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一：综述本课题国内外研究动态，说明选题的依据和意义As the society develops, English has become a necessary tool in today’s competitive world. Therefore, more and more people are being engaged in English learning. However, excellent as the Chinese learners are in the aspect of vocabulary and grammar, which, to some extent, are even beyond the native speakers’ capacity, they are still confronted with quite a few problems when they are talking with native speakers or writing in English due to the “new language” they use—Chinglish, an excrescence of standard English. Interesting still, there is such existent word as “Chinglish” in a lot of published dictionaries, however, it seems that this word is well-known between both Chinese learners of English and native English speakers. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out a study about this subject, because for one thing, this subject is not well studied abroad due to its region-specific; for another thing, Chinese learners of English are not sensitive enough to this kind of mistake that is troubling them since they pick up the English study. Therefore, it is quite necessary and important to write such a paper that English learners could raise their awareness of “Chinglish” both in speaking and writing so that it would be a lot easier to correct their mistakes of Chinglish in their language studies.
二：研究的基本问题，拟解决的主要问题。
This paper tries to raise the Chinese learners’ awareness of conquering Chinglish, discusses Chinglish in terms of definition, makes a tentative probe into different types of Chinglish on various levels, and puts forward some possible solutions in the end.
三：研究步骤，方法及措施。
Procedures:
A. Collect materials according to the selected subject from the library and the Internet.
B. Read these materials carefully and study the related theories.
C. Draw up the thesis.
D. Draw up the outline.
E. Write the research paper, referring to the opinions from the collected materials.
Methods and measures:
- Collect the mistakes of Chinglish from every accessible source.
- Analyze them and sort them out.
- Connect the mistakes with the theories I have studied.
- Analyze the mistakes from a theoretical view.
四：研究工作进度：
Mar. 14th—Mar. 31st, collect materials and pick out a topic
Apr. 5th—Apr. 20th, write an outline
Apr. 25th—May 5th, write the first draft
May 20th, finish the second draft
Before May 30th, finish the third draft
五：主要参考文献：
He Mingzhu, How to Write in the English Way, 株洲教育学院学报（综合版）， 1996年第一期
Joan Pinkham，姜桂华，《中式英语之鉴》，外语教学与研究出版社，1998.12
Ron Scollon&Suzanne Wong Scollon，《跨文化交际：语篇分析法》，外研社、布莱韦尔出版社
陈文存，《简析“Chinglish”》 ，四川师范学院学报（哲学社会科学版），1999.7
陈亚平，《复述：高质量口语表达的理想途径》， 《北外英语学院学术论文集》外研社，2005
何燕芳，《英语写作与“Chinglish”》， 广西大学学报 第二十一卷增刊， 1999
胡壮麟主编，《语言学教程》〔修订版〕，北京大学出版社，2001.7
六：教研室评议意见
教研室主任 ＿＿＿＿＿
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七：系领导审核意见：
1．通过 2．完善后通过 3．未通过
负责人：＿＿
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A Tentative Analysis of Chinglish
Name: Huang Pengxiang
Number: 2002051135
Instructor: Sun Lei
Major: English
Specialty: Cross-culture
Department: Foreign Languages Department
May 30, 2006
A Tentative Analysis of Chinglish
Outline
Thesis statement: This paper tries to probe into the definition, causes, mistakes on various levels of Chinglish--an excrescence of standard English due to the influence of native Chinese and finally, it comes up with some possible suggestions.
ⅠIntroduction.
