When a Lexical Borrowing Becomes an Ideological Tool: The Case of Saint Erkenwald Letizia Vezzosi University of Florence, Italy ABSTRACT: The nature of Middle English lexicon is characterized by the import of a massive number of loanwords, due to the high social and cultural prestige of French and Latin and the intimate contact between English and Old Norse, as well as to lexical gaps. Therefore, lexical borrowings have traditionally been studied in terms of register, style, and dialect. Based on the observation that literary texts (even if medieval) are the results of literariness, the present paper aims to investigate the rhetoric usage of foreign words. In particular, the usage of French and Scandinavian borrowings and their occurrence in binomials in Saint Erkenwald will be examined in order to establish whether the author’s choice of a particular word can be accouted for as a means to convey special meanings or obtain special rhetoric effects. KEYWORDS: borrowing, binomials, alliteration, Middle English, Saint Erkenwald 1. Introduction Among European languages, English stands out for language-contact induced features, most of them being acquired during the Middle English period. Therefore, it is not surprising that three papers of the book English as a Contact Language by Hundt and Schreier are completely devoted to Middle English (Schendl 2012). It is not new that the Middle English period is characterized by a very complex linguistic situation with diffuse multilingualism and complex communicative instances of multilingualism involving at least three languages, Medieval English, Latin, and French, the last two affecting the first one heavily in the course of time. Whether Medieval English coincides with what we label as “Middle English” is not matter of the present paper. However, it is important to remind that the concept of “Middle English” itself is a matter of debate1 and that already Angus McIntosh in his “Word Geography in the 1 Although it might sound redundant, I would like to recall Mc Intosh’s words, when he stressed out that there were “over a thousand of dialectally differentiated varieties of later
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