A Cognitive Approach To Dutch Loanwords In English Based On LCS~+ Model

From a lexical point of view,the whole history of English is a history of vocabulary borrowing.In the course of its more than 1500 years of vicissitude,English has absorbed the words from more than 120 languages.It has evolved from the language of several Germanic tribes to one of the most popular languages in the world today.All these loanwords come from a wide range of sources,some of which come from Dutch.Unfortunately,since it is a small etymology,few people pay attention to Dutch loanwords in English.Furthermore,the study of loanwords has always been a significant subject in linguistic research.Previous studies on loanwords have achieved fruitful results in many aspects.However,most of these studies are diachronic researches,which focus on the entry time,factors and sources of loanwords borrowed from the perspective of language contact.Of course,there are also some studies on the emergence stage and assimilation stage of loanwords from the perspective of culture and society.All these studies provide us with a lot of valuable references.However,previous studies rarely involve the linguistic level.Therefore,from the perspective of language contact and based on the core principle of cognitive linguistics:“reality-cognition-language”,this thesis attempts to construct a cognitive mechanism model:LCS~+model(LC represents language contact;S represents salience theory;~+represents the fusion of metaphor,metonymy,economic principles and highlighted features of social background),which is on the basis of making up for the deficiencies of various theories.The author takes Dutch loanwords in English as the object of the study and attempts to explore the process of development and evolution trend of Dutch loanwords into English based on the LCS~+Model and reveal the influence of social factors on language development from the perspectives of cognition and society.Based on the LCS~+model,this thesis takes 201 Dutch loanwords in Skeat's An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language as corpora with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze it.In the first place,the author recategorizes the Dutch sources of these 201 words by the highlighted feature of social events that affect the entry of Dutch into English and classifies them into seven categories:nautical words,textile words,place-names,personal names,military words,words related to social life and other categories.In this case,other categories refer to words that do not know what category they belong to.In addition,based on the LCS~+model,the author classifies these 201 Dutch loanwords into six categories from the perspective of semantic change:semantic invariability,semantic expansion,semantic narrowing,semantic shift,semantic degradation,and semantic elevation.After a detailed analysis of the classified data,the author finds that the number of Dutch loanwords related to the social life ranks first,followed by the loanwords related to navigation.In the third place are the loanwords related to the military.In addition,from the 16th century to the 17th century,it was the period when Dutch loanwords went into English with the largest number.At the same time,it was also the period that the Netherlands dominated the sea,and England and the Dutch Republic fought for hegemony in the sea.All these indicate that the trade between England and the Netherlands,especially the maritime trade,and the Four Anglo-Dutch Wars as indispensable social factors effectively boost the Dutch words coming into English vocabulary.In the meantime,it also shows that the development of language can not be separated from the promotion of society.On the contrary,the development of language also promotes the development of society.This thesis makes a useful exploration to clarify the history of English development,which has certain academic values for us to understand the development of English.