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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 28:4 (2023) ► pp.461–499

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When loanwords are not lone words

Using networks and hypergraphs to explore Māori loanwords in New Zealand English

ORCiD logo with link | University of Waikato
 | University of Waikato
 | University of Waikato
 | University of Waikato
Published online: 9 January 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.21124.try
Abstract
Networks are being used to model an increasingly diverse range of real-world phenomena. This paper introduces an exploratory approach to studying loanwords in relation to one another, using networks of co-occurrence. While traditional studies treat individual loanwords as discrete items, we show that insights can be gained by focusing on the various loanwords that co-occur within each text in a corpus, especially when leveraging the notion of a hypergraph. Our research involves a case-study of New Zealand English (NZE), which borrows Indigenous Māori words on a large scale. We use a topic-constrained corpus to show that: (i) Māori loanword types tend not to occur by themselves in a text; (ii) infrequent loanwords are nearly always accompanied by frequent loanwords; and (iii) it is not uncommon for texts to contain a mixture of listed and unlisted loanwords, suggesting that NZE is still riding a wave of borrowing importation from Māori.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Entrenchment: What to count, how to count it and what it can tell us
    • 2.2Māori loanwords in New Zealand English
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Overview of the Matariki Corpus
    • 3.2Loanword selection process
    • 3.3Computing loan co-occurrence
    • 3.4Linguistic properties
    • 3.5Overview of loans by frequency
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Distribution of loan types
    • 4.2Standard network analysis: Pairwise loan co-occurrence
    • 4.3Hypergraph analysis: Preserving sets of loans
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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