The extraction, introduction, transfer, diffusion and integration of loanwords in Japan : loanwords in a literate society.

This doctoral thesis seeks primarily to establish a model which shows how loanwords
in Japanese evolve through a stepwise process. The process starts well before the
actual borrowing itself, when Japanese school children acquire a stratum of English
morphemes to which conventional pronunciations have been ascribed. This stratum
could be said to be composed of a large set of orthography-pronunciation analogies.
Foreign words are then extracted from foreign word stocks by agents of introduction,
typically advertising copywriters or magazine journalists. However, since these words
are unsuitable for use in Japanese as is, the agents then proceed to domesticate them
according to Japanese rules of phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and
semantics. The next step involves transference into the public zone, crucially via the
written word, before being disseminated and finally integrated. A few researchers
have hinted that such a process exists but have taken it no further. Here, proof is
evinced by interviews with the agents themselves and together with documentary and
quantitative corpus analyses it is shown that lexical borrowing of western words in
Japanese proceeds in accordance with such a model.
It is furthermore shown that these agents adhere to one of three broad cultural
environments and borrow/domesticate words within this genre. They then pass along
channels of tran,~ference, dissemination and integration in accordance with genre
specific patterns. Investigation of these genre-specific channels of evolution
constitutes the second research objective.
Three other research objectives are addressed within the framework of this model,
namely genre-specific patterns of transference and dissemination, when a word
changes from being a foreign word to being an integrated loanword, and factors
governing the displacement of native words by loanwords.