Japan's Built-in Lexicon of English-based Loanwords

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Multilingual Matters, 2008 - Foreign Language Study - 185 pages
This book is a valuable contribution to SLA research. Apart from the obvious target of the book, SLA researchers and teachers anywhere in the world, it will be of particular interest to the Japanese community and to Westerners interested in Japanese language and culture. It is not easy to write a book appealing to audiences as disparate as this, but Daulton has managed to do this very well. He writes clearly and lucidly and makes good use of his teaching experience in Japan (Hakan Ringbom, Abo Akademi University). Japan offers a prime example of lexical borrowing which relates to language transfer in second and foreign language learning. The insights gained by examining language borrowing in Japan can be applied wherever language contact has occurred and foreign languages are learned.Many of the most important English vocabulary may already exist in native lexicons. This pioneering book examines Japanese lexical borrowing, clarifies the effect of cognates on foreign language acquisition, assesses Japanese cognates that correspond to high-frequency and academic English, and discusses using this resource in teaching. It includes extensive lists of loanword cognates.
 

Contents

The Assimilation of English into Japanese
9
The Similarity of 3K Sampled Borrowed
22
Resolving the Paradox of Cognates
43
The Effect of Loanwords in Japanese on
61
Common Loanword Cognates for Highfrequency
77
Quantifying the Overlap and Quality
87
Barriers to Accessing Cognates
101
Extending Word Knowledge Within Word Families
110
Epilogue
123
The Standard Set of Katakana
131
Academic Borrowed Words
156
References
173
Index
183
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About the author (2008)

Frank E. Daulton is an Associate Professor at Ryukoku University in Kyoto. Born in the United States, he has taught EFL in Japan for nearly two decades. His academic interests include vocabulary acquisition and language transfer. He holds degrees in Journalism (University of Missouri) and Education (Temple University). And in 2004, he completed his doctorate in Applied Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington under vocabulary expert Paul Nation. He resides on the shore of Lake Biwa with his wife and three children.

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