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 referencing people. Second, coarse-grained semantic-feature annotation reveals that Dutch retains its dominant position in all identified semantic subcategories of person-reference nouns although some hubs of English are also attested. Third, an in-depth analysis of the selection between the near-synonyms sis, sister, zus, zusje and zuster in the corpus indicates socio-pragmatic differentiation between the English and Dutch terms, English being used more for (affective) address and for friends, Dutch being reserved for reference and for proper kin. Overall, our study indicates the potential of a three-tiered onomasiological approach: the results of the three case studies show both similarities, in the systematically stronger foothold of Dutch at all levels of analysis, and differences, in the semantic specialization for English progressively uncovered from the first to the third sub-study.