The French borrowings in the Oxford English Dictionary - A lexicographical, linguistic and cultural analysis.

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PART ONE 
Theoretical Background
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CHAPTER ONE 
 
Borrowing  
 
 
 
1.1  Definition of borrowing 
Studying linguistic borrowing has always meant finding the right definition for this 
process. It would be incorrect, for instance, to consider a borrowing every phenomenon of 
interference, since, if that were true, every single word of a language would be a 
borrowing. It is without doubt that, if we potentially went backwards in studying a 
language’s lexicon, that same lexicon would always constitute a borrowing due to the 
constant contacts between languages through the years, as Schuchardt stated (1925: 28). 
That is why we need to narrow the definition to the examples of this phenomenon that 
stand out more than the others, focusing our attention on the so called national languages. 
Furthermore, the definition of borrowing implies a historical relationship between two 
languages: in this sense, one language is dependent on another, taking some characteristics 
from it and molding them into its own. Fundamental for a borrowing is the mimetic 
process, that-is-to say the adaptation to a foreign model. Haugen (1972:81) stated that the 
borrowing is “the attempted reproduction in one language of patterns previously found in 
another” sharing Gusmani’s (1973:8) same view on the importance of a model. 
 “Reproduction” means, in this case, a new creation or better an imitation, since it 
really takes into consideration the influence of the model and the mimetic process. 
Imitation here is not a passive acceptance of the model, but it refers to the activity of a 
language that makes the effort of acquiring new models and being creative.   
 On another level, it has been discussed whether the term borrowing is actually 
accurate. If we consider that, according also to the definition found in dictionaries, a
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borrowing is something that has to be returned, we can easily see how the use of this term 
is inaccurate. In fact, in the borrowing process, one language takes a model from another, 
though without returning the model itself. In this sense, a borrowing constitutes a creative 
process as well, because in the language where the mimetic process takes place, the 
borrowing is, as a matter of fact, a brand new word.  
 Certain terminology applied to borrowings (as “transfer” or “importation” ) used in 
Haugen (1972) and Weinreich’s (1953) studies can easily lead to misinterpretations
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, since 
such terminology does not help in clarifying this process. For instance, speakers, in their 
effort to imitate an archetype, may even reproduce some sounds that normally are not a 
part of the phonemic system of their own language, but this is not a reason to define the 
process as “importation” of a foreign phoneme. If we do not have linguistic “t ransfer” but a 
mimetic relationship, it is important to classify a term as borrowing, how the creation of 
the lemma took place rather than what happened. The definition of borrowing belongs just 
to those lemmas that can prove that their creation has been inspired by a foreign model. 
For this reason, it does not make sense to identify a borrowing solely on its appearance. 
 Borrowings can become, in time, really popular for the users and a part of the 
language itself, up to the point where there is no other term that designates a certain thing. 
It is clear, for instance, that the word bar in Italian is a borrowing from English, but this 
term has become an actual lemma of Italian nowadays. That said, it is wrong to consider a 
borrowing as a foreign body within the language that acquires it, since to consider it that 
way we would have to go back to the history of the language and to the moment in which 
that lemma was borrowed, that-is-to say study the etymology of that word. It may happen 
that a borrowed lemma retains a cultural connection with the source language, but this may 
simply be related to particular register (slang or academic). Looking at the history of any 
language it is easily understandable how each language always makes up new words, either 
borrowed or not. Generally, the borrowing of a word into another language is a gradual 
process which takes quite some time. This might even lead to the result that borrowed 
words become ‘nativised’, meaning that they become not distinguishable from indigenous 
terms (Katamba 1994: 199). 
                                                           
