Language Contact Across Time: Classical Chinese on Modern Public Signs in Taiwan

Abstract

Classical Chinese has been "dead" for over two millennia, but continues to exert significant influence. This article uses a corpus of modern public signs in Taiwan to explore how the interplay between modern and classical Chinese in formal register both resembles and differs from other types of language contact. In particular, it looks at the influence of classical Chinese on content words, function words and grammatical structure. This kind of "language contact across time" resembles other kinds of language contact in having L1 as a "grammar language" and L2 as a "lexifier language." However, L2 influence on content words, though including some basic vocabulary, is more limited than usual, and while L2 influence on grammatical structure is fairly limited, its influence on function words is more extensive than in other types of language contact. A number of structural, functional and pragmatic explanations are discussed.