1. Introduction

The paper discusses the increasing interest in contact-induced morphological borrowing between English and Chinese. It aims to investigate the systematic borrowing of eight English inflectional morphemes into Chinese by analyzing Chinese newspapers from 2005 to 2021. The study quantitatively scrutinizes the adaptation of these morphemes into Chinese and elucidates the mechanisms of inflectional borrowing from English into Chinese.

2. Literature Review

This chapter reviews the typological differences between English and Chinese, as well as the studies on morphological borrowing and the borrowing of English inflectional morphemes into Chinese. It introduces the eight inflectional morphemes in English, as well as the differences in grammar and orthography between English and Chinese. It then discusses the linguistic items containing English inflectional morphemes and the motives for borrowing them into Chinese. Finally, it presents theories that explain the mechanisms of morphological borrowing, including the Principle of Morphosyntactic Subsystem Integrity and the User-oriented Theory of Borrowing.

3. Methodology and Data Selection

This chapter details the database used for this study, the guidelines for selecting texts, the inflectional morphemes searched in Apabi Newspaper Database, and the corpus building process. It also includes information about the annotation of linguistic features, the adaptation of the English inflectional morphemes into Chinese, and the annotations schemes used. An inter-annotator agreement was measured, and the two corpora were analyzed using WordSmith Tools 6.1 and SPSS 22.0.

4. Results

This chapter describes the results of the investigation into the borrowing of English inflectional morphemes into Chinese newspapers. It was found that only the morphemes –ing and –ed were borrowed, with 2317 cases of –ing and 19 cases of –ed over 17 years. The linguistic features of Chinese bases bound by –ing and –ed were also analyzed, revealing three categories: Word, Phrase, and Empty Base, and their frequency distribution. The position features of the combinations were also explored, showing that 58.53% of –ing and 94.75% of –ed cases were located in the middle of sentences. Additionally, 15.88% of –ing and all –ed cases appeared in the titles, while the rest were in the content.

5. Discussion

The borrowability scale of English inflectional morphemes into Chinese newspapers indicates that –ing was most frequently borrowed, followed by –ed, while the other six inflectional morphemes were not borrowed. The linguistic and frequency distribution features of the Chinese bases adapted from English inflectional morphemes were primarily two-character words describing psychological properties. Moreover, the position features of the combinations of the Chinese bases and English inflectional morphemes revealed that more than half of –ing combinations were located at the end of the target sentences, and some appeared in the titles of target discourses, while no cases of –ed appeared in these positions. The User-oriented Theory of Borrowing (UTB) was employed to justify the mechanisms of morphological borrowing, as other theoretical frameworks were found to be less relevant.

6. Conclusion

The study built two corpora based on Chinese newspapers and found that the borrowability scale of English inflectional morphemes into Chinese newspapers followed a specific order. The category of Chinese bases adapted from exclusively verbs in English to various parts of speech, with both fixed and provisional patterns of adaptation. More than half of the –ing combinations were located at the end of target sentences and could be replaced by the Chinese word “中” without altering the meanings of the sentences. The study verified the systematic borrowing of English inflectional morphemes into Chinese for the first time and employed the User-oriented Theory of Borrowing to justify the results. Further research is needed to investigate the purposeful motives of language users for borrowing inflectional morphemes and to explore the possibility of borrowing into other recipient languages such as Japanese and Korean.