some analsis on Chinese borrowings in English.docxVIP

 PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 14 Ting Mo AN ANALYSIS ON DISTINGUISH FEATURES OF CHINESE BORROWINGS IN DIFFERENT PERIODS M.Phil. in English Language Teaching History and Globalization of English Michaelmas Term, 2010 Word count: 3698  1. Introduction Borrowings that I will discuss in this assignment refer to language forms which ‘spread from one linguistic variety into another variety’ CITATION Hea01 \p 432 \l 1033  (Heath, 2001, p. 432), which occurs in almost all languages. Likewise, English and Chinese have mutual influences on each other though the lexical items English borrowed from Chinese are limited due to huge geographical distance between the Great Britain and China as well as immense distinctions between the two language systems. In this assignment, I would try to analyze features of Chinese borrowings in different times and discuss historical and social reasons of them. My assignment is based on several corpora about Chinese borrowings. In the first section, I will focus on Moody’s (1996) corpus and analyze the Chinese borrowings from the middle of seventeenth century to the middle of twentieth century. In the second section, I will concentrate on the comparisons between some data in Cannon’s (1988) and Yang’s (2009) corpora, explore some features of newer Chinese borrowings and reasons of them. Ultimately, it is suggested that besides the level of closeness of the contact between Chinese and English, the pinyin reform in Mandarin system as well as the popularization of Chinese culture in the globalizing era also contribute to the increasing number and use frequency of Chinese borrowings in English. 2. Analysis on Moody’s corpus (1996) Both Moody’s (1996) and Yang’s (2009) corpora are established on the basis of Garland Cannon’s study of Chinese borrowings in English. In 1988, Cannon defined a corpus of 979 lexical borrowings from Chinese, and conducted a test of one item’s efficacy by checking its appearance in eight ‘leading desk dictionar