ⅡTentative definition of Chinglish
ⅢCauses of Chinglish
A. Chinese people’s psychology
B. Speech production
C. Culture factors
1. Definition of culture
2. Ways of culture influence
a. Ignorance of culture-loaded words
b. Ignorance of idiomatic expressions
c. Ignorance of customs in culture
ⅣVarious mistakes of Chinglish
A. Chinglish on phonetic level
1.Confusion between voiced consonants and voiceless consonants
2. Addition of schwa after single consonant
3. Failures to pronounce some phonetic symbols with no equivalence in pinyin
B. Chinglish on vocabulary level
1. Unnecessary word
a. Unnecessary nouns
b. Unnecessary verbs
(1) Unnecessary verb + noun
(2)Unnecessary verb + unnecessary noun + third word
c. Unnecessary modifiers
(1) Obvious redundancies
(2) Adverbs of time
2. Wrong collocation
C. Chinglish on syntactic level
D. Chinglish on cross-cultural discourse level
1. Ignorance of different discourse strategy
2. Ignorance of customs
ⅤMeasures to avoid Chinglish
a)Imitation
b)Referring to dictionaries
c)Immediate retelling
d)Culture instruction in English class
ⅥConclusion
A Tentative Analysis of Chinglish
Huang Pengxiang
(Foreign Languages Department, Taiyuan Normal University, Taiyuan，030012, China)
Abstract: As the advancement of globalization, English is becoming more and more popular around the world especially in China. However, due to the inevitable influence of the mother tongue, Chinglsh—nonnative English existing in people’s speech and writing, is troubling Chinese learners of Englishin various ways. For the purpose of helping raising people’s awareness of conquering Chinglish, this paper discusses Chinglish in terms of definition, makes a probe into different types of Chinglish on various levels, and puts forward some possible solutions.
Key Words: Chinglish, cause, mistake
浅析中式英语
黄鹏祥
(太原师范学院 外语系, 中国太原 030012)
摘要：随着全球化的到来，英语作为一门外语变得炙手可热起来。在全球范围特别是在中国掀起了一个英语学习的狂潮。但由于受到本族语汉语的影响，学习者在学习或着使用英语的过程当中都不同程度地受到了一种不规范英语——“中式英语”的干扰。为了帮助语言学习者克服“中式英语”，本文探讨了中式英语的定义，尝试着剖析产生中式英语的原因及其表现，提出了较实用的解决方案。
关键词：中式英语，成因，表现
Huang Pengxiang
English 2002051135
Prof. Sun Lei
May 30th, 2006
A Tentative Analysis of Chinglish
ⅠIntroduction
As society develops, English has become a necessary tool in today’s competitive world. Therefore, more and more people are being engaged in English learning. However, with an impressive command of English vocabulary and good mastery of grammar as well as phonetics, which, to some extent, are even beyond the native speakers’ capacity, they are confronted with quite a few problems when they are talking with native speakers or writing in English. They usually make the foreigners confused by their speech or writing. No matter how they rephrase or paraphrase, the native speakers’ action will remain the same—they either shrug or shake their heads. Finally both of them have to end embarrassingly. What had happened to the Chinese speakers? Why the language they use sounds alien to the foreigners? To retrace the cause, I find that most of the Chinese learners’ mistakes are not made due to their lack of grammar or vocabulary knowledge but a “new” language they use—Chinglish, an excrescence of standard English. In order to make the English learners become more efficient in conveying their points of view both in speech and writing without being affected by Chinglish, I write this thesis paper tries to probe into its cause, mistakes of various levels and finally, I will come up with some possible suggestions.
ⅡTentative Definition of Chinglish
Before we get about our task, it is quite necessary to know what Chinglish really is. Actually, there is no such existent word as “Chinglish” in a lot of published dictionaries. However, surprisingly enough, it is well known between both Chinese learners of English and native English speakers. Thus there is a justified demand for a proper definition of this word. To be more authoritative, in the following, I will provide some authorities’ definitions in the first place.
According to Mrs. Joan Pinkham (1998), an experienced American translator and an expert in this field, defines Chinglish in this way:
Chinglish, of course, is that misshapen, hybrid language that is neither English nor Chinese but that might be described as “English with Chinese characters”.
While professor Deng Yanchang (1988) describes “Chinglish” as “speech or writing in English that shows the interference of Chinese. Some sentences may be little or more than word-for-word translation of Chinese expressions. Chinglish might be grammatically correct, but the choice of words or phrases and expressions do not conform to standard English. Although understanding might not be the problem, Chinglish is unacceptable.”
Though being defined by different authorities and in different ways, we can still find some similarities between them. Firstly, all of the definitions state that Chinglish refers to the language that is influenced by Chinese people’s mother tongue. Secondly, although Chinglish might be understood in some certain way, it is unacceptable in standard language use.
