| In Taiwan the language of the majority, Taiwanese, historically has had three periods of contact with other languages since 1895. Those languages are Amoy, Japanese and Mandarin. The first language contact was due to religious activity; the other two were both a result of political colonization. All three language contacts caused lexical change and variation in the language of Taiwanese novels.; I have collected five volumes of Taiwanese novels. They were written in omanization by two pastors, TeN7 Khe-phoan3 (1925), and Loa7 Jin5-seng (1924--1954). Using computer-aided segmentation supplemented by manual segmentation, I found 112,964 word tokens with 12,941 word types in this corpus. I also collected a second corpus with 92,539 word tokens and 12,969 word types consisting of the short stories of Tan5 Lui5 and Tan5 Beng5-jin5 written in the 1990's.; I use a "Balancing Approach" to do the statistical analysis by comparing the two corpora in two eras on one hand, and applying symbolic and sociolinguistic theories to the lexical categorization and lexical analysis on the other.; Comparison of the two corpora reveals that the church register has undergone a significant loss; Japanese loanwords have not declined as expected; Mandarin loanwords have had a great increase.; Comparing the Taiwanese local lexical layer to the loanwords in the two eras, I found that the lexical density of the local layer in the second era is higher than that of the first era. The average of the lexical richness of the personal lexicon in the second era is higher than that of the first era. This shows that lexical expansion is ongoing despite the lexical loss from the first era. It is perfectly normal for Taiwanese, as for any language, to lose words and add words over the normal course of time. |
