Semantic shift

Semantic shift refers to the phenomenon where the original meaning of a word or a phrase is modified through narrowing, widening, peroration, amelioration, or change.

The examples below from the ID show semantic narrowing of the word beef.

(116) a. (00:20:54) <r>Western food</r>. (En eh.) En en. <r>I</r> I like to go to the en <,></,> en western restaurant for the beef. (CS047 F, WUST)

b. (00:29:43) Er because such as last time I eat the beef, er with <r>blood</r> blood on a beef. (CS107 F, WU)

c. (00:34:24) <r>They just have the<//r> they just have fried chickens, <r>fried</r> fried beef, and <r>some</r> some others. (CS127, WU)

Beef does not refer to the flesh of cattle here, because the students in the interviews were invited to talk about western food and beef is not a typical western food in Chinese’s eyes. Chinese people do not go to western restaurants in China for Chinese dishes whose ingredients include beef. For Chinese people, steak is a typical western food. Therefore, it can be deduced that the meaning of beef is narrowed to steak. Instead of using the corresponding hyponym steak, the hypernym beef is applied. This might be due to the students’ failure to recall the English equivalent on the spot.

Another word that exhibits semantic change in the ID is remember.

(117) a. (00:10:59) Er from primary school to high school, er teachers just speak and speak over again, <r>and write down on the blackboard</r>, and write down <Ø -O> on the blackboard, and let’s

remember this and remember that, <r>and</r> and just for the exams. (CS048, WUST)

b. (00:11:11) Er at primary school, teacher only tell us to remember something or er <r>just er something just little thing<//r> just little thinking. (CS108 F, WU)

c. (00:30:24) because my teacher always say you have to remember the words from A to Z, and I will give you a dictation next week, <r>and<//r> and that week. (CS116 F, WU)

Where StE uses the verb remember to express having or recalling “a picture or idea in your mind of people, events, places etc from the past” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary

English, 2009: 1473), in the examples of the ID it emphasizes the act of storing of information in the brain, and in this sense, resembles memorize.

5.4 Summary

A range of features have been identified in the data of the reading passage and interviews. Contrary to previous research (Deterding, 2006b; Schneider, 2011b; Li and Sewell, 2012), we determine that an extra final schwa does not occur frequently in the WD. The most salient feature in vowels is the absence of reduced vowels. It is more likely to be absent in monosyllabic function words than unstressed polysyllabic words. The merger of long vowels and short vowels is more influential on /ʌ/ and /ɑ:/ than its influence on other pairs of long vowels and short vowels. Other distinctive features include consonant cluster reduction and the replacement of the post-alveolar fricative /ʒ/ by /ʃ/ or /dʒ/. The features identified in the data of the reading passage are tabulated in table 5.1.

Morpho-syntactic features identified in the interview data cover the 11 categories suggested by Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2004): pronouns, noun phrases, tense and aspect, verb morphology, negation, agreement, relativization, complementation, prepositions, adverbial subordination, discourse organization and word order. The features that occur relatively frequently include no gender distinction in third person singular, pronoun drop: referential pronouns, additional or optional plural marking, omission or addition of articles, include levelling of present perfect and simple past: present perfect for StE simple past, leveling of past tense/past participle verb forms: regularization of irregular verb paradigms, zero past tense/past participle forms of regular verbs and irregular verbs, invariant non-concord tags, verbs with -s suffix on verbs occurring with third person plural noun phrase subjects, absence of -s on third-person singular forms, deletion of the verb be, gapping/zero-relativization in subject position, optional use of to in infinitives, conjunction doubling, omission of StE prepositions, left dislocation, and double nominative construction. A complete list of the identified morpho-syntactic features is summarized in table 5.2.

In terms of lexico-semantic features, borrowing is mainly used in the semantic fields of entertainment, food and education in the interview data. Words of borrowing identified in the ID contain majiang, pingpong, chunwan. Words associated with food include jiaozi and chihuo.

Words that pertain to education comprise Gaokao and Putonghua in the ID. Loan translation is applied when something is related to Chinese culture and technologies. The typical loan translations identified in the ID include the Spring Festival, and lucky money. The words that involve semantic shift in the ID include beef and remember. The meaning of beef is narrowed to steak while remember is synonymous to memorize. Table 5.3 presents an overview of the lexico- semantic features identified in the interview data.

The relatively wide range of the identified features in the WD and ID indicates that a Chinese variety of English is probably in the course of developing. However, the relatively infrequent use of the identified phonological features suggest that the Chinese variety of English is far from taking shape.