A Contrastive Analysis of the Morphological Motivation of English, German and Chinese Words

1. Different strategies for introducing foreign items

1.1. English: adopt directly.

1.1.1. Eg: mafia /Italian/ => mafia /English/

1.1.2. Cause: in history borrowed extensively from many language

1.2. Chinese: translate

1.2.1. Eg: mafia /Italian/ => heishou dang /Chinese/

1.2.2. Cause: a markedly morphologically motivated; make out the meaning of a word through looking at the character/morphemes => loan translation

1.2.3. Loan translation

1.2.3.1. Literally translate each morpheme in a word or individual word in a phrase from the source language to its correspondence in the target language.

1.2.3.2. The morpheme or phrase borrowed: naturalized or partly naturalized

2. Ferdinand de Saussure argues:

2.1. German: the most morphological motivation => correct

2.2. Chinese: the least morphologically motivated => only applied to classic Chinese

3. Modern Chinese:

3.1. 80% of lexical items: multi -morphemic

3.2. Most of these are compounds

3.3. almost no inflectional and very few derivative affixes

3.4. almost no inflectional and very few derivative affixes