Article published In:
DiachronicaVol. 31:1 (2014) ► pp.74–105
Core vocabulary, borrowability and entrenchment
A usage-based onomasiological approach
It is often claimed in contact linguistics that core vocabulary is highly resistant to borrowing. If we want to test that claim in a quantitative way, we need both a quantitative measure of coreness and a method for quantifying borrowability. We suggest here a usage-based operationalization of coreness in terms of entrenchment, and of borrowability in terms of onomasiological success. Applying these measures in a corpus-based study on the use of English person reference nouns in Dutch, we show via a multivariate statistical analysis that there are indeed clear indications of an inversely proportional relationship between the success of the English nouns and the degree of coreness/entrenchment of the concept lexicalized by the loanwords.
References
Arppe, Antti, Gaëtanelle Gilquin, Dylan Glynn, Martin Hilpert & Arne Zeschel
2010 Cognitive corpus linguistics: Five points of debate on current theory and methodology. Corpora 5(1). 1-27. 
Baayen, Harald
2008 Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Backus, Ad
1996 Two in one: Bilingual speech of Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands. Tilburg, Netherlands: Tilburg University Press.
2001 The role of semantic specificity in insertional codeswitching: Evidence from Dutch Turkish. In Rodolfo Jacobson (ed.), Codeswitching worldwide II1, 125-154. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bednarek, Adam
2009 Studies in Canadian English: Lexical variation in Toronto. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Boon, Ton den & Dirk Geeraerts
(eds.) 2005 Van Dale groot woordenboek van de Nederlandse taal, 14th edn. Utrecht: Van Dale Lexicografie.
Borland, Colin
1982 How basic is “basic” vocabulary? Current Anthropology 23(3). 315-316.
Bowern, Claire, Patience Epps, Russell Gray, Jane Hill, Keith Hunley, Patrick McConvell & Jason Zentz
2011 Does lateral transmission obscure inheritance in hunter-gatherer languages? PLoS ONE 6(9). e25195.
Bybee, Joan & Dan Slobin
1982 Rules and schemas in the development and use of the English present tense. Language 581. 265-289.
Caldwell-Harris, Catherine L. & Alison L. Morris
2008 Fast pairs: A visual word recognition paradigm for measuring entrenchment, top-down effects and subjective phenomenology. Consciousness and Cognition 171. 1063-1081.
Carter, Ronald
1987 Is there a core vocabulary? Some implications for language teaching. Applied Linguistics 81. 187-193.
Chesley, Paula & Harald R. Baayen
2010 Predicting new words from newer words: Lexical borrowing in French. Linguistics 48(4). 1343-1374.
Dixon, R.M.W
1971 A method of semantic description. In Dany D. Steinberg & Leon A. Jakobovits (eds.), Semantics, 436-471. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Doğruöz, Seza & Ad Backus
2009 Innovative constructions in Dutch Turkish: An assessment of ongoing contact-induced change. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 12(1). 41-63.
Dyen, Isidore
1965 Lexicostatistics in comparative linguistics. Lingua 131. 230-239.
Edmonds, Philip & Graeme Hirst
2002 Near-synonymy and lexical choice. Computational Linguistics 28(2). 105-144.
Embleton, Sheila M
1986 Statistics in historical linguistics. Bochum: Brockmeyer.
Evans, Vyvyan, Benjamin Bergen & Jörg Zinken
2007 The cognitive linguistics reader. London: Equinox.
Everitt, Brian S. & Torsten Hothorn
2010 A handbook of statistical analyses using R. Boca Raton, FL: Taylor and Francis Group.
Faraway, Julian J
2005 Linear models with R. Boca Raton, FL: CRC.
Fischer, John L
1961 The retention rate of Chamorro basic vocabulary. Lingua 101. 255-266.
Fuster Marquez, Miguel & Barry Pennock Speck
2008 The spoken core of British English: A diachronic analysis based on the BNC. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 371. 53-74.
