ADAPTATION STAGES OF CHINESE BORROWINGS BY THE ENGLISH LITERARY LANGUAGE SYSTEM
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2019-9-32-38
Introduction. English literary language is a historically heterogeneous structure, which includes various borrowed adstrata, more or less adapted by its system. Borrowings of Chinese origin as part of this recipient language have their own deep historical traditions and are the subject of this study. The synchronously functioning layer of borrowed Sinisms seems to be very heterogeneous in terms of assimilation, its levels and stages. Because the contacting languages – English and Chinese – are not related or even homologous, the process of assimilation by the system of elements of the Chinese adstratum is non-linear and has a number of characteristic features. This article is an attempt to fragment the process of assimilation/adaptation of Chinese borrowings in the system of English literary language by levels of assimilation and its stages. The aim of the paper is to distinguish the levels and stages of adaptation of borrowed lexical units of Chinese origin by the English literary system. Material and methods. As a general methodological foundation, a system-functional approach was used, which allows us to describe the functioning of a system or its individual part in the dynamics of linguistic evolution, an integral part of which is the phenomenon of borrowing. In the course of the study, a corpus of general and particular scientific (linguistic) methods was used, including: methods of logic (analysis, synthesis, deduction, comparison, generalization and modeling), statistics (grouping method, dialectic method), a comparative historical method with the step of internal reconstruction, component analysis method and the opposition method. Results and discussion. In linguistics, the terms “assimilation” and “adaptation” are traditionally contrasted: borrowings “assimilate” in the system of the recipient language, and the system itself adopts borrowed units. There are two approaches to the description of the process of assimilation/adaptation of these units: the first recognizes a borrowing adapted when it corresponds to the phonetic and grammatical appearance of the original words of the recipient language system. The second approach takes into account the influence of the lexical environment of the new foreign language unit. Thus, the approaches implicitly repeat the above opposition and differ in object-subjective position in relation to the borrowed unit and the system of the recipient language. Five three levels of assimilation of Chinese borrowings in the system of English literary language are distinguished: phonetic, morphological (grammatical) and spelling. The latter seems to be the most significant for the adapting Sinisms due to their highly heterogeneous graphic appearance. There are five stages in the adaptation of these units by the English literary language system: 1) the use of the unit in the form that it possesses in its donor language; 2) adaptation of borrowing to the laws to which the lexical means of the recipient language obey at the above levels; 3) loss by a unit of accompanying comments as applied to lemmatical corpuses of dictionaries and reference publications of the recipient language; 4) loss by borrowing of the previous stylistic differentiation; 5) consolidation of the borrowed lexical unit in the explanatory dictionary. Conclusion. The proposed stages and extrapolated approaches can find application in the practice of studying the Chinese adstratum in a number of other idioms that have historically been in contact with the Chinese language, as well as adstrata of a different origin in systems of unrelated languages. The empirical material of the study has high theoretical and practical value and can be used in reading university courses and teaching such disciplines as intercultural communication, history, lexicology, grammar and functional stylistics of the English language, contact and social linguistics, as well as in teaching the theory and practice of translation.
Keywords: borrowing, assimilation, adaptation, recipient language, donor language, English literary language, Chinese borrowing
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Issue: 9, 2019
Series of issue: Issue 9
Rubric: RESEARCH OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES
Pages: 32 — 38
Downloads: 757