Lexical Replacements of Romance Origins in Middle English

and key words This BA thesis focuses on selected words of French origin adopted into English during the Middle English period. The theoretical part deals with the research carried out in the field of French borrowings in the Middle English period so far. The research part focuses on lexical borrowings that replaced their corresponding equivalents of Germanic origin. The words were chosen from the Oxford English Dictionary, which also provided the information on etymology, various orthographic forms, current usage frequency and classification into semantic fields. The classification was used to find corresponding equivalents of French or Germanic origin. The list of orthographic variants of the words was verified and complemented with the Middle English Dictionary. Next, a corpus including English prose and verse from the period between 1150 and 1500 was used to analyze the usage and changes in the usage frequency of the replacements and the replaced words throughout this period. Key words: lexical replacements, French borrowings, Romance borrowings, Middle Englis