Galwey, Nicholas W
2006 Introduction to mixed modeling: Beyond regression and analysis of variance. Chichester, UK: Wiley.
Geeraerts, Dirk
1997 Diachronic prototype semantics: A contribution to historical lexicology. Oxford: Clarendon.
2010 Lexical variation in space. In Peter Auer & Jürgen Erich Schmidt (eds.), Language in space: An international handbook of linguistic variation, vol. 1, Theories and methods, 821-837. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers & Peter Bakema
1994 The structure of lexical variation: Meaning, naming and context. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers & Dirk Speelman
1999 Convergentie en divergentie in de Nederlandse woordenschat. Een onderzoek naar kleding- en voetbaltermen. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut.
Geeraerts, Dirk & Dirk Speelman
2010 Heterodox concept features and onomasiological heterogeneity in dialects. In Dirk Geeraerts, Gitte Kristiansen & Yves Peirsman (eds.), Advances in cognitive sociolinguistics, 23-40. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Greenhill, Simon J., Robert Blust & Russell D. Gray
2008 The Austronesian basic vocabulary database: From bioinformatics to lexomics. Evolutionary Bioinformatics 41. 271-283.
Haarmann, Harald
1990 “Basic” vocabulary and language contacts: The disillusion of glottochronology. Indogermanische Forschungen 951.7-37.
Haspelmath, Martin
2008 Loanword typology: Steps toward a systematic cross-linguistic study of lexical borrowability. In Thomas Stolz, Dik Bakker & Rosa Salas Palomo (eds.), Aspects of language contact: New theoretical, methodological and empirical findings with special focus on Romancisation processes, 43-62. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
2009 Lexical borrowing: Concepts and issues. In Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds.), Loanwords in the world’s languages: A comparative handbook, 35-54. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Haspelmath, Martin & Uri Tadmor
2009 The loanword typology project and the world loanword database. In Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds.), Loanwords in the world’s languages: A comparative handbook, 1-34. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Heggarty, Paul
2010 Beyond lexicostatistics: How to get more out of “word list” comparisons. Diachronica 27(2). 301-324.
Hock, Hans Henrich & Brian D. Joseph
1996 Language history, language change and language relationship: An introduction to historical and comparative linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Holman, Eric W., Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Viveka Velupillai, André Müller & Dik Bakker
2008 Explorations in automated language classification. Folia Linguistica 42(2). 331-354.
Hymes, Dell
1960 Lexicostatistics so far. Current Anthropology 1(1). 3-44.
Koops, Bert-Jaap, Pim Slop, Paul Uljé, Kees Vermeij & Dick van Zijderveld
2009 Funshoppen in het Nederlands: woordenlijst onnodig Engels. Amsterdam: Bakker.
Langacker, Ronald
1987 Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. 1, Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
1991 Foundations of cognitive grammar, vol. 2, Descriptive application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Lutz, Mark
2007 Learning Python. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.
McMahon, April M.S
1994 Understanding language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Onysko, Alexander
2007 Anglicisms in German: Borrowing, lexical productivity and written codeswitching. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Onysko, Alexander & Esme Winter-Froemel
2011 Necessary loans — luxury loans? Exploring the pragmatic dimension of borrowing. Journal of Pragmatics 43(6). 1550-1567.
Petroni, Filippo & Maurizio Serva
2011 Automated word stability and language phylogeny. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 18(1). 53-32.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum & Geoffrey Leech
1985 A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.
Rohde, Ada, Anatol Stefanowitsch & Suzanne Kemmer
1999 Loanwords in a usage-based model. In Sabrina Billings, John Boyle & Aaron Griffith (eds.), Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistics Society (= CLS) 35: The Main Session, 265-275. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistics Society.
Schmid, Hans-Jörg
2007 Entrenchment, salience and basic levels. In Dirk Geeraerts & Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics, 117-138. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2010 Does frequency in text instantiate entrenchment in the cognitive system? In Dylan Glynn & Kerstin Fischer (eds.), Quantitative cognitive semantics: Corpus-driven approaches, 101-135. Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter.
