The Middle English period is well known as one of widespread lexical borrowing from French and Latin, and scholarly accounts traditionally assume that this influx of loanwords caused many native terms to shift in sense or to drop out of use entirely. The study analyses an extensive dataset, tracking patterns in lexical retention, replacement and semantic change, and comparing long-term outcomes for both native and non-native words. Our results challenge the conventional view of competition between existing terms and foreign incomers. They show that there were far fewer instances of relexification, and far more of synonymy, during the Middle English period than might have been expected. When retention rates for words first attested between 1100 and 1500 are compared, it is loanwords, not native terms, which are more likely to become obsolete at any point up to the nineteenth century. Furthermore, proportions of outcomes involving narrowing and broadening (often considered common outcomes following the arrival of a co-hyponym in a semantic space) were low in the Middle English period, regardless of language of origin.

众所周知，中古英语时期是从法语和拉丁语中广泛借用的词汇之一，而学术帐户传统上认为这种外来词的涌入导致许多本地术语的意义发生变化或完全退出使用。该研究分析了一个广泛的数据集，跟踪词汇保留、替换和语义变化的模式，并比较了母语和非母语单词的长期结果。我们的结果挑战了现有条款与外国收入者之间竞争的传统观点。他们表明，在中古英语时期，再词汇化的例子比预期的要少得多，而同义词的例子要多得多。当比较在 1100 和 1500 之间首次证明的单词的保留率时，它是借词，而不是本地词，在 19 世纪之前的任何时候，它们都更有可能过时。此外，在中古英语时期，无论起源语言如何，涉及缩小和扩大的结果比例（通常被认为是在语义空间中出现同义词后的常见结果）的比例很低。