A Sociolinguistic Approach To The Loanwords In The Ming Dynasty

Loanword is a pivotal linguistic by-product caused by the contact of various cultures and languages.The geyser of loanwords has not only provided a cultural diversity and lexical enrichment,but also offered valuable materials for linguistic researches.The Chinese loanwords in the Ming dynasty is the panoramic and true reflection of the Ming society,enlightening China's contacts with diverse nations and cultures in high frequency and massive scale.However,previous studies on the Ming loanwords are highly concentrated in the aspects of linguistic description and etymological explanation.Few has studied the Ming loanwords by examining the reciprocal relationship between the loanwords and social milieu in which they are produced.This thesis,therefore,intends to illuminate the peculiar linguistic phenomenon of linguistic borrowing by a rather Promethean perspective—the sociolinguistic approach.To be specific,the Theory of Covariance,pertaining to sociolinguistics,will be utilized in the study.Via analyzing the societal causes and influences of the Ming loanwords,this thesis will testify the co-variant relationship between loanwords and societal changes.As for the initial step,the author collects and sifts the Ming loanwords by perusing various sources,and a corpus of the loanwords is then constructed as the basic studying materials.On the basis of the corpus,the author processes the aggregated loanwords in two major procedures—the linguistic description and sociolinguistic analysis.For linguistic description,the author classifies the loanwords in terms of their donor language,adoptive method and semantic contents.Based on the results of descriptive categorization,the author analyzes the societal causes of the Ming loanwords both synchronically and diachronically by utilizing the Theory of Covariance.The social influences brought by the loanwords are also discussed.After the discussions,the thesis generalizes social and linguistic patterns of the Ming loanwords.Conclusively,via the results produced by the above-mentioned procedures,this thesis not only sheds light on the internal linguistic features of the Chinese loanwords,but also elucidates the external societal factors that trigger the linguistic phenomenon.Most importantly,the co-variant relationship between language and society is axiomatically illuminated in the study.