Semantic Preference of English Lexicons towards Bahasa Indonesia-equivalent Words in the Lexical Borrowing

Iwan Fauzi

2018

Abstract

Needless to say that linguistic borrowing is a very common phenomenon and that no language is completely free of borrowed lexical terms. It is also noticed that languages vary drastically as to the number of foreign elements comprised therein. This study provides two finding remarks related to English borrowing in Bahasa Indonesia news contexts; (1) categories of semantic distribution are mostly borrowed in the news context. In relation to this, it is also to specify whether English loanwords give positive or negative contribution to a certain semantic field categorized; and (2) linguistic motivation of English loanwords towards Bahasa Indonesia lexicons which is to attest whether or not they are purely motivated by the lack of Bahasa Indonesia lexicons. This study used 1,000 English loanwords elicited randomly from the data corpus built in 2009. There were 3,538 English borrowings in the corpus in which they were downloaded from three online Indonesian prominent newspapers; Kompas, Koran Tempo, and Media Indonesia. The study comes to the conclusion that Indonesia news media actually had no reasons to borrow the English loanwords since they had their counterparts in Bahasa Indonesia lexicons. Of all 1,000 loanwords sampled in the study showed that the tendency of lexical borrowing in BI is not reasoned by the lack of BI terms to express the word-filled gap but it is caused by a non-linguistic factor; that is the preference factor of users to English.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Fauzi I. (2018). Semantic Preference of English Lexicons towards Bahasa Indonesia-equivalent Words in the Lexical Borrowing. In Proceedings of the Borneo International Conference on Education and Social Sciences - Volume 1: BICESS, ISBN 978-989-758-470-1, pages 275-283. DOI: 10.5220/0009019800002297

in Bibtex Style

@conference{bicess18,
author={Iwan Fauzi},
title={Semantic Preference of English Lexicons towards Bahasa Indonesia-equivalent Words in the Lexical Borrowing},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Borneo International Conference on Education and Social Sciences - Volume 1: BICESS,},
year={2018},
pages={275-283},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009019800002297},
isbn={978-989-758-470-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the Borneo International Conference on Education and Social Sciences - Volume 1: BICESS,
TI - Semantic Preference of English Lexicons towards Bahasa Indonesia-equivalent Words in the Lexical Borrowing
SN - 978-989-758-470-1
AU - Fauzi I.
PY - 2018
SP - 275
EP - 283
DO - 10.5220/0009019800002297