In addition, it seems that scholars pay more attention to Chinese learners’ speech and writing when they are doing the research. However, in my humble opinion, Chinglish may also loosely refer to Chinese-dominated accent spoken by speakers of English in China, though this idea may not be widely in acceptance or may only be gaining acceptance. Therefore, I try to provide my tentative definition on Chinglish from a comprehensive angle:
Chinglish, a portmanteau word derived from the word “Chinese” and “English”, refers to any poor, broken or Chinese-modified English uttered or written by native Chinese learners as well as a small number of foreigners who are influenced by Chinese. It is an awkward mixture in which ideas conceived in Chinese are ungrammatically or unidiomatically expressed in English.
ⅢCauses of Chinglish
Chinglish is not a personal problem; instead, it is an abnormal linguistic phenomenon taking place among a vast majority of people. Thus it is quite natural that we take for granted that Chinglish is caused by people’s nationality, namely, we are inborn Chinese and English serves us as a totally foreign language. So it is a self-evident rule that a native Chinese cannot speak or write natively just as foreigners do when they are learning Chinese. To some extent, honestly speaking, this point of view is acceptable. However, looking deeper, we can find some other causes that make Chinglish get the upper hand easily.
A. Chinese people’s psychology
During the long course of history, Chinese nation earns a high repetition of “inward grace”, which, in some way, can be substituted for another word—“modesty” or “shyness”. Such state of mind goes through nearly every way Chinese people behave. Despite its other effects, I mainly focus on this effect on Chinese people’s performance in English study.
Foreigners who go traveling or teach in China often find it a bit difficult to talk with Chinese people in English. The first problem they met with is that Chinese people have fears to talk in English no matter who they are—middle school students or college students and how excellent their written English is. Strange still, when the foreign teachers read their students’ essays, they were surprised at their English writing ability; however, when they were talking with them, they found their oral English did not match with their writing skills. On most of the cases, Chinese learners of English usually act as attentive listeners instead of eloquent speakers. Why it is so? That is because of their “modesty” written in their genes that make them afraid to open their lips to speak.
Chinese learners’ shyness, in my opinion, also influences the quality of their pronunciation when they speak English. Compared with English phonetic symbols system, Chinese pinyin, phonetic system for transcribing Chinese character, seems more “modest” than the former. In other words, English phonetic symbols, especially the vowels, are more open or exaggerating in articulation than they do in Chinese pinyin. For example, when some Chinese students pronounce the phonetic symbol// as in “apple”, “bank”, they will turn it into //unconsciously. Thus “apple”,“bank” have to be degraded into “epple”, “benk” that find no existence in dictionary. It is interesting to ask Chinese students to pronounce these minimal pairs such as “pan” and “pen”, “man” and “men”. This phenomenon will become more obvious if the word occurs in a sentence level, which will lead Chinese students to commit mistakes. No wonder some foreigners make fun of Chinese learners by stating that they cannot borrow a pan in abroad. Instead a cooking pan, the only cook they get will be a pen. Tracing the causes, we may find that there is no such sound as //in Chinese pinyin and also the “modesty” plays so that the Chinese learners are not used to speaking in a comparatively exaggerated way as English speakers do. They fail to pronounce it correctly especially in sentence level. For more details, I will discuss it in part Ⅳ.
B. Speech production
Speech production is very definitely a goal-directed activity, in the sense that people speak and write in order to make friends, influence people, convey information, and so on.
At a theoretical level, a promising start has been made by Garrett (1976; 1984). He argued that producing speech is a much more complex matter than it might appear to be from our everyday experience. According to his model, there are altogether five different levels of representation involved in speaking a sentence, and they occur in the following sequence:
Step 1 the message-level representation: this is an abstract, pre-linguistic representation of the idea or ideas that the speaker wants to communicate.
Step 2 the functional-level representation: this is an outline of the proposed utterance having grammatical structure; in other words, the slots for nouns, adjectives, and so on are allocated, but there are no actual words to fill the slots.
Step3 the positional-level representation: this differs from the functional level representation in that it indicates some of the necessary information about the ways in which words in the intended sentence are pronounced.
Step 4 the phonetic-level representation: this indicates some of the necessary information about the ways in which words in the intended sentence are pronounced.
Step 5 the articulating-level representation: this is the final representation, and contains a set of instructions for articulating the words in the sentence in the correct order.
