On sisters and zussen : integrating semasiological and onomasiological perspectives on the use of English person-reference nouns in Belgian-Dutch teenage chat messages

Abstract This paper targets the division of labor between borrowed English forms and heritage alternatives in Belgian-Dutch youth language. Through lexical semantic analysis of a youth-language corpus containing over 450,000 private instant messages, the choice for English or Dutch person-reference nouns (e.g. Eng. girlfriend , loser , sister ; Du. vriendin , sukkel , zus ) is studied at three levels of semasiological granularity. First, at the level of the semantic field as a whole, Dutch appears to have the strongest foothold, accounting for over 75 % of the types and over 85 % of the tokens... Mehr ...