A Språkforum talk by Professor Louise Sylvester, University of Westminster.
Abstract
This talk presents research re-examining the scholarly and textbooks accounts of the effects of the influx of French terms into English following the Norman Conquest. We deployed extensive datasets of lexical items classified into semantic hierarchies to investigate the idea that native terms were overwhelmingly replaced by words of French or Latin origin (Schendl 2000; Trotter 2017); to look again at narratives about the effects on the native vocabulary, such as narrowing and broadening (Durkin 2014; Kay & Allan 2015); and to test the suggestion that French borrowings in Middle English provide a technical vocabulary (Serjeantson 1935; Prins 1941). Our work shows that native terms rarely undergo semantic shift because of competition from loanwords and tend not to become obsolescent in the medieval period (Sylvester 2018; Sylvester et al 2022a; Sylvester et al. 2022b; Sylvester et al. 2025). We also found that French terms tend to cluster at the higher levels of the semantic hierarchy rather than at the most specific, technical levels (Sylvester et al. 2020; Sylvester et al. 2025). We investigate the extent of the semantic integration of loanwords and generally find co-existence between native and borrowed terms occupying the same semantic spaces, and the kind of polysemous borrowing that is generally only seen in situations of intense language contact and high levels of bilingualism (Sylvester & Tiddeman 2023; Sylvester et al. 2025). Finally, the possibility that late medieval English was enriching its vocabulary as a precursor to standardization, and that as part of this we may be able to trace register variation in this period is considered.
Bio
Louise Sylvester is Professor in English Language at the University of Westminster, London. Her research focusses on the vocabulary and multilingual textual culture of medieval England. She has led several research projects on the vocabulary of medieval clothes and clothing and was the co-compiler of a Bilingual Thesaurus of English and Anglo-Norman. She recently led an AHRC-funded three-year project on ‘Technical language and semantic shift in Middle English’. Drawing on this project, a new book volume, Language Contact and Semantic Development in Late Medieval English, was published this autumn by De Gruyter Mouton.
References
Durkin, Philip. 2014. Borrowed Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kay, Christian and Kathryn Allan. 2015. English Historical Semantics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Prins, A. A. 1941, 1942. On the loss and substitution of words in Middle English. Neophilologus 26. 280–298; 27. 49–59.
Schendl, Herbert. 2000. Linguistic aspects of code-switching in medieval English texts. In David Trotter (ed.), Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, 77–92. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.
Serjeantson, Mary S. 1935. A History of Foreign Words in English. London: Kegan Paul.
Sylvester, Louise. 2018a. Contact effects on the technical lexis of Middle English: A semantic hierarchic approach. English Language and Linguistics 22(2). 249–264.
Sylvester, Louise, Megan Tiddeman, & Richard Ingham. 2020. An analysis of French borrowings at the hypernymic and hyponymic levels of Middle English. Lexis: Journal of English Lexicology 16. 1–32.
Sylvester, Louise, Megan Tiddeman, & Richard Ingham. 2022a. Semantic shift in Middle English: FARMING and TRADE as test cases. Transactions of the Philological Society 120(3). 427–446.
Sylvester Louise, Megan Tiddeman, & Richard Ingham. 2022b. Lexical borrowing in the Middle English period: A multi-domain analysis of semantic outcomes. English Language and Linguistics 26(2). 237–261.
Sylvester, Louise & Megan Tiddeman. 2023. Reframing the interaction between native terms and loanwords: Some data from occupational domains in Middle English. In Sara Pons-Sanz & Louise Sylvester (eds.), Medieval English in a Multilingual Context: Current Methodologies and Approaches, 159–186. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Trotter, David. 2017. Middle English creolization. In Laurel J. Brinton & Alexander Bergs (eds.), The History of English. Volume 3: Middle English, 224–238. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.