Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses the problem of Irwin's classification of loanword compounds in Contemporary Japanese focusing on English origin loanword compounds, and investigates the influence of the donor language morphological and syntactic patterns (English in this research) on Japanese word formation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the problem of Irwin's classification of loanword compounds in Contemporary Japanese focusing on English origin loanword compounds, and investigates the influence of the donor language morphological and syntactic patterns (English in this research) on Japanese word formation.

Compounding in Japanese is a phenomena found in all lexical strata, such as native words (wago), Sino-Japanese (kango), mimetic and foreign (gairaigo). As Frellesvig (2010) mentions the extensive contact with cultures and languages other than Portuguese and Dutch that started in Meiji period in Japan led to the numerous loanwords from a number of European languages, English being a dominating donor language. As a result in addition to native and Sino-Japanese compounds, Japanese has acquired a layer of loanword or gairaigo compounds. However, etymologically not all loanword compounds were compounds in the donor language - English. Tracing back to the donor languages shows that some words were originally simple words later on assembled into compounds in Japanese, while others were compounds or even phrases. Irwin (2011:143) differentiates between two types of loanword compounds: imported and assembled. Imported compounds are the compounds 'borrowed directly from a donor language', while assembled compounds are the compounds 'created in Japan from two independent gairaigo'. However, in the present research we argue that Irwin's classification is not complete. Japanese actively borrows not only simple words or compounds, but also English collocations, such as 'hot coffee' or 'long hair' are also being borrowed into Japanese. Therefore, we suggest that Irwin's classification can be extended to include collocation-based gairaigo compounds, such as hottokoohii 'hot coffee' and ronguhea 'long hair' in order to better explain Japanese word formation processes.

References:

1. Frellesvig, B. (2010). A history of the Japanese language. Cambridge University Press.

2. Irwin, M. (2011). Loanwords in Japanese. John Benjamins Publishing.