The semantics of word borrowing in late medieval English
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Louise Sylvester
Abstract
The paper presents a pilot study investigating the extent of sense sharing between loanwords in Middle English and their etyma in French and Latin, undertaken as part of a new three-year project. Fifty loanwords have been examined, with all senses in the borrowing and donor language(s) recorded using the major historical dictionaries. These have been standardised and mapped onto a framework using the categories of the Historical Thesaurus of English (Kay et al. 2022) to allow comparison. Our main results show that polysemy is nearly always mirrored but complete semantic overlap is rare; that senses unique to Middle English are common but short-lived; and that figurative senses are almost never borrowed into Middle English without the original literal senses.
Abstract
The paper presents a pilot study investigating the extent of sense sharing between loanwords in Middle English and their etyma in French and Latin, undertaken as part of a new three-year project. Fifty loanwords have been examined, with all senses in the borrowing and donor language(s) recorded using the major historical dictionaries. These have been standardised and mapped onto a framework using the categories of the Historical Thesaurus of English (Kay et al. 2022) to allow comparison. Our main results show that polysemy is nearly always mirrored but complete semantic overlap is rare; that senses unique to Middle English are common but short-lived; and that figurative senses are almost never borrowed into Middle English without the original literal senses.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Resurrecting rhymes, reasons and (no) rhotics 5
- Diachronic phonology with Contrastive Hierarchy Theory 20
- The life cycle of phonological patterns explains drift in sound change 35
- The diachronic typology of retroflex vowels 50
- Diachronic shifts among sound ideophones 62
- The classification of the Plains Algonquian languages 79
- Modelling combined linguistic and non-linguistic evidence in language reconstruction 94
- Dissimilatory constraints discriminate between variants in analogical change 110
- Patterns of suppletion in inflection revisited 128
- Differential object marking in early Italo-Romance and old Sardinian 150
- Semantic factors in case loss 166
- Morphosyntactic borrowing in closely related varieties 184
- Nominal privative suffixes as a diachronic source of verbal negative markers 198
- The emergence of oblique subjects 215
- Grammaticalization of sentence adverbs and modal particles revisited 232
- A discourse analysis of left-dislocation in Old English 249
- The semantics of word borrowing in late medieval English 263
- Approximative adverbs in modern and pre-modern languages 279
- The history of numerals as a history of East African languages 294
- Language index 307
- Subject index 309
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Resurrecting rhymes, reasons and (no) rhotics 5
- Diachronic phonology with Contrastive Hierarchy Theory 20
- The life cycle of phonological patterns explains drift in sound change 35
- The diachronic typology of retroflex vowels 50
- Diachronic shifts among sound ideophones 62
- The classification of the Plains Algonquian languages 79
- Modelling combined linguistic and non-linguistic evidence in language reconstruction 94
- Dissimilatory constraints discriminate between variants in analogical change 110
- Patterns of suppletion in inflection revisited 128
- Differential object marking in early Italo-Romance and old Sardinian 150
- Semantic factors in case loss 166
- Morphosyntactic borrowing in closely related varieties 184
- Nominal privative suffixes as a diachronic source of verbal negative markers 198
- The emergence of oblique subjects 215
- Grammaticalization of sentence adverbs and modal particles revisited 232
- A discourse analysis of left-dislocation in Old English 249
- The semantics of word borrowing in late medieval English 263
- Approximative adverbs in modern and pre-modern languages 279
- The history of numerals as a history of East African languages 294
- Language index 307
- Subject index 309
