Obsolescence and Innovation in the Middle English Religious Lexicon

Abstract

Lexical loss has long been of interest to scholars of the history of English, even though it is difficult to measure and has therefore received less attention than related processes, such as lexical innovation. Recently, the topic has received renewed interest, especially concerning the idea of French replacing large swathes of native vocabulary after the Norman Conquest. Using data from the Historical Thesaurus of English (HT), the present article tracks changes in the Middle English (ME) religious lexis, focusing on nouns and the influence of French and Latin, and investigates patterns of lexical obsolescence and innovation in conjunction with language of origin and semantic specificity. Following Sylvester et al. (2020), semantic specificity is measured by utilising the HT's structure, and etymological information is extracted from the OED and MED. Overall, most lexical items are found at the hypernymic level of the semantic hierarchy. Already in the early ME period, about 30% of the religious lexicon is of Romance origin and this proportion only continues to grow. The proportion of English‐origin items decreases accordingly, although the absolute number stays relatively stable. Peaks in first and last attestations are shown to coincide, likely due to the nature of the available data.