📄 Loanwords and polysemy: An investigation of specialized domain lexis in Middle English

Summary

The paper asks whether French words that entered Middle English kept the several meanings they had in French, or arrived with only one sense. One sense is the pattern usually reported for colonial and modern international borrowing. Earlier work by Ingham found that general French loans in Middle English were mostly polysemous. It left open whether technical vocabulary behaved differently, since specialists may adopt only the sense their trade needs.

To test this, the author takes loanwords from three occupational domains (building, manufacture and agriculture) in the Bilingual Thesaurus, a two-language word collection covering ordinary daily activity in England during the Middle Ages. For each word, the senses listed in the Dictionnaire du moyen français and the Anglo-Norman dictionary are compared with the entry in the Middle English dictionary (MED). Most of the items turn out to carry several senses that mirror the French source. Domain-specialised lexis is therefore not monosemous.

The author rejects the idea that the matching senses arose independently in English. He concludes that bilingual French–English speakers were the agents of borrowing and copied source-word polysemy into English. This marks medieval contact as different in kind from modern loan situations.

Key points

• The sense sources are the Dictionnaire du moyen français (DMF), the Anglo-Norman dictionary (AND) and the Middle English dictionary (MED).
• The items come from the Bilingual Thesaurus (BTh) in three domains: building, manufacture and agriculture.
  • Examples include masonrie, joynture, temprure, assai, harneis, ferme and labourer.
  • An appendix lists items that were polysemous in French but not in Middle English, such as carpentrie, forge, cage and forke.
  • Senses not attested before 1350 are flagged in that appendix.
• The earlier general-sample study found that over three quarters of French-origin polysemes in the MED carried at least two senses of their Old French etymon.
• The comparison cases show monosemous borrowing elsewhere:
  • Swahili phathi (political party only).
  • Urdu press (to iron only).
  • Tunisian Arabic orange (the colour only).
  • Carpatho-Ukrainian dialect Zug (draught only).
  • New Zealand English pāua (abalone only).
• The proposed mechanism is polysemy copying (Heine & Kuteva) through a shared bilingual lexicon. The author treats loan polysemy as distinct from loan shift.

Interesting ideas

• I1. The study measures sense transfer by aligning the sense inventory of a source dictionary against a target dictionary entry by entry, instead of judging words as wholes.
• I2. The paper tests the intuitive assumption that technical terms carry only one sense, and finds it false.
• I3. To rule out coincidental parallel development, native speakers of unrelated languages (Japanese, Mandarin) checked whether the same sense pairs are lexicalised by one word. Only one pair (try/test) was.
• I4. Senses are filtered by attestation date (before 1350), so that later developments are not credited to the borrowing event.
• I5. The paper separates two processes: borrowing a word together with its senses, and a native word gaining a foreign sense (loan shift).

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (world): When WordNet, FrameNet and Wikidata senses are linked, each sense of a lemma could be aligned explicitly. The ontology would then record which senses genuinely map across resources rather than merging them by lemma.
• I2 (frames): Domain words in school texts and word problems should not be hard-wired to a single sense. Frame selection should still weigh their general senses.
• I3 (learn): Unrelated-language co-lexification is a cheap negative control. It can check whether an induced sense link or repair rule reflects real structure or something any language would produce.
• I4 (world): Compiled knowledge could carry provenance or time-of-validity tags on senses and facts. The reader could then avoid applying anachronistic meanings to older texts such as fables.
• I5 (back): The translation layer of the meta-world could model these two cases separately. This would help explain calque-like renderings instead of treating them as errors.