CONTACT SCENARIOS DURING THE JAPANESE MEDIATION IN THE ADOPTION OF ANGLICISMS IN CHINESE

Abstract

The cross-cultural settings for the borrowing process between English and Chinese could be mediated on the part of the Japanese language for its signifi cant historical and more recent role in the region. Attention is paid to the contact factors in the intermediate medium that determine the scenarios of such indirect penetrations. Both semantic and formal sides of the processes of tripartite language interaction during the adoption of Anglicisms in Chinese via Japanese are tackled with the emphasis on the interplay between the sound and graphic representation of the interim and ultimate lags of the borrowing process. The analysis considers the concomitant factors of the reductive simplifi cation of the source item in the two-way target environment as well as the decomposition of the semantic content of the recipient units. The whole process is demonstrative of the inter-cultural subtlety of lexical borrowings in the typologically distant languages.