Prototype effects behind French loans in middle English: a cognitive account of lexical borrowing

It is a well-established fact that the Norman Conquest profoundly transformed the English society and had a significant impact on the course of evolution of its language. As a result of the peculiar situation of English, French and Latin trilingualism in medieval England, Middle English displayed a reorientation of its strategies for word creation, by increasingly relying on lexical borrowing. The presence of Romance-derived loanwords thus introduced some degree of onomasiological variation into the language, so that the coexistence of native and foreign lexical resources would eventually become a recurring feature of Middle English. Within this well-researched area, the prototype aim of this paper is to explore the contribution of Cognitive Semantics, and more specifically of prototype theory, to French lexical borrowing, and to investigate the many ways in which may help account for the integration of loanwords into the English lexicon – or conversely, for the retention of native vocabulary. First of all, the substitution of cultural models made for rather swift changes into the lexicon, as loanwords were introduced to better reflect the new cultural prototypes. Prototypicality can also work both within lexical categories at the prototypicality intensional level, as a differentiating factor between near-synonyms, and across categories at the extensional level, in the restructuration of category members around an onomasiologically salient concept. The objective of this paper is thus to show how prototypicality comes into play at various levels in processes of semantic change, and how prototype theory can therefore be deemed a relevant framework for the analysis of loanwords.