Lexical Borrowings in French: A Separate Strategy for Anglicisms

Paula Chesley ches0045@umn.edu

Linguistics Program University of Minnesota USA

International Conference on Language Variation in Europe Nicosia, Cyprus 17 - 19 June 2007

Chesley ches0045@umn.edu

Lexical Borrowings in French

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 such legislation Widely thought that these measures are to protect French against English Highly-charged, commercially successful, general-audience writings of linguists: Etiemble (1964), Hag`ge (2006): e Anglicisms are trendy and snobby No similar qualms about non-English lexical borrowings

The number of lexical borrowings from one language to another is a quantiable statistic that can gauge the interaction of two cultures We can discover more about this interaction by examining the patterns of lexical borrowings in a given language
Chesley ches0045@umn.edu Lexical Borrowings in French

Non-integrated lexical borrowings give insight into borrowing phenomena

In Metropolitan French, do Anglicisms constitute a dierent phenomenon than lexical borrowings from other languages? Is the rate at which Anglicisms are integrated into French higher than rates of non-English borrowings? Study Anglicisms in French in the larger context of non-integrated lexical borrowings (cross-linguistic) This approach will help us better understand the role of Anglicisms in French Quantitative and qualitative corpus study to measure the integration of lexical items into the French lexicon

Idea: tracking patterns of new words will give us insight into borrowing phenomena

Chesley ches0045@umn.edu

Lexical Borrowings in French

What is a (non-integrated) lexical borrowing?

Functional denition (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 are excluded.

Excluded examples

drgulation; calques like gratte-ciel skyscraper: violate (1) ee above week-end: violates (3) above Insta Pump: violates (4) above apple-pie glasnost (Russian, transparency within government) popiwek (Polish, super-normative wages tax)
Chesley ches0045@umn.edu Lexical Borrowings in French

Included examples

Gathering data

Le Monde newspaper corpus (Abeill et al., 2003): 21,560 e parsed, POS-labeled sentences, gathered from 1989-1993 Corpus features manual verication 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) Automatic search in corpus for non-native, low frequency letters or letter combinations, like k, , qi, etc. o 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)
Chesley ches0045@umn.edu Lexical Borrowings in French

Solution

Data breakdown
Language English Spanish Russian German Italian Hebrew Latin Polish Portuguese Total Non-English Total Types 92 12 9 5 5 4 3 1 1 40 132 Tokens 126 35 25 11 8 4 3 1 1 88 214

Table: A breakdown of borrowed tokens and types according to languages.

Chesley ches0045@umn.edu

Lexical Borrowings in French

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 can refer to more things, so they are likely to be more frequent and thus more likely to be integrated
Chesley ches0045@umn.edu Lexical Borrowings in French

Quantitative results
Figure: Cross-distribution of Anglicisms (left) and non-English borrowings (right) in the Monde corpus and the Figaro data.
1 2
3 4 5 6 Monde occurrences 7 8 9

Figaro occurrences 100

Figaro occurrences

100

10

10

1 0 0

1 0 0

2 3

7 8

4 5 6 Monde occurrences

Some more frequent non-English borrowings are rarely seen again Clear correlation for Anglicisms between frequencies in initial Monde data and later Figaro data
Chesley ches0045@umn.edu Lexical Borrowings in French

Qualitative results: sense patterns

8 polysemous Anglicism types (= 16 tokens) e (1) a. Ce bimestriel. . . visera les jeunes tudiants sous la forme dun news pratique. This bimonthly [publication]. . . will target young students in the form of a practical newsletter. b. . . . ca cest les news ici. . . . thats the news here.

0 polysemous non-English borrowings

Chesley ches0045@umn.edu

Lexical Borrowings in French

Qualitative results: cultural context

68 restricted Anglicism tokens, 57 unrestricted (1 removed due to unclear context) (2) Le Maroc a cr en fvrier dernier ` Tanger une place ee e a nanci`re oshore dont il attend de meilleures e conditions dacc`s aux capitaux internationaux. e Last February Morocco created in Tangiers an oshore nancial market from which it expects better conditions 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 perestro ka and glasnost referred to in former Communist countries
Chesley ches0045@umn.edu Lexical Borrowings in French

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 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 rst stages of use, Anglicisms behave more like core lexical items than non-English borrowings

Qualitative results

Anglicisms should be regarded as similar to native neologistic strategies in French, or as a separate, hybrid (native/non-native) strategy with multiple causes
Chesley ches0045@umn.edu Lexical Borrowings in French

Conclusions and future work

Corpus-based, cross-linguistic study on lexical borrowings in French Presents a semi-automatic way of determining foreign words in a corpus Establishes quantitative and qualitative criteria for determining the degree of integration of a newly borrowed lexical item In French, Anglicisms constitute a dierent phenomenon than lexical borrowings from other languages (at least sometimes!) Anglicisms are either like native neologistic strategies in French, or they are a hybrid (native/non-native) strategy Cultural implications of results for future work!

Chesley ches0045@umn.edu

Lexical Borrowings in French

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 franaise ? c 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 ches0045@umn.edu Lexical Borrowings in French

Example borrowings
Borrowing cash ow check - up citizen s charter classless society come - back cross borders debt deation deregulation discount downgrading int glass hedge funds industrial design lease - back lobbying Frequency 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 2 3 Borrowing stand - by struggle for life success story sustainable swaps teddy the top - down trade unions training groups Karenztag chapka ejido glasnost huasipongo
Lexical Borrowings in French

Frequency 3 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 9 2 2

Chesley ches0045@umn.edu

POS breakdown of data

Part of Speech Nouns Adjectives Idiomatic/Multi-word Expressions Determiner Conjunction

English 100 19 5 1 1

Non-English 84 2 2 0 0

Total POS 184 21 7 1 1

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

Chesley ches0045@umn.edu

Lexical Borrowings in French

Examples of written forms queried in the corpus

xxx- = prex xxx(-) = prex or anywhere in a word -xxx = sux (-)xxx = sux or anywhere in a word a a -ag -ah and -anh -arm (-)auf(-) ausbank -bar -betont -chen -chi -cional grund-gut -haft haupt-hen hoch-huan -ial -iang ich -ig (-)ijt(-) -ing -ism o -platz -qab (-)qe(-) (-)qh(-) (-)qi(-) (-)qs(-) -sai sch sf(-)sh(-) spr-ss -tad

Chesley ches0045@umn.edu

Lexical Borrowings in French