1
 According to Gusmani (1973:17), the use of the terms transfer and importation in both Haugen and 
Weinreich creates confusion
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A very basic distinction has to be made between direct and indirect borrowings. We 
have a direct borrowing when a language takes a term directly from another language
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. On 
the contrary, when a term is acquired from the source language through another language, 
this is an indirect borrowing. 
Another distinction has to be made between the different kinds of borrowings. 
Borrowing is a blanket term to define many different types, since the speakers have many 
options when facing new elements in another language. There have been many different 
types of classifications carried out by different linguists.  
It is the studies by Betz (1949), Haugen (1950), Weinreich (1953), Hockett (1958) 
and Gusmani (1973) that are regarded as the classical theoretical works on loans. 
Weinreich (1953: 47) delineates a difference between two mechanisms of lexical 
interference: those starting from simple words and those from compound words and 
phrase. He defines simple words “from the point of view of the bilinguals who perform the 
transfer, rather than that of the descriptive linguist. Accordingly, the category ‘simple’ 
words also include compounds that are transferred in unanalyzed form.” After this general 
classification, Weinreich resorts to Betz’s terminology.  
Following the importation-substitution distinction, Haugen (1950: 214f.) describes 
three groups of borrowings: “loanwords show morphemic importation without substitution. 
[. . .]. Loan blends show morphemic substitution as well as importation. [. . .]. Loan shifts 
show morphemic substitution without importation.” Inside the category of loan shifts, 
Haugen delineates a further distinction between loan homonymy, “if the new meaning has 
nothing in common with the old,” and loan synonymy, “when there is a certain amount of 
semantic overlapping between the new and old meanings”. 
According to Hock/Joseph (2009), there is a reason that makes speakers decide for 
the adoption instead of the adaptation and vice versa. It seems that a high similarity 
between the structure of the source and target language as well as political and economic 
prestige are what make speakers prefer the adoption of a lemma, whereas a low similarity 
between the two languages together with linguistic nationalism, makes speakers prefer 
adaptation
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. Haugen (1956) has later refined his model following the one by Betz (1949).  
Gusmani (1973), on the other hand, opts for this distinction: 
                                                           
2
 The word omelette in English is an example of a direct borrowing since it has been taken from the French 
omelette, without any major phonological or orthographical change 
3
 see also Hock 1986: 409ff.
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- loanword is the term for the most faithful reproduction of the term
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; 
- loan-translation or calque shares just the model with the foreign language while 
the actual reproduction is made with indigenous elements
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. Loan translations go 
into the much wider category of loan formations which Haugen (1956) calls 
‘creations’. It has been discussed whether a loan formation is by all means a calque 
or whether it simply is a loan rendering, that-is-to say an independent creation. 
Loan translations and loan renditions have not always been separated, as Tesch 
holds (1978). More simply, it is practically impossible to detect the two categories, 
since we cannot know whether the speaker had a foreign model in mind or whether 
the lemma has been borrowed by chance. In addition, Deroy (1956: 222) holds that 
calques can also occur with idiomatic expressions
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.  
- loan-blend is a form in which one element is a loanword and the other is a native 
element
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. They are considered as hybrid composites as much as the phenomenon 
known as “tautological compounds” in Gusmani (1973: 51) where an indigenous 
morpheme is added to a foreign one, while the sense of the indigenous one is 
already being encompassed in the foreign lemma. An example is the English 
peacock whose first element comes from Latin pavo ‘peacock’). It is believed that 
“tautological compounds” exist because speakers do not remember the exact 
meaning of the foreign word anymore, as in Carstensen (1965: 265f.), Fleischer 
(1974: 123) and (Tesch 1978: 127). This can be a reason, but it is definitely not the 
only one. 
There is another type that needs to be added to this list and it is the semantic loan. In this 
type of loan, the lemma in the borrowing language already exists, but the difference is that 
it acquires a new meaning, an extended meaning that already exists in the donor
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.  
Myers-Scotton (2002: 239) distinguishes between cultural borrowings and core 
borrowings, which according to her have very different origins. Cultural borrowings are 
words for new objects (e.g. espresso) or words for new (non-object) concepts (e.g. 
                                                           
