Chinese vocabulary that has been borrowed from Japanese, constituting a peculiar part of Chinese loanwords. Although the field of linguistics has expended much effort on this subject and rich literature has been reaped in the area of qualitative analysis, a study from the perspective of statistical quantitative analysis and mobile diachronic approaches is yet to be established. This dissertation wants to fill this blank by compiling all the ‘Japanese loanwords' contained in the six different version of Xiandai hanyu cidian, which enable one to conduct a closed-ended data collection. There are three conclusions can be drawn from the comprehensively collected data. First, the ‘Japanese loanwords' has never stopped being incorporated into Chinese vocabulary, its number shows a rising tendency and the manner by which it is borrowed is diversifying. Then, the ‘Japanese loanwords' entered in the earlier time has an exclusive predominance in number. Finally, the ‘Japanese loanwords' incorporated in different times tends to vary prominently in meaning and the manner by which it is borrowed. This paper notes that there are five paradigms of semantic change happened after the words entered Chinese through strict comparison between Xiandai hanyu cidian and the dictionaries of Japanese, and points out the possibility that maybe it is the similarity that the use of Chinese-characters in both Chinese and Japanese that triggered this semantic change. Some editorial incompleteness of Xiandai hanyu cidian on the ‘Japanese loanwords' it contained has also been exemplified and analyzed,in the hope of leading to its future improvement.