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Article published In: English World-Wide
Vol. 44:2 (2023) ► pp.157–183

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Maid in Cornwall

Social, stylistic, and cognitive factors in lexical levelling

 | University of York
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of York.

Published online: 31 October 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.22013.san
Abstract
While the research literature on regional dialect levelling is substantial (e.g. Williams, Ann, and Paul Kerswill. 1999. “Dialect Levelling: Change and Continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading, and Hull”. In Paul Foulkes, and Gerard Docherty, eds. Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles. London: Arnold, 141–162.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Britain, David. 2002. “Diffusion, Levelling, Simplification and Reallocation of Past Tense BE in the English Fens”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 61: 16–43. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Watt, Dominic. 2002. “‘I Don’t Speak With a Geordie Accent, I Speak, like, the Northern Accent’: Contact-induced Levelling in the Tyneside Vowel System”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 61: 44–63. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Jansen, Sandra. 2019. “Levelling Processes and Social Changes in a Peripheral Community”. In Sandra Jansen, and Lucia Siebers, eds. Processes of Change: Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 203–226. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), this process is under-explored and under-theorised when it comes to patterns of lexical usage. Using maid as a case-study, in this article I provide a detailed account of processes of lexical levelling in Cornwall. I consider the usage of maid from two perspectives, that of onomasiology and semasiology. From an onomasiological perspective, maid, as a variant of the concept woman, exhibits socio-stylistic reallocation, with attested usages of maid in this study being limited to older speakers in careful speech styles. From a semasiological perspective, two senses of maid, ‘woman’ and ‘female servant or attendant’, have undergone structural reallocation in apparent-time with maid ‘woman’ being the prototypical sense for older speakers but a more peripheral sense for their younger counterparts.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Dialect contact and linguistic change
    • 1.2Dialect contact in Cornwall
  • 2.Maid
  • 3.The study
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Method
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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