ICOME6 Abstract

Elisabeth Tacho
Vienna
Email: elisabeth dot tacho at kstp dot at

The use of ME arīven in different text types and genres. A case study.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the process of borrowing of the AN loan word arīven ‘to come ashore’ and its subsequent effects on the structure of the English lexicon. The principal target is to trace the lexical and semantic changes during the verb’s transition period in Middle English by employing both an onomasiological and a semasiological approach.

The analysed material provides evidence that arīven was borrowed in the course of the 13th century and contributed to substantial changes in the structure of the English lexicon, eventually rivalling and replacing synonymous native lexemes, such as ME lēnden ‘to land’ or differentiating them in meaning in ME and EModE. After spreading rapidly and extending its meaning in the first half of the 15th century, ME arīven has remained considerably stable in its occurrence throughout the Middle English period. The current study will discuss some possible language external and internal motivations for the loan word’s increase in frequency by the 15th century, a period referred to as “the hightide of translation” (Sørensen 1957: 134; Drinka: 2006.) and will further examine the loan word’s relation to synonymous native lexemes, such as ME lēnden and comen to with the help of contextualised examples drawn from ME and EModE sources.

Since historical studies of language variation (Romaine 1982; Biber 1995; Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003) have shown that linguistic innovations are more likely to be found in speech-based genres, such as private letters or drama, the present paper will include a quantitative study of the loan word’s use in written and speech-based text types in order to explore whether this pattern of language innovation is valid for ME arīven, too.

The data for the current study will be drawn from the OED Online, the MED Online and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse.

References

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