Lexical Borrowings French Chesley Slides

7/31/2019 Lexical Borrowings French Chesley Slides

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Lexical Borrowings in French:

A Separate Strategy for Anglicisms

Paula [email protected]

Linguistics Program

University of Minnesota

USA

International Conference on Language Variation in EuropeNicosia, Cyprus17 - 19 June 2007

Chesley [email protected] Lexical Borrowings in French
http://find/http://goback/


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Lexical borrowings in French: why theyre important

Lexical borrowings: Anglicisms

In France, Anglicisms are of legal, public, and academic interest 1975 Bas-Lauriol Law and 1994 Toubon Law regulate use of

foreign words in France; France is exceptional in having suchlegislation

Widely thought that these measures are to protect French

against English Highly-charged, commercially successful, general-audiencewritings of linguists: Etiemble (1964), Hagege (2006):Anglicisms are trendy and snobby

No similar qualms about non-English lexical borrowings

The number of lexical borrowings from one language toanother is a quantifiable statistic that can gauge theinteraction of two cultures

We can discover more about this interaction by examining thepatterns of lexical borrowings in a given language

http://find/


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What is a (non-integrated) lexical borrowing?

Functional definition (narrow)1. The (approximate) form and meaning are copied from some

language into French; Captures psychological impressions of speakers about lexical

items

2. Native speakers of French do this copying;3. The borrowed sense does not yet exist in a French dictionary

(TLFi);4. Proper nouns/proper names including product names areexcluded.

Excluded examples deregulation; calques like gratte-ciel skyscraper: violate (1)

above week-end: violates (3) above Insta Pump: violates (4) above

Included examples apple-pie glasnost (Russian, transparency within government) popiwek (Polish, super-normative wages tax)

http://find/


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Gathering data

Le Monde newspaper corpus (Abeille et al., 2003): 21,560

parsed, POS-labeled sentences, gathered from 1989-1993 Corpus features manual verification of POS, including foreign

words

Problem

A lot of foreign words are not indicated as such (e.g. popiwek) And a lot of tagged foreign words are highly frequent in

current French and exist in a French dictionary (e.g. week-end)

Solution Automatic search in corpus for non-native, low frequency

letters or letter combinations, like k, o, qi, etc. Examine context around words with these letters since

borrowed words might occur in clusters Add any new letter combinations found in neighboring words

to list of letter combinations queried (103 total)

http://find/


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Data breakdown

Language Types Tokens

English 92 126Spanish 12 35

Russian 9 25

German 5 11

Italian 5 8

Hebrew 4 4

Latin 3 3

Polish 1 1

Portuguese 1 1

Total Non-English 40 88Total 132 214

Table: A breakdown of borrowed tokens and types according tolanguages.

http://find/


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Criteria for measuring lexical integration

Quantitative Want to determine whether the borrowings are random

occurrences, or whether they recur in other data Cross-check lexical borrowings in initial corpus (Le Monde)

against another newspaper corpus (Le Figaro) from later dates Le Figaro data: gathered from queries to online archives, 1997

to present Qualitative

Sense pattern of borrowings (monosemous vs. polysemous) Cultural context of borrowings (relationship between language

and culture of denotatum: restricted vs. unrestricted)

restricted: e.g., perestroika when talking about Russia unrestricted: e.g., perestroika when talking about China

Idea: polysemous senses and unrestricted cultural contexts canrefer to more things, so they are likely to be more frequent andthus more likely to be integrated

http://find/


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Quantitative results

Figure: Cross-distribution of Anglicisms (left) and non-English borrowings(right) in the Monde corpus and the Figaro data.

0

1

10

100

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Figaro

occurrences

Monde occurrences

0

1

10

100

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Figaro

occurrences

Monde occurrences

Some more frequent non-English borrowings are rarely seenagain

Clear correlation for Anglicisms between frequencies in initialMonde data and later Figaro data



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Qualitative results: sense patterns

8 polysemous Anglicism types (= 16 tokens)

(1) a. Ce bimestriel. . . visera les jeunes etudiants sous laforme dun news pratique.

