To refer to a male adult, speakers of Present Day English have several lexical items to choose from (e.g., man, guy, dude, fella, bloke, gentleman). However, variation within this semantic field is not new. According to The Thesaurus of Old English, there were at least 25 lexical items which denoted ‘male adult’ in Old English (e.g., guma, man, wer) which could occur in referentially comparable contexts. This talk summarizes two studies that use variationist quantitative methods to examine the evolution of this semantic field throughout the history of the English language. The first study traces changes within this semantic field in the early history of English (from Old English to Middle English) and the second study examines more recent changes in Present Day British English using two British National spoken corpora.
Both studies present evidence of lexical replacement. In the early history of English wer, the most frequent lexical item for ‘man’, is gradually replaced by the gender-specific use of man, a change that is almost complete by Early Middle English. As wer decreases in frequency, man takes on the former function of wer, with the diachronic shift in frequency following a prototypical s-curve distribution. Language-internal (e.g., alliteration) and language-external factors (e.g., text type, text origin) are found to significantly affect variation. The results from Present Day English point to another example of lexical replacement within this system, with man being replaced by guy. Some correlates and potential causes of the replacement are proposed for both changes.