Onomasiological Variation and Change in the Multilingual Vocabulary of the Medieval English Manor

Notwithstanding the extensive treatment of lexical borrowing in English historical linguistic studies and the increasing academic interest in the multilingual situation typifying post-Conquest England, there still remain areas of the Middle English vocabulary that deserve further investigation from a contact linguistic perspective. In view of the conventional assumption that borrowing from French mainly affected lexical domains relating to the life and interests of the ruling elite, the extent of borrowing in the vocabulary connected to the non-elite strata of medieval society, and to rural contexts in particular, is relatively less well-researched. Moreover, scholarship investigating multilingualism in post-Conquest England has attempted to shed light on the medieval perceptions of language boundaries, consequently highlighting the issues posed by monolingual lexicography and advocating an onomasiological treatment of the vocabulary in use in late medieval England that takes the multilingual situation of the time into account. However, the multilingual lexis attested in the centuries following the Norman Conquest is still scattered in distinct dictionaries and an onomasiological resource assembling the three medieval languages (Anglo-French, Latin, and Middle English) in overlapping use at the time is not available at present. Drawing on recent approaches to post-Conquest multilingualism and grounded in the framework of cognitive semantics, this thesis investigates the multilingual lexis in use in post-Conquest England for referring to concepts and referents relating to the manor, one of the key institutions of medieval England. A trilingual thesaurus, i.e. a lexicographic resource addressing the three medieval languages from both a multilingual and onomasiological perspective, was compiled to assess the effects of language contact on this domain related to the medieval countryside and to fill the aforementioned gap in historical lexicography. The lexical items collected for the compilation of the thesaurus were drawn from the historical dictionaries currently available and arranged in hierarchically structured groupings on the basis of historical studies of the medieval English manor, with the aim of reconstructing the medieval cognitive experience. The results of the investigations carried out on the lexical material collected demonstrate that the effects of language contact on the vocabulary of rural environments were much greater than previously claimed in the literature. Firstly, they show that French- and Latin-origin lexis occupies considerable space in the domain under investigation. In particular, the vocabulary relating to manorial society was found to be considerably affected by the influence of French and Latin, while a predominance of native English items was identified in the vocabulary denoting locations. The effects of language contact observed in the terms referring to the various members of manorial society unveiled the pivotal role of manorial officials as major agents of loan diffusion in rural contexts of post-Conquest England. Secondly, these findings illustrate how the influence of French and Latin identified by scholars in the Middle English lexicon overall is paralleled in this domain from a diachronic perspective. Furthermore, they confirm recent studies challenging the traditional claim concerning a widespread relexification of the language during the Middle English period, as well as providing insights into survival in Present-Day English. Overall, this thesis aims to bring attention to areas of the lexicon that are still underinvestigated from a contact linguistic perspective due to long-established narratives and attempts to address the long-term need for a lexicographic resource that treats the medieval languages from a multilingual perspective.