留学生语言学dissertation范文-Globalisation and the Chinese Language

留学生语言学dissertation范文，NCUK Graduate Diploma and PMP Programme 2009 - 2010

STUDENT ID: WH-09-0001

Research Methods Assessed Coursework: Component 2: The Dissertation

Topic: Globalisation and the Chinese Language
Globalisation is generally thought of first in economic terms; although it also has clearly always had a cultural effect. This has become particularly noticeable in the age of modern global media in the impact of globalisation, and of the English language, on other languages. This effect was felt first in Europe and strongly resisted as cultural domination (Gordon & Meunier, 2000) in France where laws against “franglais” in official media have been in place since 1994 (Pooley, p.95), or in Germany where “Denglish” is seen as a treat by many (Cleaver, 2001). This effect is felt across East Asia: in the Philippines (Villanueva, 2007) where English is seen as a threat to the establishment of Filipino as a national language, or in Japan (Blair, 1997), where there is a cultural tradition that is now threatened by what Ota (2002) calls the “rampant use of English loan words”, concluding that, for the Japanese, knowing English is now indispensible. China is now the latest member of the global community and the dissertation presents the background to the possible linguistic effects of English on Chinese and offers findings, based on original research, concerning the attitudes to those effects of two groups: Chinese graduates in their early twenties and the generation of Chinese before that.

Contents
1.Introduction and Background p. 3
2.Methodology
3.A brief introduction to loanwords
3.1 The relationships among Words, Language and Culture
3.2 Main Sources of Loanwords in the English and Chinese Languages
3.2.1 Culture Infusion
3.2.2 Inflow of New Words in Technology
3.2.3 New Coinage of Network Words
3.3 Influence of loanwords
4.Attitude survy
Conclusion
Bibliography
1. Introduction and Background
In the past, two clear instances of foreign languages affecting Chinese significantly can be identified. More than 1500 years ago the introduction of Budhism saw many terms from Sanskrit and other ancient Indian languages entering Chinese (Chu, 2003) a process that has attracte scholarly comments since (Lahiri, 2008) but of little importance to anyone else to-day, and probably to very few then and, more recently, from German, usually via Russian, the political and economic vocabulary associated with Marxism: still in common use officially (O’Brien), but declining in modern economic contexts (Zanier, 2008). These are both very specialised areas; but globalisation affects everyone, by definition, and the effects of this on to-day’s language have not been studied. This section will present the background for such a study.

.2. Methodology
Since the publication of “Quantitative Methods in Linguistics” (Johnson, 2008) quantitative methods have become increasingly popular (Larson-Hall, 2008) in areas as diverse as comparative linguistics (Cysouw, 2008) and phonology (Guy, 2005) using statistical methods to approach “a common problem: variation” (Labov, 2008, p.1) and there is an established history of quantitative approaches to large corpus-based projects (de Mőnnink, 1997).#p#分页标题#e#
However, the time available for this project, and the fact that it is looking at cultural attitudes (McRoy, 1995) to linguistic interaction makes a qualitative approach (Brown, 1996) more appropriate.

In this paper,using the way of searching journals and social investigation to study, and use the Likert scale to make survery questionnaire.This is not a completely clear concept; but an attitude can be seen as having three aspects
• Affective - feelings
• Cognitive – knowledge and belief
• Behavioural – how someone would react (Page-Bucci, 2003)
To explore these and to enable measurement: a scale is needed and I shall use the Likert scale .named after the American psychologist, Rensis Likert, who introduced it in 1932 (Arnold et al, 1995). It requires the individuals to make a decision on their level of agreement, generally on a five-point scale (ie. Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree) with a statement. The number beside each response becomes the value for that response and the total score is obtained by adding the values for each response, hence the reason why they are also called 'summated scales' (the respondents score is found by summing the number of responses).As well as use psychological knowledge to anaylze investigators' attitude.

