Vocabulary 215

a pickpocket is not a pocket, and barefoot is not a foot. Such formations have been called bahuvrihi-compounds, exocentric compounds or pseudo-compounds (see Kastovsky, 2002b) and are treated by Marchand (1969: 380ff.) as containing a zero morpheme as determinatum, i.e. as derivatives from phrases. I will follow this analysis, although there are alternatives for some of them, e.g. treating them as instances of metonymy.

A similar problem exists with the analysis of prefixal verbs like delouse, disarm, unbutton, where the second part is a noun. It has been argued, therefore, that in this case the prefix acts as head and changes the word class, which, however, goes against the general constituent order of the Germanic languages. Such instances should therefore be treated as a combination of prefixation and zero derivation, cf. the parallelism between to bone/Ø a chicken ‘remove the bones’ (a simple zero derivative) and to delouse/Ø a person ‘remove the lice’ (combination of zero derivation and prefixation).

We have to add one more way in which the vocabulary can change (and expand), viz. meaning change. This can take various forms: meanings can be widened or narrowed, ameliorated or get a pejorative tinge. Thus an existing lexeme can adopt an additional meaning by borrowing it from a lexeme of another language, which has at least partly the same meaning. Thus the OE lexeme cniht ‘boy, servant’ took on the additional meaning of Lat. discipulus ‘disciple of Christ’; in ME it adopted the meanings ‘male military servant of a person of high rank, a man raised to honorary military rank by a monarch, ranking below a baron’, probably in connection with the introduction of the Norman feudal system, and acted as an equivalent of Fr. chevalier; in late ME it finally developed the Modern English meaning ‘a man awarded a title by a sovereign in recognition of personal merit, ranking below a baronet, and entitled to be styled Sir’ (ShOED). Another example is the OE lexeme synn ‘injury, enmity, feud’, which adopted the additional meaning ‘sin, crime’ from Lat. peccatum, since it was usually used to translate the latter and therefore also moved from the purely legal to the religious sphere. Note that eventually the original legal meaning ‘crime, injury’ was lost (it was replaced by Romance equivalents, since the legal language in the ME period was at least partly French), and only the religious meaning survived.

Another possibility is the translation of the meaning of a foreign expression by means of native material without borrowing the lexical item itself. This phenomenon is extremely frequent in OE, where it is preferred to direct borrowing. In principle we can distinguish two types, which, however, can not always be neatly separated: (a) the translation is a direct, morpheme-by-morpheme imitation of the foreign original (a ‘loan translation’), as in Ælfric’s attempt to create an Anglo-Saxon grammatical terminology on the basis of the Latin original in his eleventh-century Grammar and Vocabulary, e.g. dæl-nimend ‘something taking part’ for participium, forsetnys ‘that which is put before’ for praepositio,