Derivatives Formed with English Terms Denoting Social Roles in the Medieval Period
Derivatives Formed with English Terms Denoting Social Roles in the Medieval Period

Summary/Abstract: Social terms form categories created by human society, unlike natural kind terms which exist in nature independently of institutional frames (Dahlgren 1985). They are interrelated and disposed in systems denoting ranks in a social hierarchy. Like natural terms (e.g. man, tiger), social rank terms undergo word-formation processes (compounding, derivation, conversion). In this paper, I will examine derivation, highlighting the productivity of English social terms (e.g. king, knave, bailiff) in forming new words from their bases, from the medieval period up to now. The members of the lexical frame of the studied terms will be discussed according to the word formation rules that have applied in the generation of these terms. It will be apparent that not all lexical frames are equally rich. The richness of the lexical frame helps identify which terms are central/prototypical in the frame, from a diachronic perspective. The morphological extensions of terms are similar, thereby proving the systematic character of their lexical frame (Lehrer 1985, Hughes 1988).

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