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 i.e. Italian bar from English 
5
 i.e. Italian grattacielo from the English sky-scraper 
6
 Old French Coment le faites vous? becomes How do you faire? in Middle English and later How do you do?) 
7
 i.e. the borrowed preost (priest) added to the native -had (hood) in Old English to produce preosthad 
(priesthood) 
8
 An example could be the Italian angolo that borrows also the technical meaning of soccer from the English 
corner
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zeitgeist), and they usually appear abruptly when influential groups use them. Core 
borrowings, by contrast, are words that more or less duplicate already existing words (e.g. 
OK in German, which replaces gut). Core borrowings “usually begin life in the recipient 
language when bilinguals introduce them as singly occurring code switching forms in the 
mixed constituents of their code switching”. 
If Bloomfield (1933: 480) observed that “a cultural loan […] may be due to a single 
speaker, more often […] it is made independently by more than one” it means that a 
loanword which encounters a certain degree of diffusion, that-is-to say it is integrated in 
the target language, does not come from just one interference act only made by just one 
speaker in an isolated circumstance. As a consequence, a series of interference acts take 
place thus differentiated on the sociolinguistic and diachronic standpoint: even though the 
replicas go back to their model, they can present distinctive traits among them, since the 
various degrees of the foreign language’s knowledge are represented, the different 
situations and the prestige of the donor. 
The more the loanword will permeate situations and environments in a less degree 
of contact with the donor, the more the varieties that that borrowed lemma can take, while 
it will be more likely the possibility of cross-contacts among replicas which were 
originally independent. It can certainly happen that one of the new lemmas substitutes, 
thanks to the prestige of the donor language, its competitors, so that it finds way into the 
target language and becomes “standard” in that language , but it can happen also that it 
takes a lot of time before the new lemma can become institutionalized. This happens 
whenever the target language is still in a non-standardized form, like the case of Old 
English, a language that was still evolving and was not a standard yet, when it came into 
contact with the French influence.  
It is possible for a loanword to be repeatedly borrowed, that-is-to say it may come 
from different acts of interference. This phenomenon is called reborrowing (Gusmani 
1973: 91, Haugen 1969: 394). The reason why this type of borrowing is considered as 
uncommon lies in the difficulty and the lack of means to reconstruct how the interference 
really took place. This label is sometimes applied without a reason. First of all, we have to 
say that an autonomous meaning of the lemmas is, generally speaking, a good criterion to 
avoid the improper use of the notion of reborrowing. Secondly, the model is formally 
speaking the same, but the two borrowed lemmas coming from that same model need to be
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considered like homophones, since their meaning changes. We can talk about reborrowing 
if a relationship among the replicas makes sense, even synchronically: if the shape and/or 
meaning diverge, we can say that there is no link between the two lemmas.
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It is now customary to use the terms recipient/target language for the language that 
acquires a loanword and donor language for the language that is the source of the 
loanword. A loanword can be defined as a word that is transferred from a donor language 
to a recipient language, and it should not necessarily be equated with “borrowed word”, 
because some linguists define borrowing in a narrow way that excludes the effects of shift-
induced interference or substrate (Kaufman/Thomason, 1988: 37ff.).  According to Ross 
(1991), there are two kinds of contact situations: typical borrowing and typical shift-
induced interference. He notes that typical borrowing is created by native speakers who 
consciously import a word from another language, while typical shift-induced interference 
is created by non-native speakers who unconsciously impose features of their native 
language to the recipient language. But imposition may happen to native speakers as well, 
especially when their native language is not their dominant language. In such cases, 
according to Ross, native speakers may transfer syntactic features from a dominant 
language to their native language. Moreover, in addition to importing words from a 
language spoken by a different group into their language, speakers may also import words 
from a language of their own group into the majority language, thus creating a new variety 
of the majority language that expresses the minority group’s cultural ident ity.  
 