Skybina, Valentyna & Iryna Galutskikh
2009 Historical core vocabulary: Spring and/or anchor. On tendencies and mechanisms of language evolution. In Monique Dufresne, Fernande Dupuis & Etleva Vocaj (eds.), Historical linguistics: Selected papers from the 18th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Montreal, 6–11 August 2007, 295-306. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Speelman, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers & Dirk Geeraerts
2003 Profile-based linguistic uniformity as a generic method for comparing language varieties. Computers and the Humanities 371. 317-337.
Starostin, S.A
1995 Comments from Starostin. In William S.Y. Wang (ed.), The ancestry of the Chinese language (Journal of Chinese Linguistics 8), 393-404. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Swadesh, Morris
1952 Lexico-statistic dating of prehistoric ethnic contacts: With special reference to North American Indians and Eskimos.
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
961. 452-463.
1956 Some limitations of diffusional change in vocabulary. American Anthropologist 581. 301-306.
Tadmor, Uri, Martin Haspelmath & Bradley Taylor
Yeon-Ju, Lee & Laurent Sagart
2008 No limits to borrowing: The case of Bai and Chinese. Diachronica 25(3). 357-385.
Zenner, Eline, Dirk Speelman & Dirk Geeraerts
2012 Cognitive sociolinguistics meets loanword research: Measuring variation in the success of anglicisms in Dutch. Cognitive Linguistics 23(4). 749-792.
Cited by
Cited by 15 other publications
Calude, Andreea Simona, Steven Miller & Mark Pagel
2020. Modelling loanword success – a sociolinguistic quantitative study of Māori loanwords in New Zealand English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 16:1 ► pp. 29 ff. 
De Smet, Isabeau
2023. An assessment of the fourth law of Kuryłowicz: does prototypicality of meaning affect language change?. Cognitive Linguistics 34:2 ► pp. 261 ff.
Franco, Karlien, Eline Zenner & Dirk Speelman
2018. Let's Agree to Disagree. (Variation in) the Assignment of Gender to Nominal Anglicisms in Dutch. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 30:1 ► pp. 43 ff.
Geller, Ewa & Michał Gajek
Geller, Ewa, Michał Gajek, Agata Reibach & Zuzanna Łapa
2021. Applicability of Wordnet Architecture in Lexical Borrowing Studies. International Journal of Lexicography 34:1 ► pp. 92 ff.
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.
List, Johann-Mattis
2023. Evolutionary Aspects of Language Change. In Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines [Synthese Library, 478], ► pp. 103 ff.
List, Johann‐Mattis
2019. Automated methods for the investigation of language contact, with a focus on lexical borrowing. Language and Linguistics Compass 13:10
Morin, Regina & Damián Robles
2020. The differing behavior of loanwords in the Spanish of technology and of fashion and beauty. In Hispanic Linguistics [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 26], ► pp. 266 ff.
Schuring, Melissa & Eline Zenner
2022. English from Scratch: Preadolescents’ Developing Use of English Lexical Resources in Belgian Dutch. Frontiers in Communication 6
Smith, Chris & Jeanne Vigneron-Bosbach
2021. Introduction. Syntaxe & Sémantique N° 21:1 ► pp. 11 ff.
Smith, Chris A.
2023. Productivity from a Metapragmatic Perspective: Measuring the Diachronic Coverage of the Low Level Lexico-Grammatical Construction Have the N (Body Part/Attitude) to ↔<Metapragmatic Comment> Using the COHA. Languages 8:2 ► pp. 92 ff.
Smith, Chris A.
2024. How Is Stickage Different from Sticking? A Study of the Semantic Behaviour of V-age and V-ing Nominalisations (on Monomorphemic Bases). In Nouns and the Morphosyntax / Semantics Interface, ► pp. 445 ff.
Trye, David, Andreea S. Calude, Felipe Bravo-Marquez & Te Taka Keegan
2020. Hybrid Hashtags: #YouKnowYoureAKiwiWhen Your Tweet Contains Māori and English. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 3
van Tilborg, Arjan & Stijn R. J. M. Deckers
2016. Vocabulary Selection in AAC: Application of Core Vocabulary in Atypical Populations. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups 1:12 ► pp. 125 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.