Vol. 28:4 (2023) ► pp.461–499
When loanwords are not lone words
Using networks and hypergraphs to explore Māori loanwords in New Zealand English
Networks are being used to model an increasingly diverse range of real-world phenomena. This paper introduces an exploratory approach to studying loanwords in relation to one another, using networks of co-occurrence. While traditional studies treat individual loanwords as discrete items, we show that insights can be gained by focusing on the various loanwords that co-occur within each text in a corpus, especially when leveraging the notion of a hypergraph. Our research involves a case-study of New Zealand English (NZE), which borrows Indigenous Māori words on a large scale. We use a topic-constrained corpus to show that: (i) Māori loanword types tend not to occur by themselves in a text; (ii) infrequent loanwords are nearly always accompanied by frequent loanwords; and (iii) it is not uncommon for texts to contain a mixture of listed and unlisted loanwords, suggesting that NZE is still riding a wave of borrowing importation from Māori.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1Entrenchment: What to count, how to count it and what it can tell us
- 2.2Māori loanwords in New Zealand English
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1Overview of the Matariki Corpus
- 3.2Loanword selection process
- 3.3Computing loan co-occurrence
- 3.4Linguistic properties
- 3.5Overview of loans by frequency
- 4.Findings
- 4.1Distribution of loan types
- 4.2Standard network analysis: Pairwise loan co-occurrence
- 4.3Hypergraph analysis: Preserving sets of loans
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
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References
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.21124.try