Onomasiology

Lexical obsolescence is a topic whose study spans centuries, and yet it is not well-understood. Variously termed lexical mortality, lexical death, and lexical loss, among other names, the phenomenon has been described as both a product and a process, but the scholarship on how and why expressions go out of use has, until recently, been sporadic and sparse. The last few years have seen attempts to situate obsolescence among other processes of language change, but these have mostly focused on obsolescing constructions in modern languages. The present study, by contrast, investigates words that went obsolete in Late Middle English, suggesting a methodological approach designed to overcome the challenge of finding that which is no longer there, namely the consultation of a comprehensive online historical dictionary, and proposing an explanatory framework within the tradition of onomasiology and semasiology that positions obsolescence as a diachronic result of the habitual and contextually driven corporate deselection of linguistic constructions.