Motivations and Mechanisms for Lexical Change: the Interaction between Lexical Gaps, Analogy and Borrowing

Lexical Semantics has undergone significant changes in the theoretical frameworks that are most commonly used. In the twentieth century Structuralism became most prominent; this theory regards the vocabulary of a language as structured and therefore classifiable (Kay and Allan 2015: 35). However, Structuralism views this system as classifiable in a particular time

period: language change is seen as forming a whole new system, which is completely separate from the previous system (Graffi 2006: 183). As a result, structuralists are mainly interested in synchronic research. The research focus changed when Cognitive Linguistics gained popularity in the 1980s. Cognitive Linguistics acknowledges that drawing up strict boundaries between categories in

the lexicon is impossible and therefore uses the idea of fuzzy sets with core and peripheral members (Kay and Allan 2015: 26). Prototype Semantics also applies this idea of blurred boundaries to the different senses of a word (Geeraerts 1997) and brings in a diachronic focus to understand the genesis of more peripheral senses from core meanings. Moreover, while

Structuralism views language as a closed system, Cognitive Semantics recognises that this natural diachronic development of a language can be disrupted by language contact. My study probes the interactions of synchrony, diachrony and borrowing, and therefore combines a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. One such approach, which is coined

'amphichronic' (Kiparsky 2006: 222) because it goes around (amphi-) from synchrony to diachrony to synchrony etc., has been applied in phonology, but is not yet used in semantics. Taking an amphichronic approach will enable me to explore how the state of the lexicon of Old English and Old Dutch determined the lexical change that could occur and to trace these

changes while continuously paying attention to how these interact with the resulting states of English and Dutch. In addition, my study will consider the influence that borrowing as a disruptive force has on the synchronic system and therefore on the development of the language and the amphichronic process, which is often overlooked. As a result, this study will

be able to take a holistic approach to studying lexical change, making it unique in its ability to investigate the interaction between diachrony, synchrony and borrowing. I will use a comparative method in order to tease apart the role of internal and external factors. English and Dutch are closely related languages, which have a shared core of lexical

items. Moreover, both languages have well-documented histories of language contact. The microvariation between these two West-Germanic languages will therefore illuminate the processes of lexical and semantic change and the influence of language contact well.