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date: 05 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

After providing a general introduction to loan phenomena, which may be phonological, grammatical and syntactic, morphological or lexical, and commenting on the degree to which various different languages have borrowed elements from other languages, this chapter concentrates on the main types of semantic change triggered by language contact, and underlines the frequency of these processes. First, loanwords are distinguished from loan creations, which are new coinages made from loan material. Then pure loanwords are contrasted with loanblends. Pure loanwords are adopted wholesale, with little phonological or morphological change, while loanblends adopt only part of the form of a foreign lexical item. Loanshifts borrow the meaning, but the form is native. These include pure loan translations (calques), where the original morphemes are translated item by item. The more fanciful among these are called loan renditions, in which the translation of the foreign word is freer and less than literal. In semantic loan (semantic calque), a native word undergoes extension of its meaning on the model of a foreign counterpart. The second half of the chapter deals with the causes of semantic borrowing, and shows that it is often induced by formal similarity of cognates. In this section, attention is paid to pressure from the native language in second language acquisition, and the influence exerted on dialect by the standard language, or vice versa. The chapter ends with some examples of pragmatic borrowing.

Keywords: loanword, linguistic borrowing, semantic borrowing, pragmatic borrowing, linguistics, sociology of language, language contact, loan translation, second language acquisition, dialect

Brian Mott

Brian Mott is “Professor Honorífic” of the University of Barcelona, from which he retired in 2016. He taught phonetics and phonology, semantics, translation, composition and grammar from 1972 after three years at the University of Saragossa. From 2004 to 2010 he tutored on the Summer Course in English Phonetics at University College London directed by Professor John Wells. He has an MA in Spanish Studies (Aberdeen, 1969) and a PhD in Aragonese Dialectology (Barcelona, 1978). He has also studied the Mirandese dialect spoken in North East Portugal, and has published many books and articles covering all the above areas.

Natalia J. Laso

Natalia J. Laso is a Serra Hunter fellow in English Linguistics at the University of Barcelona. She holds a PhD in English Philology from the University of Barcelona and is also a member of the GRELIC-Lexicology and Corpus Linguistics Research Group. Her research is focused on two main areas: a) science writing and the main challenges that NNES writers face when writing their research in English; and b) the use of corpora in the linguistics classroom. She has co-edited the volume Biomedical English: a corpus-based approach (by Isabel Verdaguer, Natalia J. Laso & Danica Salazar. Eds.), published by John Benjamins Publishing.

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