3. A brief introduction to loanwords

There are two causes of borrowings into Chinese: historical and social.(chen, 2000)
Historically, on the one hand, Chinese shares with Western languages in the process of culture infusion; on the other hand, with the policy of opening and reform, China is becoming more and more a centre of both economy and culture. An increasing number of borrowings have been directly borrowed from English, Latin, and Spanish as well.
The influence of foreign languages on the Chinese language has been the sharp increase of financial condition and sharing of knowledge and information, which play an indispensable role in propelling the further progress of our whole society and strengthen the sustentation and stability of our country.
Socially, as the world develops so does the Chinese language. Especially in the twentieth century, owing to the rapid development of the modern mass media, communication skills, and transportation facilities, the international and cultural exchange, countless borrowed words have come into Chinese and they have become a component part of Chinese vocabulary to satisfy needs of society. (gu,1996)
Foreign words and concepts are adopted into the Chinese language in either of two ways. (Amen,R. 1982) One way is to create a new compound word that actually translates the concept behind the word. For example, a computer is known as a “diannao” or “electric brain”, while a telephone is “dianhua” , or electric voice. Another way is for the foreign word to be transliterated into Chinese. Unfortunately, this approach has a number of drawbacks. One is that since the Chinese characters were not designed to represent sound, the result is usually just a rough approximation of the original sound. Moreover, since the characters may be pronounced very differently under various dialects, what is a close approximation under one dialect may not be under another. Hence, it is not unusual for the same foreign word to have multiple Chinese transliterations based on the dialect. Another disadvantage of transliterated words is that since every Chinese character has a meaning, a transliterated word is nonsensical unless one immediately recognizes that one should read just the sound and ignore the meaning of the underlying characters.( Liu Yongquan, Qiao Yi,1991)This can be very confusing for beginning Chinese readers.#p#分页标题#e#
Increasing globalization means that foreign loan words are likely to increase in the Chinese language. In Hong Kong, where residents freely insert English words into their Cantonese dialect, they tend to have more transliterated English words than other Chinese speakers.
3.1 The relationships among Words, Language and Culture
留学生语言学dissertation范文First and foremost, what is a word? Aristotle defined “words as the smallest significant units of speech”. However, as the rapid pace of modernization and socialization, linguists have discovered semantic units below the word level, that is, an element smaller than the word. So we now know that the smallest significant unit of speech is not the word, but the morpheme. (linchengzhang，liushiping, 2009, 2) And according to the contemporary linguistic theory, a word is a minimum free form, that is to say, the smallest form that may appear in isolation and there are two types of linguistic forms: one is the bound form, the other is free form. More importantly, every word has a fixed sound form and a certain meaning. That is to say, a word is a unity of sound and meaning. It is therefore easily observed that the sound of a word is inseparable form its meaning.
In all, the majority of the words in the vocabulary of any language, including Chinese and English, are conventional symbols. It is impossible to explain why this or that word has this or that sound or why it has this or that meaning.
Subsequently, what is language? It is really a tough question. By language we mean human language, namely, natural language, not any artificial languages used by logicians or scientists. As we know, with the development of language, the definitions of languages are different by linguists. But when I look at a famous Chinese linguist Professor Zhao Shikai who has defined the term language from different angles, we find that language is a system of symbols based on physiology, psychology and physics. It is a specific social action and a carrier of information used for human communication in a society.
So what is the relationship between language and culture?
In the very basic first, let us look at a paradigmatic fact in our daily life. Once an American was visiting a Chinese, as the visitor saw the host’s wife, he said, “Your wife is very beautiful”, the host smiled and said: “Where? Where?”----Which caused Americans surprise, but still he answered: Eyes, hair, nose…”---an answer that the host found a bit puzzling. The surprising was caused by different cultures. “Where? Where?” means “nali！ nali！”In Chinese is a kind of humble saying, but the American understood it as “which parts of the body”. Events like these are fairly common when people of different languages and cultures communicate. Because of cultural differences, misunderstandings may arise, although the language used in communication may be faultless. The same words or expressions may not mean the same thing to different peoples. Because of cultural differences, a serious question may cause amusement or laugh; a harmless statement may cause displeasure or anger. Because of cultural differences, jokes by a foreign speaker maybe received with blank faces and stony silence. Yet the same stories in the speaker’s own country would leave audiences holding their sides with laughter. Language is a part of culture and plays a very important role in it. On the one hand, without language, culture would not be possible. On the other hand, language is influenced and shaped by culture; it reflects culture. In the broadest sense, language is the symbolic representation of a people, and it comprises their historical and cultural backgrounds as well as their approach to life and their ways of living and thinking. #p#分页标题#e#
Language and culture interact and understanding of one requires understanding of the other. Cultures differ from one another. Each culture is unique. Learning a foreign language well means more than merely mastering the pronunciation, grammar, words and idioms. It means learning also to see the world as native speakers of that language see it, learning the ways in which their language reflects the ideas, customs, and behavior of their society, learning to understand their “language of the mind”. Learning a language, in fact, is inseparable from learning its culture. (quoted in Bronislaw Malinowski, 1923,73)
Maybe we have this experience: when we are listening to something familiar to us, no matter what is concerned, usually we find it easy to understand. Even if there are some new words in the material, we are able to guess their meanings according to its context. However, when we encounter some unfamiliar material or something closely related to cultural background, we may feel rather difficult. Even if the material is easy, we only know the literal meaning, but can’t understand connotation, because we lack knowledge of cultural background.
In a word, language is an important part of the culture, and they can not separate .The language in communication is not only the transfer in speech but also the transfer in the culture .The individuality of the culture construct the deep gap of the language .According to the above mentioned, we can have a conclusion that language and culture effect with each other .If we want to learn English well, we can not avoid learning the culture.