 
1.2 Reasons for borrowing 
Borrowing is a synchronic and diachronic process, since once a lemma has been 
borrowed it takes time for the target language to absorb it and make it its own. In this 
sense, both synchronic and diachronic linguistics can deal with the phenomenon. In fact, 
borrowing is a synchronic process in the specific moment in which the lemma is borrowed, 
but also a phenomenon that influences the diachronic aspect of the language since it takes 
some time to the loanword to be integrated into the new linguistic system (see 1.4).  
                                                           
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 for Deroy (1956: 266), a new type of borrowing takes place because there is no longer a relationship with 
the lemma which had been borrowed in the past
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For this reason, when we look at the reasons for borrowings, we always have to 
bear in mind that this phenomenon does not happen overnight, like many linguistic ones. 
There are many reasons why a language like English borrows words from other languages 
and they can be mainly divided into: social and linguistic. The social factors that may 
explain the reasons behind borrowings are mainly two for Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 
65ff): the intensity and length of contact and the cultural and political dominance of one 
community over the other. 
 It is clear, in fact, how the more intense and prolonged a contact the more the 
speakers will develop a deeper knowledge of the language they come in contact with and 
with all its characteristics. Speakers will develop a sense of identity towards the foreign 
language. This is also the case of bilingual speakers who, by using a foreign element in 
their speech, underline their own perception of that element, that-is-to say they will give a 
connotative meaning to the new lemma. In this long process, speakers will start mastering 
new lemmas, but also phonetics and morphology of the foreign language, just because of 
the continuous contact with it.  
The second factor is prestige: people borrow loanwords from other languages only 
if they consider the language or object from which the denotation is taken as prestigious 
(Gusmani 1973). It is now clear how, the more the speakers perceive the foreign language 
as superior or culturally dominant, the more they will acquire lemmas from that language 
(Hill and Hill 1986).  
Gramley (2001: 24) holds that a great part of the prestigious terms in English comes 
from “languages of classical learning”, like Latin or Greek, even though not all languages 
have been prestigious for English at the same time. For instance, after the Norman 
Conquest, there was a greater influence from French, while Italian had a central role from 
1550 to 1650. Furthermore, if we look at the dominance of English nowadays, we have to 
underline that English gained more and more importance because of the political 
predominance of the United Kingdom at first, especially during the colonization period, 
and later on because of the political superiority of the United States. The cultural 
dominance and prestige is a consequence of the political one; human beings are more 
prone to perceive as culturally superior the countries which have more political power.  
As far as linguistic factors are concerned, there exist three: need (Gusmani 1973), 
frequency and formal equivalence (Van Hout and Muysken 1994: 42; Weinreich 1953:
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61). Whenever the speakers have the need to find a lemma to define an object, they recur 
to a borrowed word. In this case, the borrowed lemma’s purpose is to fill a gap for a non-
existing word.  
Frequency is how often specific items occur in the donor language. The more the 
frequency, the more the chance that those items will be borrowed by the target language; 
on the other hand, the more frequent a lemma in the target language the more of an 
inhibiting effect it will exert, blocking a possible borrowing. When two lemmas are 
formally equivalent in the target language, two solutions may arise: the two lemmas co-
exist and one of them acquires a new semantic aura with time, or one of them slowly 
disappears. 
It is important to underline how lexical items are more likely to be borrowed than 
grammatical items. Myers-Scotton (2002) holds that nouns are borrowed preferentially 
“because they receive, not assign, thematic roles”, so “their insertion in another language is 
less disruptive of predicate argument structure”. Linguists say, on the other hand, that 
borrowing verbs as verbs is very difficult. In fact, it has been said that verbs cannot be 
borrowed in French because of their inflection, so that it is difficult to replicate this 
inflection in other languages (Meillet in 1921). Moravcsik (1978) noticed that if verbs are 
borrowed, they seem to be borrowed as if they were nouns.  For this reason, structural 
incompatibility can be invoked as an explanation for the resistance to borrowing for 
grammatical items. 
 
 
1.3 Adaptation 
This regards the way foreign words fit into the recipient language. Each loanword 
establishes a relationship with the linguistic structure of the target language, that-is-to say 
it automatically adapts its structure to the new linguistic environment. We can find two 
stages of adaptation: integration and acclimatization (Gusmani 1973: 25). While the first is 
the process of the target language to adapt the neologism to its, for instance, phonological 
or morphological structures, the latter depends on the extent to which the speaker 
familiarizes with the new word. It does not imply any actual alteration on the structure of 
the target language and can be perceived just by the speakers of that language. Those two 
processes often work in tandem thus keeping their independence.