Formal variance and semantic changes in borrowing: Integrating semasiology and onomasiology

Winter-Froemel, Esme

doi:10.1515/9781614514305.65

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…As mentioned in Section 1.1, a variety of algorithms, strategies and parameters have been created to answer the question of what should count as English. Inspired by Roberts et al (2021), we synthesize the methods proposed in the literature into a phased identification protocol involving three levels (see Figure 1): etymology, recognizability and relative markedness (Levinson, 2000;Winter-Froemel, 2013). A decision task on each of the levels results in a classification into four borrowing types, ordered on a scale from low Englishness to high Englishness: no English, unrecognizable English (UE), recognizable unavoidable English (RUE) and recognizable avoidable English (RAE).…”

Section: Identifying Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

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English from Scratch: Preadolescents’ Developing Use of English Lexical Resources in Belgian Dutch

Schuring

Zenner

2022

Front. Commun.

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Working within the framework of the socio-pragmatic turn in anglicism research, this paper adds a developmental sociolinguistic perspective in investigating preadolescents’ use of English lexical resources in Belgian Dutch. The so far largely undocumented role of English in the linguistic transition from childhood to adolescence is analyzed through a fieldwork corpus of 15,465 utterances, collected during sociolinguistic interviews with 26 (12 boys, 14 girls) Belgian Dutch preadolescent (6–13 years/o) respondents from a local hockey club. All English lexical material in the corpus was identified and categorized following a three-step identification protocol. This protocol introduces a distinction between recognizable unavoidable English (RUE) and recognizable avoidable English (RAE). Results reveal that, overall, 9.7% of the utterances contain recognizable English (RUE + RAE), with RUE being significantly more frequent than RAE. Our findings further indicate only limited stratification according to traditional socio-demographic parameters and display a number of outliers in the respondent profiles. Closer inspection of these outliers allows the conclusion that in the community of practice studied, English is an emerging youth language marker, typically used when talking about gaming or girl-oriented activities. In sum, we conclude that preadolescents in our sample instrumentalize English for incipient identity work, both on the micro-level (being a gamer, a soon-to-be teenage girl) as on the macro-level (through ingroup and outgroup marking).

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Section: Identifying Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A recognizable English insertion must finally go through the last step of our protocol which is based on the principle of relative markedness (Levinson, 2000;Winter-Froemel, 2013). This principle corresponds to the labels of "catachrestic (∼necessary) and "noncatachrestic"(∼non necessary) loanwords (Onysko and Winter-Froemel, 2011, cf.…”

Section: %Engmentioning

confidence: 99%

English from Scratch: Preadolescents’ Developing Use of English Lexical Resources in Belgian Dutch

Schuring

Zenner

2022

Front. Commun.

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“…By linking up to the cognitive linguistic approach, research into loanwords has started to shift its attention to a usage-based perspective on borrowing and quantitative, corpus-based methods. Recent papers that rely on large corpora, as well as sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic experimental methods, speak in favour of this tendency (Rohde, Stefanowitsch, and Kemmer 1999;Kemmer and Barlow 2000;Zenner, Speelman, and Geeraerts 2011;Backus 2012;Winter-Froemel 2013;van Meurs, Hornikx and Bossenbroek 2013;Daems, Heylen and Geeraerts 2015;Serigos 2017...). Examining the usage of loanwords and their semanto-pragmatic nature as a field that has been neglected in traditional studies, the cognitive-linguistic approach has made a great contribution, both theoretically and methodologically, to the study of loanwords.…”

Section: Pragmatic Functions and Classification Of Loanwordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pragmatic functions of anglicisms in the Montenegrin language

Đurčević¹,

Kostić²

2021

CLAC

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This paper deals with the traditional distinction between necessary and unnecessary loanwords as a problematic one because it marginalises the functions of so-called unnecessary loanwords. By adopting a cognitive-linguistic approach, this paper aims to highlight the importance of both types of loanwords from a language user’s point of view. To this end, we examine anglicisms in Montenegrin on the basis of a new pragmatic model which distinguishes between catachrestic and non-catachrestic loanwords (Onysko, Winter-Froemel 2011). Our study has shown that the pragmatic distinction of anglicisms is possible in Montenegrin, thereby proving it is unacceptable to divide them into necessary and unnecessary ones. The results also show that anglicisms do not always have all the characteristics typical of their categories, which brings us back to the cognitive-linguistic approach we have taken in our study.

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“…One of the most thorough discussions of the semantics of loanwords is provided by Winter-Froemel (2013). Following a usage-based approach, she tackles the issue of variance in the form of loanwords (ex.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using distributional semantics in loanword research: A concept-based approach to quantifying semantic specificity of Anglicisms in Spanish

Serigos

2016

International Journal of Bilingualism

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Aims and objectives: This study aims to redress the paucity of research on the semantics of loanwords, by extending and empirically testing Backus’s ((2001). The role of semantic specificity in insertional codeswitching: Evidence from Dutch-Turkish. Jacobson, Rodolfo (Hg): Codeswitching Worldwide. Bd, 2, 125–154) Specificity Hypothesis – ‘Embedded language elements in code-switching have a high degree of semantic specificity’ (p. 128). Approach: Adopting a concept-based approach to examine loanwords in a large, reliable corpus, the study pursues the following question: Do loanwords have a high degree of semantic specificity relative to their receiving-language equivalents? Specificity is operationalized as an entropy measure of the target word’s environment, the assumption being that more specific words have less variety in their surrounding context. Data and analysis: To test this hypothesis, Anglicisms in a 24-million-word newspaper corpus of Argentine Spanish were processed in three stages: detecting loanwords, selecting semantic equivalents, and measuring specificity. Findings/conclusions: A Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test revealed that loanwords receive significantly lower entropy scores, that is, they are more specific than their Spanish equivalents. The results suggest a possible motive for adopting loanwords when terms already exist in the source language, namely, to utilize words that provide more nuanced meaning. Originality: Methodologically, this study offers innovative applications of computational methods to loanword research, employing a distributional model to measure entropy. Theoretically, it addresses an underrepresented aspect of loanword adoption, semantics, by extending Backus’s hypothesis to loanwords and increasing its scope to data often viewed as ‘monolingual’. Significance/implications: The conclusions offer novel perspectives on loanwords with existing semantic equivalents, often viewed as ‘unnecessary’ when compared to loanwords that introduce new concepts into the recipient language (e.g. blog). With the notion of specificity, we may understand these loanwords as disruptors to the semantic system of the recipient language, dividing up the semantic space formerly occupied solely by the native equivalent, thus increasing the level of nuance expressed in the original concept.

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Formal variance and semantic changes in borrowing: Integrating semasiology and onomasiology

Cited by 12 publications

References 0 publications

English from Scratch: Preadolescents’ Developing Use of English Lexical Resources in Belgian Dutch

English from Scratch: Preadolescents’ Developing Use of English Lexical Resources in Belgian Dutch

Pragmatic functions of anglicisms in the Montenegrin language

Using distributional semantics in loanword research: A concept-based approach to quantifying semantic specificity of Anglicisms in Spanish

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