For sake of simplification, we can generalize the theory and conclude that there are three levels of speech production—idea level (step 1), syntactic level (steps 2-3) and sound level (steps 4-5). On idea-level, people conceive the idea or concept they want to express and decide its sense and its content. In Garrett’s words, to find an abstract, pre-linguistic representation of the idea; while at syntactic level, people begin to construct the syntactic framework (slots) of idea. Then they will allocate exact words of semantic feature such as adjectives, nouns and so on and put them into the pre-set framework in the previous stage. Then they come to the last stage of the speech production—sound level, the speaker transfer the sentence matter into audible expressions so as to achieve the purpose of communication. This process of speech production can be illustrated in the following diagram:
Step 1 steps 2-3 steps 4-5
For English speakers, the most important part in speech production lies in the top level—idea level. Therefore, they focus a large share of their attention on this level. As for the rest levels, they con accomplish them in an automatic way. As for the Chinese speakers of English, they have to contribute their limited energy to every level, which, undoubtedly, is a waste of time in conversation. They do not have cut-and-dried framework in control, thus they have to distribute their attention in the lower two levels, which result in ineloquence and inaccuracy. In this process, Chinglish occurs.
Native speakers’ speech production Chinese people’s speech production
As the diagram shows, Chinese learners of English spend more time in the speech production, (symbolized by the area the picture accounts for, the more area it accounts for, the more time spent). When a Chinese have a conversation with a foreigner in English, in order to compensate the additional time they spent, they either speak slowly to make secure the transformation of ideas or speak quickly accompanied by unnatural stops and mistakes, the latter of which can lead to Chinglish.
C. Culture factors
1. What is culture?
As we all know, different nation has different culture. Chinese culture and English culture are no exception. Language, as a necessary part of culture, has it deep roots in it. Before we talk about the culture factors in Chinglish making, we should make clear in our mind what culture is.
Culture refers to the ideas, beliefs, and customs that are shared and accepted in a society. (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English 2001)
Culture refers to the customs and beliefs, art, way of life and social organization of a particular country or group. (Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary1989)
Different people may have different opinions about what culture is. Generally speaking, it contains three levels of content.
(1)Material civilization, such as architecture, dress and personal adornment, food etc.
(2)Institutional civilization, such as laws, institution etc.
(3)Spiritual civilization, such as value, way of thinking, aesthetic perspective, religion, philosophy etc.
2. How does culture lead to Chinglish?
Chinese culture has a long history, which dates back to thousands of years ago. Since we were born, Chinese culture had been written in our genes. Therefore, when Chinese people take up another language, they will take Chinese culture with them while they are communicating with others coming from another culture. As a result, when people learn English by applying mechanically the method recognized in Chinese culture, Chinglish occurs.
a. Ignorance of culture-loaded words
Sometimes, words of same semantic meaning vary in cultural meanings. Namely, a word with commendatory sense in Chinese culture may have derogative sense in English and vice versa.
Culture-loaded Words in Two Cultures
Words / Cultural meaning in Chinese / Cultural meaning in Englishred / Joy/ Jubilance / Violence/ Blood
white / Funeral / Wedding
blue / A color / Depression/ Vulgarity
yellow / Royal, Vulgarity / Timidity
peasant / Honest / Mean, narrow-minded
dog / Contempt / Compassion
dragon / Noble, elegant / Evil
moon / Reunion / Illusion
propaganda / Neutral sense / Derogative sense
When a Chinese learner of English communicates with foreigners, he should know the intended cultural meaning of these culture-loaded words, or else, he may make a fool of himself. For instance, if a foreigner told him that he was a lucky dog, which, however, would make the latter angry to death. For want of necessary culture knowledge, he would fell rather uncomfortable and think that the foreigner curses him. Actually, dog is a culture-loaded word that means compassion in foreign culture. Even the native speaker calls his or her child “my little dog”.
b. Ignorance of idiomatic expressions
There are a lot of idiomatic expressions in both Chinese culture and foreign culture; however, sometimes, Chinese learners of English usually translate Chinese idiomatic expressions literally into English with an expectation that the counterparts will understand it just like they do. On the contrary, the foreigner will feel rather confused by these literal translations in that they do not have the same expression in English or if any, the words chosen would be quite different. For instance, some of familiar idiomatic expressions in Chinese have to be modified so as to make them understood.（in the examples of this paper，version A is wrong and refined version is provided in B）