Language contact and morphosyntactic borrowing: The case study of Hong Kong Written Chinese

As a result of language contact between Chinese and English, as well as between Standard Chinese and Cantonese, Hong Kong Written Chinese (henceforth HKWC) has attracted a substantial amount of research effort. However, at the present time, understanding of the nature of the Hong Kong speech community, the features of HKWC, the patterns of morphosyntactic borrowing, the constraints on morphosyntactic borrowing, the factors affecting the morphosyntactic borrowing, and so forth, is still limited and there is clearly a need for further investigation.;The present study has established two models for describing and explaining morphosyntactic borrowing in HKWC. The first model posits a continuum of Written Chinese in the Hong Kong speech community on a four point scale with HKWC in the middle. The second model explains the process of linguistic borrowing. The Hong Kong speech community is described as a changing multi-level-diglossic system. Some English words with inflectional morphemes have been borrowed into HKWC as wholes with the inflectional morphemes losing their meanings and functions. Some English affixes and bound morphemes are borrowed into HKWC as free morphemes or even phrases. KWC has also borrowed some syntactic structures from English in the forms of calque, extension and convergence.;Constraints on morphosyntactic borrowing have also been discussed. There are two types of constraints. One type is linguistic constraints, the other type is sociocultural constraints. It is hypothesized that a multi-cultural society results in a multi-level-diglossic system, which leads to the emergence of more than one embedded language in the process of linguistic borrowing. Also emerging is the situation in which syntactic and semantic equivalents from different sources coexist, compete with each other, and face selection under linguistic and social-cultural constraints. The result of morphosyntactic borrowing is determined by a system of equilibrium between internal factors and external factors; when external factors trigger a process of borrowing, the equilibrium is broken, but this temporary imbalance returns to equilibrium due to internal factors. Although these two sets of factors seem to interact with each other during the morphosyntactic borrowing, the external factors tend to be the determining ones.