3.2 Main Sources of Loanwords in the English and Chinese Languages

There are many borrowings in our daily communication. Many linguists divided them into four groups according to their character: Aliens, Denizens, Translation-loans, and Semantic borrowings. However, considering the origin of these words and their main use in our daily life, we can still broadly divide them into three aspects.
3.2.1 Culture Infusion
As an inevitable fact in the new century, different cultures have a great impact in each other, including English and Chinese. In fact, there exist numerous loanwords that we can see anywhere, while people pay little attention to them because some loanwords have experienced longer history, we cannot distinguish their “foreign identity” now, even we think they are just Chinese. Consider, for example, Kentucky, McDonald’s, spar, cola, Viagra, supermarket, Sunna, SOS, AIDS, and so on. AIDS was originated from the United States. When appearing in China, we translated it into a long word through CCTV. Such word was very long and difficult to know. In Hong Kong, they translated it into “Ai Zi Bing”. Such translation method is very easy to remember and know. So this translation can be accepted by the common people quickly. Up to now, we still use this translation and almost no one think it is a foreign word. To speak honestly, since these words have experienced long history, people sometimes can not distinguish them correctly. One apt example in this point involves the famous brand--- Aquascutum, which means “waterproof” in Latin, and Chinese translate it in to “jushui” by using a method of transliteration. In fact, many people know Aquascutum is a production of foreign company, but maybe they think the name of this brand is a production of Chinese. Though English name of this brand has its own meaning, its Chinese name can make more imagination. So people accept the name which is more convenient and easy-remembering, which made this brand become one of the most famous cloth brand. More importantly, culture infusion is mutually effected in both sides. With more and more frequent contacts between Chinese and Western countries, lots of Chinese words have entered English language, and surprisingly, some of them even have changed a lot. We can see chopsticks, chop suey, litchi, loquat, jiao zi, tong oil, wok, and many others. However, as a Chinese, I still do not know that “wok” means “tieguo”. Also worth mentioning is that some loanwords have replaced native words, or to say, have overwhelmed native words. We can take the same example of “jiao zi”, which means dumpling in English, however, being more and more familiar with people of Chinese and skyrocketing soaring of Chinese people in English-speaking countries, people in West also turn to use “jiao zi” rather than “dumpling”.#p#分页标题#e#
In sum, when talking about loanwords, culture infusion plays an indispensable role in propelling this special phenomenon into a common one.