This bimonthly [publication]. . . will target youngstudents in the form of a practical newsletter.

b. . . . ca cest les news ici.. . . thats the news here.

0 polysemous non-English borrowings



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Qualitative results: cultural context

68 restricted Anglicism tokens, 57 unrestricted (1 removeddue to unclear context)

(2) Le Maroc a cree en fevrier dernier a Tanger une placefinanciere offshore dont il attend de meilleuresconditions dacces aux capitaux internationaux.

Last February Morocco created in Tangiers anoffshore financial market from which it expects betterconditions of access to international capital.

79 restricted non-English borrowed tokens, 8 unrestricted (1

removed) 8 unrestricted non-English borrowings were either Latinisms or

the words perestroka and glasnost referred to in formerCommunist countries



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Discussion

Quantitative results Anglicisms are far more numerous than non-English borrowings

in French. . . . . . more interestingly, Anglicisms are less likely to be random

occurrences than borrowings from other languages Presence in initial corpus is a good predictor of presence in

later corpus for Anglicisms Not so for non-English borrowings

Qualitative results Non-English borrowings remain largely reduced in meaning and

anchored to the culture in which those languages are spoken These limitations do not apply to Anglicisms

Even at the first stages of use, Anglicisms behave more likecore lexical items than non-English borrowings

Anglicisms should be regarded as similar to nativeneologistic strategies in French, or as a separate, hybrid(native/non-native) strategy with multiple causes



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Conclusions and future work

Corpus-based, cross-linguistic study on lexical borrowings inFrench

Presents a semi-automatic way of determining foreign wordsin a corpus

Establishes quantitative and qualitative criteria for determiningthe degree of integration of a newly borrowed lexical item

In French, Anglicisms constitute a different phenomenon thanlexical borrowings from other languages (at least sometimes!)

Anglicisms are either like native neologistic strategies inFrench, or they are a hybrid (native/non-native) strategy

Cultural implications of results for future work!



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Further reading

R. H. Baayen and A. Renouf.

Chronicling the Times: Productive Lexical Innovations in an English

Newspaper.

Language, 72:6996, 1996.

R. Etiemble.

Parlez-vous franglais ?

Editions Flammarion, Paris, 1991.M. Pergnier.

Les anglicismes: danger ou enrichissement pour la langue francaise ?

Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1989.

M.D. Picone.

Anglicisms, Neologisms, and Dynamic French.

John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1996.

S.G. Thomason.

Language Contact.

Georgetown UP, Washington, D.C., 2001.Chesley [email protected] Lexical Borrowings in French


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Example borrowings

Borrowing Frequency Borrowing Frequency

cash flow 2 stand - by 3check - up 1 struggle for life 1citizen s charter 1 success story 2classless society 1 sustainable 1come - back 1 swaps 1

cross borders 1 teddy 1debt deflation 1 the 1deregulation 1 top - down 1discount 1 trade unions 1downgrading 1 training groups 1

flint glass 1 Karenztag 2hedge funds 3 chapka 1industrial design 1 ejido 9lease - back 2 glasnost 2lobbying 3 huasipongo 2


POS b kd f d


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POS breakdown of data

Part of Speech English Non-English Total POS

Nouns 100 84 184

Adjectives 19 2 21

Idiomatic/Multi-word Expressions 5 2 7Determiner 1 0 1

Conjunction 1 0 1

Table: A breakdown of part of speech tokens according to languages.


E l f i f i d i h


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Examples of written forms queried in the corpus

xxx- = prefixxxx(-) = prefix or anywhere in a word

-xxx = suffix(-)xxx = suffix or anywhere in a word

a grund- oa -gut -platz-ag -haft -qab-ah haupt- (-)qe(-)and -hen (-)qh(-)-anh hoch- (-)qi(-)-arm -huan (-)qs(-)(-)auf(-) -saiaus- -ial sch

bank -iang sf--bar ich (-)sh(-)-betont -ig spr--chen (-)ijt(-) -ss-chi -ing -cional -ism -tad


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Lexical Borrowings French Chesley Slides