Investigating the Borrowing of English Inflectional Morphemes Into Chinese Newspapers

Abstract

Abstract It is controversial whether English inflectional morphemes can be systematically borrowed into written Chinese since English and Chinese are typologically and orthographically different. This paper intends to investigate the borrowing of eight English inflectional morphemes [–’s (possessive), –(e)s (plural), –ed (past tense, past participle), –ing (present participle), –en (past participle),–s (the 3rd person singular), –er (comparative), and –est (superlative)] into Chinese with a corpus of Chinese newspapers collected from 2005 to 2021. The findings of this study suggest a significant presence of the systematically borrowed English inflectional morphemes into Chinese newspapers in terms of borrowability. Based on the analysis of the linguistic features and frequency distribution of the borrowed morphemes into Chinese newspapers, it can be concluded that the English inflectional morphemes borrowed can be well adapted into Chinese.