A corpus study of pragmatic adaptation: The case of the Anglicism [jobb] in Norwegian

•The study shows how an Anglicism is pragmatically adapted after it has been borrowed into Norwegian language.•This is one of few studies which considers the development of semantic prosody over time.•The study documents how the discourse function of the Anglicism [jobb] has changed from conveying a consistently negative to a generally non-negative (neutral/positive) semantic prosody.•It is shown that this is a unidirectional change that occurs gradually and at different times with different morphosyntactic realisations of the Anglicism.

This article considers the post hoc adaptation of a borrowed lexeme throughout its period of existence in Norwegian. The case in point is the Anglicism [jobb] 'job' and its derived forms. The aim of this case study is to show how the use and development of this Anglicism is characterised by a discernible pragmatic adaptation after its adoption in the 19th century to the present. The methodological framework of the analysis is Sinclair's (1996) model of 'extended units of meaning'. By exploring a historical text archive, the study charts the emergence of new types of usage and concomitant changes in the semantic prosody of the Anglicism. The study shows how its discourse function has changed from conveying a consistently negative to a generally non-negative (neutral/positive) semantic prosody, and that this is a unidirectional change that occurs gradually and at different times with different morphosyntactic realisations of the Anglicism.