Morphological creativity in a China English corpus

Abstract

With increasing numbers of international students from China at American universities, China English has become a matter of great interest and concern for educators. Recent studies have delineated characteristics of its grammatical features and lexical usage, but its processes of word derivation have been neglected. This study is based upon the analysis of a corpus consisting of the entrance-examination essays of Chinese international students. It shows that these students, though producing words that seem to deviations from standard forms, are actually using productive morphological-derivation processes and relying on sophisticated concepts such as analogy and parallelism, tendencies which should be encouraged in second-language learners rather than simply corrected.

Keywords:

• China English
• derivational morphology
• English as a second language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://www.iie.org/Who-We-Are/News-and-Events/Press-Center/Press-Releases/2014/2014-11-17-Open-Doors-Data

2. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/01/education/chinese-students-lead-foreign-surge-at-us-colleges.html

3. http://ahdictionary.tumblr.com/post/124237629428/weirding-language-new-parts-of-speech-added-since