Paulina Ołownia Jan Kochanowski University of Kielce „The lexical field WINE in American and British English: A corpus‑based study.”
ABSTRACT
This study examines the development of the lexical field WINE. It is conducted on the basis of the set of lexemes denoting WINE which are extracted from the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE). The lexemes have been classified according to their origin and the results are compared with the quantitative distribution of the lexeme wine with adjectives denoting nationality. The source for the analysis is the corpus collection compiled at Brigham Young University (COCA, COHA and BNC). My study demonstrates that there exists a correlation between the origin of a given wine and the etymology of the lexemes denoting it. Moreover, the countries enumerated as popular wine exporters to the British Isles appear to correlate with both the adjectives modifying the lexeme wine and the etymology of lexemes in the lexical field WINE. Furthermore, the lexemes have been studied diachronically in order to verify the correlations among the dates of occurrence in the HTE and in the corpora. My analysis shows that there are some significant differences among the dates of attestation of the lexeme under investigation. The paper encompasses also an analysis of temporal trends in adopting both native lexemes and borrowings in the lexical field WINE, as well as a quantitative comparison between the distribution of the lexemes in American English and British English; the aim is to define prototypical lexemes for the lexical field studied and their frequency in both varieties of the English language.
Keywords: lexeme, lexical field, borrowing, lexicology.