Laura Wright is a Professor of English Language at the University of Cambridge, author of 12 books and 80+ articles/chapters. She is a historical sociolinguist who tracks the social history of words across languages in space and time. Recent books are Sunnyside: A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names (2020, OUP/The British Academy), which is concerned with Scottish English and Scots Gaelic as well as English; and Laura Wright ed. The Multilingual Origins of Standard English (2020, Mouton de Gruyter), where the impetus for standardisation is pinpointed as stemming from the shifting codeswitching practices of scribes in the late fourteenth/early fifteenth centuries, leading to an adoption of Anglo-Norman writing habits such as uniform spellings.

ABSTRACT

THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF POLYSEMY

Taking as inspiration Calvo Cortes’s (2014) analysis of words aboard, ahead, aloof which originated as maritime spatial perceptions and only subsequently moved from ship to shore via metaphor, my talk is concerned with lexical sociolinguistics, by which I mean theoretical ways of looking at how words shifted according to social context. In this case, the social context is also a physical one, from water to land. Specific vocabulary has long been used on board ship, a community of practice that supersedes both region and language:

it is often impossible to attribute the lexis of maritime affairs with certainty to any of the irresponsibly promiscuous and apparently interchangeable languages used in Mediterranean ports from east to west […] It is impossible to study this material without reaching the inescapable confusion that the modern urge to impose order and clarity on this mêlée of forms and languages is about as likely to succeed (and about as safe) as an attempt to determine the precise racial origins of the denizens of Genoa’s waterfront on a rowdy Saturday night.

Trotter (2003: 22)

Trotter was talking here about medieval words related to ships and shipping but the same is true of all periods, and his joyful verdict of irresponsible promiscuity also applies to the words for the goods ships bring. In this talk I discuss the concept of polysemy, and apply it to a historical word which crossed the North Atlantic in the late nineteenth century and on landing, acquired a new social meaning within a community of practice where the social variable was ‘race’.

References

Calvo Cortes, Nuria. 2014. A corpus-based study of gradual meaning change in Late Modern English. In Alejandro Alcaraz Sintes and Salvador Valera Hernández (eds.). Diachrony and Synchrony in English Corpus Linguistics. Bern: Peter Lang. 25-54.

Trotter, David. 2003. Oceano vox: you never know where a ship comes from: on multilingualism and language-mixing in medieval Britain. In Kurt Braunmüller & Gisella Ferraresi (eds.). Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language History. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 15-33.