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Linguistics and Literary History: In honour of Sylvia Adamson
Edited by Anita Auer, Victorina González-Díaz, Jane Hodson and Violeta Sotirova
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 25] 2016
► pp. 71–86

Chapter 4. Borrowing and copy

A philological approach to Early Modern English lexicology

| Oxford English Dictionary
| University College London

Adamson (1999) demonstrates the importance of “copy” (copia) as a motivation for lexical borrowing in early modern English. Our paper will take this observation as its starting point. Using data from the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary to gain an overview of the available words realizing a given concept, we will investigate the evidence for the use of each of these words in the sixteenth century, as recorded in early books that can be accessed via Early English Books Online (EEBO). Our study will investigate how far certain words are confined to particular registers, and how far spread between registers can be detected using these resources. It will also examine how far we can identify diachronically what was the “usual” word realizing a particular meaning, what were its marked synonyms, and how these words interacted semantically.

Published online: 20 October 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.25.05dur
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

DURKIN, PHILIP
2018. Exploring the penetration of loanwords in the core vocabulary of Middle English:carryas a test case. English Language and Linguistics 22:2 ► pp. 265 ff. DOI logo
Ho-Cheong Leung, Alex & Wim van der Wurff
2018. Chapter 6. Anaphoric reference in Early Modern English. In The Noun Phrase in English [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 246], ► pp. 143 ff. DOI logo
Sylvester, Louise, Megan Tiddeman & Richard Ingham
2022. Semantic Shift in Middle English: Farming and Trade As Test Cases. Transactions of the Philological Society 120:3 ► pp. 427 ff. DOI logo

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