3.2.2 Inflow of New Words in Technology

In a not dissimilar way, loanwords come into being in the realm of technology, like telecommunications, electronic productions, cultural value concepts, and so on. Specifically, CD, AIDS, SARS, SBS, CNN and so forth, obviously, these loanwords are fresh vocabularies in recent years. For that matter, they show that our country is greatly globalized, no matter in economy or in military. At the same time, countless loanwords are absorbed continually, which inevitably enrich Chinese vocabularies and form a relatively stable structure of our language. More importantly, they still become a part of our language. For example, mosaic(mashaike); Golgi(gaoerjiti); nylon(nilong); sonar(shengna); vaseline(fanshilin), these words are all absorbed by our nation and on the other side, they wax the variety of Chinese vocabularies. Deep down, there is no denying that loanwords in new technology are borrowings that most linguists insist that it should and must be defined as loanwords and they can not easily be replaced or modified. In the first place, the feature in itself decides that they may be strange to any culture even in the culture of the inventors. Consider, for example, the fact that Mary Curie finds an important element in Chemistry, which is so called “radium”, however, before this element was discovered, do the word--- “radium” exist? And the same question in other technology words like DNA, holograph, heliocentric theory and so on. Since they are new and unique, they made themselves loanwords, which come from people’s will not reality. Next, technology is developing any time, so there is a sharp requirement of new words indisputably. And people with different language backgrounds will define them in their own languages, and this causes lots of loanwords when other people use these words. Say, a famous Italy brand of automobile—“Ferrari” (falali): It is known to all that this brand was named by its founder. But when people in different nations want to bring this brand into their country, they found it impossible to make any change and replacement to this word, because it has totally formed its own culture and its influence. In other words, the word—“Ferrari” has become a loanword to many languages and absolutely absorbed by these culture.

3.2.3 New Coinage of Network Words

With the coming of information era, Networks language, serve as the host for interpersonal communication and the mechanization for exchanging information, becomes the staple in our daily life. (lin,liu,2009)As most people concern, internet is the cradle of all kinds of miracles. Many loanwords, believe it or not, are also born in this inconceivable world. Really contacting with people from any part of the world, people almost develop a new type of language, which is regarded as the blending of all kinds of language like Whisky. For instance, when we want to search some thing or someone, “Google”(guge) will always be the first choice for anyone of us. In fact, in china, not everyone knows the exact meaning of this word, even we can say only a small number of people in china know the meaning of “Google”, which exactly means “10 of 100th power”. The same as the word “addwater”, which is the pseudo name of the former president Reagan in a BBS forum. And after Reagan admitted his identity, hundreds of thousands of people came to talk to this president, and eventually, the name “addwater” become famous in the Internet. Even today, we, Chinese, still use this word as the behavior of replication to others’ posts. Surprisingly, Chinese translate this word into “guanshui”, which conveys both the meaning of “addwater” literally and representatively. Deep down, we can find people’s inspiration and imagination in their attitude towards loanwords, what is more, the cause of these words. In a dictionary like Webster may mention that “hacker” means “an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer”. However, as Internet crimes spread over the century, people now turn to define it as “a person who illegally gains access to and some times tampers with information in a computer system”. Obviously, this is a derogative sense of translation and in fact, such things, like punk, bug, imba, occur everywhere in the internet. Deeply concerning with these words, linguists find many loanwords are representative of a phenomenon that words change their meaning or obtain meaning and form new loanwords finally. There are large numbers of examples: we call “sofa” as the first one who leaves message to the post; we define “ORZ” as the meaning of “peifu” by its image, which seems that one man is standing on his knees. For that matter, we can find the Internet’s promising prospects of furthering the production of loanwords, for it has infinite space or chances to let this phenomenon go further. #p#分页标题#e#
Summing up: the Internet plays a relative important role in producing loanwords, and it may become a main source of loanwords in future.

