The semantics of word borrowing in late Medieval English is a three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and based at the University of Westminster. The Principal Investigator is Louise Sylvester and the Co-Investigators are Richard Ingham, Visiting Professor at the University, and Dr Kathryn Allan (UCL). Dr Megan Tiddeman is Research Associate.
The context of the semantic borrowing project is a gap in our knowledge about the semantic development of words borrowed from one language into another during the medieval period. In historically focused accounts, loanwords have tended to be seen as being in competition with native terms.
Our previous Leverhulme Trust-funded project, Technical Language and Semantic Shift, found that in Middle English, which is known to have undergone large-scale borrowing from French in the period after the Norman Conquest, loanwords did not generally appear to drive native terms out. Rather, borrowed and native terms most often coexisted in the language thus providing a range of expressions for the concepts they expressed. Native terms and loanwords do not always compete with each other but rather may exist as near-synonyms alongside one another. This indicates a need to reconceptualise the semantic ecology of lexis in the medieval period allowing for a different kind of relationship between the vocabularies of the languages in contact.
The project is rooted in historical lexical semantics. Diachronic semantic research on the history of English has usually taken into account only the evolution of lexis in the borrowing language, without considering changes taking place in the source language, and most studies have concentrated on the subsequent sense developments of borrowed terms within English.
Our project pays attention to the development of loanwords borrowed into English in the source languages: Medieval Latin and French. Rather than treating English in isolation, it is investigating the ways in which words and meanings are shared between English, French and Latin in the later medieval period, addressing questions about how and to what extent developments in the lexicons of English, French and Latin influence each other.
A related strand of the project is a historical psycholinguistic focus on the part played by multilingual speakers in adopting French and Latin-origin lexis into Middle English. Bilingual speakers may have acted as the locus of language contact, and thus as agents of contact-induced lexical innovation in English. If so, their knowledge of polysemy in French would be expected to have favoured borrowing of more than one source-language sense into English. On the other hand, borrowing may have taken place: speakers who know more than one language to some extent but cannot be considered fully bilingual introduce terms from their non-native languages into their native language.
We are investigating loanword senses borrowed from French and Latin into English to establish whether or not these show the full range of polysemy of the source language word will thus provide a principled way to assess the level of competence of English speakers using French and Latin, and the way this relates to the borrowing process in later medieval Britain.