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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 44:2 (2023) ► pp.157–183

Maid in Cornwall

Social, stylistic, and cognitive factors in lexical levelling

| University of York

While the research literature on regional dialect levelling is substantial (e.g. Williams and Kerswill 1999; Britain 2002; Watt 2002; Jansen 2019), this process is under-explored and under-theorised when it comes to patterns of lexical usage. Using maid as a case-study, in this article I provide a detailed account of processes of lexical levelling in Cornwall. I consider the usage of maid from two perspectives, that of onomasiology and semasiology. From an onomasiological perspective, maid, as a variant of the concept woman, exhibits socio-stylistic reallocation, with attested usages of maid in this study being limited to older speakers in careful speech styles. From a semasiological perspective, two senses of maid, ‘woman’ and ‘female servant or attendant’, have undergone structural reallocation in apparent-time with maid ‘woman’ being the prototypical sense for older speakers but a more peripheral sense for their younger counterparts.

Keywords: levelling, reallocation, lexis, Anglo-Cornish, UK dialects
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Dialect contact and linguistic change
    • 1.2Dialect contact in Cornwall
  • 2. Maid
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Method
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 31 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.22013.san
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