3.3 The influence of loanwords

Loanword, many viewers insist, is a kind of art, which represents the transcendental spirits of human imagination and unquenchable structure of human society (Wang Kaijian). It has ineffaceable impact to our language, culture and even our life. In the first place, Loanwords become rich in Chinese gradually, as indicate such foreign components through Chinesization. They are handled by Chinese in a relatively stable structure, which is conductive to the development of Chinese vocabulary. Communicating and contacting with other nations, we often bring amounts of foreign things and concepts. To have these things and ideas understood by ourselves and let our voice be widely spread are the major concern of language. Reconstructing the loanwords and making them become the daily vocabularies fit for Chinese custom can enrich the materials of Chinese vocabulary and maintain the characteristics of Chinese. At the same time, not only Chinese has absorbed amounts of loanwords, but also many fresh loanwords have appeared in Chinese. It brings the adjustment and revamp of Chinese vocabulary system. Secondly, Loanwords themselves have their own culture meanings and special connotations. With the process of time and level of joining Chinese, these specialties of loanwords will be desalted gradually. But when we talk about “surrealism”, “totalitarian”, we still can feel the flavor of modern western culture. In another side of this issue, different nations must bring cultural blend. Cultural blend can be embodied on household utensils, system and the bottom of mind. Loanwords are just another embodiment place of cultural blend. Loanword is a production of direct contact and indirect contact among different nations; it will blend different language culture certainly and have the duality of language culture. In this way, people’s way of life changes with the irresistible coming of loanwords. With new ideas of fashion, teenagers tend to be as “cool” as possible. Wearing clothes in a rebel way, singing songs mixed with element like “R&B” and so forth, which seem unacceptable before. Gone are the days when people sat around charting daily gossips with each other, nowadays people can go out and play “golf”, “bungee” and things like that.

4.Attitude survy

According to the Likert scale,we have already finished the questionnaires. In general,some data are not involved my expectation.However,the whole breakdown still prove my hypothesis.I have investigated the attitudes of 25 young people(22---30),which these people are prepared to Master' s students.The survey shows that 52% volunteers are supporters who think the loanwords can enrich our lives, let us learn more about world culture, and broaden our horizons, to promote the development of the country.For example, loanwords encourage us to learn about foreign culture,which all people are strongly agree this question. 29% volunteers are neutrals who think the loanwords have desirable place, but it affect the purity of their own culture.For instance, globalisation will lead to the loss of some Chinese words,which some people choose the no opinion.And 19% volunteers are opponents who think the loanwords have influenced our traditional culture, it is not benefit our national development.For example,Languages need to change with the times or they die,which some people are disagree it.In sum,there are some advantages and disadvantages about somethings.But it can help the modern development,we should support.#p#分页标题#e#
Conclusion

Language is a cultural and social phenomenon. It accumulates many “cultural dregs” in its long history. Cultural factor always permeates into every lay of language. Language has storing function, it stores all life experiences of predecessors, records national history, reflects economic life, prospects cultural mood of one nation, contains thought style, marks cultural communication of different cultures. Language and culture are the closest relationship. They each play an indispensable role in the evolution of other. As most of people use Chinese all over the world, because Chinese absorbs many foreign components from other nations. That is to say Chinese language itself obtains lots of elements from different culture and causes it own culture to create new loanwords.
Above all, the frequent use of loanwords from English reflects western culture has permeated into every corner of our city and country quickly, comprehensively. And different loanwords have already become a part of our language. In fact, we are absorbing and assimilating the loanwords actively by ever-increasing chances to communicate with outside world. To take it into further consideration, with the process of time, some of them will disappear soon, and some will enter into common core. Everything is changing besides the language. With the development of society, language should ameliorate its structure continuously to fit the development of society and serve for the society better.
The development of language is a basic condition of the development of society. Language is one of the most important communication tools to humans and ties between social members; with the development of society, the ability to realize the reality and ameliorate the reality is strengthened continually. Fresh things and concepts spring up continually. So it needs us to enrich our vocabularies, ameliorate grammar to fit the needs of communication. That is the aim of loanwords, to let people communicate more easily, to make heart to heart more frequently. To fulfill this purpose, it is necessary that we should learn more new loanwords.

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