Abstract | The relationship between native lexical items and terms borrowed from other languages has traditionally been understood as one of competition. The Historical Thesaurus has provided modern scholars with the tools to classify vocabulary using componential analysis and to investigate lexical change up and down the semantic hierarchy. This study makes use of vocabulary collected for the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England, which has been augmented with more general terms and arranged into hyponymic levels. It focuses first on the lexis of TRADE to provide a detailed case study, and then draws on work undertaken for the Technical Language and Semantic Shift in Middle English project to present a larger dataset taken from various occupational domains. Results suggest that the relationship between incoming loanwords and native lexis in the Middle English period may be reframed more as one of harmonious co-existence, with the enlarged vocabulary providing the conditions for the early beginnings of lexical standardisation. |
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