Chapter title | The semantics of word borrowing in late medieval English: A preliminary investigation |
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Authors | Sylvester, Louise, Tiddeman, Megan, Ingham, Richard and Allan, Kathryn |
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Editors | Kennard, H., Lindsay-Smith, E., Lahiri, A. and Maiden, M. |
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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. |
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Book title | Historical Linguistics 2022: Selected papers from the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oxford, 1–5 August 2022 |
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Page range | 263-278 |
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Year | 2025 |
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Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company |
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Publication dates |
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Published online | 20 Mar 2025 |
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Published in print | 07 Apr 2025 |
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ISBN | 9789027219176 |
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| 9789027246219 |
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ISSN | 0304-0763 |
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Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.369.17syl |
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File | File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |
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Journal | Current Issues in Linguistic Theory |
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