Pohl, AlexanderCalude, Andreea S.Whaanga, HēmiZenner, ElineRosseel, Laura2025-03-312025-03-312024Pohl, A., Calude, A., Whaanga, H., Zenner, E., & Rosseel, L. (2024, December 9-10). When your maunga is a mountain but your moana is not a sea; Insights from the perception of synonymy of te reo Māori loanwords and New Zealand English lexical equivalents [Conference item]. New Zealand Linguistics Society Conference, Christchurch.https://hdl.handle.net/10289/17303Languages and their speakers are in ongoing contact with one another, which inevitably leads to a flow of words being borrowed from one language into another (Haspelmath 2009; Winford 2010). One perspective that has comparatively seen less attention in language contact research concerns how loanword relate to existing lexical alternatives. In recent years, language contact research has thus seen a paradigm shift towards an onomasiological perspective (see Anderson et al. 2017; Crombez et al. 2022; Zenner et al. 2023). Within this shift, most studies looking at lexical variation between loanwords and their near synonyms equivalents employ corpus linguistics methods (e.g. Onysko & WinterFroemel 2011; Soares da Silva 2013). This project presents a large-scale experimental approach from a case-study involving Māori loanwords borrowed into New Zealand English (NZE). Māori loanwords are ubiquitous, salient and probably still increasing within the NZE lexicon (Macalister 2007; Trye et al. 2019). Regarding onomasiology, Māori loanwords have been glossed and explained in different ways, and to date, there has been to our knowledge almost no research focused specifically on the relationship between loanwords and their near synonyms. Here, we report on a Qualtrics experiment devised to probe the perceived relationship between 60 Māori loanwords (spanning established semantic categories: flora and fauna, material culture, and social culture) and their NZE equivalents, as ascertained from published sources. The synonymy judgments were elicited for pairs (e.g. whānau – family), using an analogue slider (ranging from 0 = non-synonymous to 100 = fully synonymous; see Figure 1). Because synonymy judgements are subjective, we also included ten fillers, to help us calibrate and interpret participant judgements. The 60 words were divided into two-word lists in order avoid fatigue, resulting in a within participant design. The target demographic for our population of interest consisted of young adults (18-24 years). Following cleaning and exclusions (e.g. participants who ignored filler items), the final dataset contained 260 participants. Inspecting the dataset showed a skew towards female participants, and for this reason, we focus our statistical analysis on this core sample, while keeping an eye on the full dataset containing all participants. Preliminary findings suggest that young adults think Māori loanwords are (highly) synonymous with NZE lexical alternatives. These findings will be further scrutinised with regression techniques and qualitative analyses of the comments provided in an open answer section of the questionnaire.This is a PowerPoint file from an oral presentation at the New Zealand Linguistics Society Conference 2024. © The authors.Conference Contribution