Julia Schultz University of Heidelberg “Word-formations of recent borrowings from French to English: An analysis based on data from the Oxford English Dictionary.”
ABSTRACT
It is a well‑known fact that French has enriched the English lexicon with a considerable number of words since before the Norman Conquest. The French impact on English vocabulary constitutes the focus of many studies on the history of the English language. Yet French words and meanings which have recently been borrowed into English have not received much scholarly attention. Schultz’s (2012) monograph represents the first comprehensive appraisal of the phonological and semantic reception of twentieth‑century borrowings from French. The results presented in this paper are based on some of the data provided by Schultz (2012), i.e. on the body of twentieth‑century French borrowings which have become fairly widespread in present‑day English and thus belong to the core vocabulary recorded in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) dictionaries. The present investigation sets out to shed light on the morphological development of the various fairly common borrowings identified by Schultz (2012), concentrating on the different categories and types of word‑formations derived from twentieth‑century French borrowings. A close review of the linguistic documentary evidence included in the Oxford English Dictionary Online will make it possible to provide an accurate image of the word‑formations coined from recent French borrowings.