Lexical-semantic Analysis Of China English

The concept of China English has been put forward for many years, and with the rapiddevelopment of Chinese economy, politics and culture, it is being accepted by moreand more people. It is beneficial for intercultural communication and the export ofChinese culture. However, there are only few fruitful achievements even in terms ofits research at the lexical level. Many scholars only paid attention to the traditionaltranslation strategy concerning a few loanwords, or conducted some research on theircollocation features, while disregarding the systematic analysis of their structuralfeatures and motivations, not paying attention to the collection, generalization andanalysis of the data from different news media at home and abroad, thus lackingsystematic research on its lexical representation.The study collects hundreds of China-specific referents(CSRs) from mainstreamnews papers and magazines at first. Calque translation method is used to analyze theirconstruction features and semantic features; Meaning-driven translation model,motivation model framework for neologisms and national cultural semantics are toexplain their word construction motivation; China-related corpus, based on thesamples form western news media, is used to explore their word frequency with thehope of revealing their acceptability and popularity in the west; Meaning-drivenmulti-dimensional definition theory will be used to give a detailed description andexplanation of China-specific referents, which may contribute to the design of itsword-stock.The major findings can be summarized as follows:1) considering the word class,most of the CSRs are used to refer to China-specific items and phenomenon, so theymainly consist of nouns, rarely cover other word classes.2) in terms of semantic fielddistribution, they cover all the aspects of Chinese society. Culture-loaded itemsinclude those in geography, history and culture, diet and measurement, whileneologisms mainly cover the areas like society, education, economy, science and technology.3) with regard to lexical meaning, synonym is very often. There are twoor more English expressions for the same China-specific phenomenon.4) in terms oflexical motivation, six calque methods are mostly used, they are phonological calque,phono-semantic calque, literal translation calque, referential calque, morphologicalcalque and semantic calque, each has their own features in word constructionmotivation.5) considering the structural features, CSRs are usually bounded withexplanation information, the word and the explanation can change their places in thesentence with the help of some marks, like comma, brackets, hyphens as well as somemetalanguage, like or, refer to, mean, call, name etc. For those CSRs withoutprominent explantation information, extra background information is very likely to beadded.6) in terms of acceptability in the west, the westerners always hold a tolerantattitude towards CSRs, whether they are phonological calques, literal translationcalques, or even some Chinese abbreviations.Finally, the present study proposes the design of CSRs word-stock, based onmulti-dimensional definition theory and other lexicographical rules, for the purpose ofrepresenting the lexical-semantic features of CSRs, which can better satisfy thedemand of dictionary compiling, intercultural communication and export of Chineseculture.