Predicting new words from newer words: Lexical borrowings in French

Paula Chesley; R. Harald Baayen

doi:10.1515/ling.2010.043

Article

Predicting new words from newer words: Lexical borrowings in French

Paula Chesley and R. Harald Baayen

Published/Copyright: November 4, 2010

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From the journal Volume 48 Issue 6

Abstract

This study addresses entrenchment into the lexicon of lexical borrowings. We search for all new lexical borrowings in a corpus of French newspaper texts and examine the frequency with which these borrowings reoccur in a second corpus of newspaper texts from about 10 years later. Lexical entrenchment emerges as depending on a variety of factors, including length in syllables, the original language of the borrowing, and also semantic and contextual factors. The dispersion of a word in the early corpus is found to be a better predictor of its frequency in the later corpus than its frequency, but both measures contribute to predicting the degree of entrenchment of a lexical item. The interaction between these two variables implies that borrowings are penalized for their burstiness.

Correspondence address: Paula Chesley, Institute of Linguistics, University of Minnesota, 214 Nolte Center, 315 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Received: 2009-07-30

Revised: 2010-01-08

Published Online: 2010-11-04

Published in Print: 2010-November

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DOI: doi.org/10.1515/ling.2010.043