Semantic shifts of ‘coming out’ and ‘come out of the closet’

Juxtaposing lexicographic data with authentic corpora-excerpted contexts, this article investigates the semantic variance of coming out and come out of the closet in English and Polish. It discovers the linguistic sources of the LGBTQ+-related sense of coming out in English and focuses on the semantic shift from its sociolectal LGBTQ+-related usage towards nonsociolectal pragmatically marked uses, which result in extended collocability (e.g. Eng. coming out as an atheist; Pol. ateistyczny coming-out). The study contrasts English and Polish corpus data to see whether the nonsociolectal usage of Polish coming out can be argued to be contact-induced – that is, modelled on English. Language contact research shows that contact-induced innovations undergo semantic change through conscious and creative exploitation by recipient language speakers to realise their pragmatic needs. The cognitive-onomasiological theoretical framework, coupled with a usage-based methodology, allows investigation of how native and contact-induced phenomena are used by native and recipient language speakers.