One name, two parents: The marketing potential of phono-semantic matching in China

Abstract

Phono-Semantic Matching (PSM) is a camouflaged borrowing in which a foreign lexical item is matched with a phonetically and semantically similar pre-existent native word. The neologism resulting from such source of lexical expansion preserves both the meaning and the approximate sound of the reproduced expression in the Source Language (SL) with the help of pre-existent Target Language (TL) elements. This paper analyses the marketing potential of PSM in contemporary China, arguing that PSM provides manipulation of the foreign term and thus controlled nativization of it.