Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev and Nino Amiridze
Borrowed morphology: an overview
1 Introduction
Borrowing has traditionally occupied a prominent role in historical linguistics, as
it has been viewed as one of the main sources of language change, besides sound
change and analogy. While lexical borrowing has attracted particular interest,
the borrowing of morphology has generally attracted less attention in the literature. There is no doubt that this can be explained in terms of the apparent relative
infrequency of morphological borrowing.
At the turn of the 20th century, two schools of thought dominated this debate.
On one hand, advocates of a retentionist view (Müller 1862; Meillet 1921; Sapir
1921; Jakobson 1938) claimed that the borrowing of inflectional morphemes is most
unlikely. Most explicitly, Meillet maintained that “il n’y a pas d’exemple qu’une
flexion comme celle de j’aimais, nous aimions ait passé d’une langue à une autre”
(1921: 86). On the other hand, Schuchardt, one of the proponents of the opposed
diffusionist view (to whom scholars such as Whitney 1881 and Trubetzkoy 1939
also belong), claimed that there are no completely unmixed languages and that
morphological borrowing exists (Schuchardt 1884: 9).
The first analytical framework for the study of language contact in general,
and borrowing in particular, was provided by Weinreich (1953), who observed that
derivational affixes are more easily transferable from one language to another
than inflectional affixes, while at the same time reporting instances of inflectional morphemes that were transferred from one language to another (Weinreich
1953: 31–33). Following Weinreich’s seminal work, and based on the apparent
resistance of bound morphology to contact-induced change, linguists have interpreted the borrowing of morphology as a reflex of very strong social pressure
that one language, the source language (SL), exerts over another, the recipient
language (RL). In order to seize different degrees of borrowability, linguists have
developed a number of borrowing scales (e.g. Whitney 1881: 19–20; Haugen 1950:
224; Moravcsik 1978: 110–113; Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 74–76; Field 2002:
36–37). All currently accepted hierarchies deem a high intensity of contact to
be necessary for morphological borrowing to occur (Matras 2007; Matras 2009:
153–165 and Wohlgemuth 2009: 11–17, provide useful overviews).
The last decade has seen an increased interest in contact-induced morphological change, and several publications reflect this tendency, such as Borrowing of
inflectional morphemes in language contact (Gardani 2008), Copies versus cognates
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Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev and Nino Amiridze
in bound morphology (Johanson and Robbeets 2012), and Morphologies in contact
(Vanhove et al. 2012). All in all, a number of attempts have been made to put this
field of research on both a theoretical and an empirical footing. Today, thanks to
both the compilation of grammars of previously undescribed languages and the
publication of studies on structural borrowing based on large cross-linguistic data
(e.g. Matras and Sakel 2007a; Wohlgemuth 2009), a substantial number of instances of morphological borrowing are known, and useful comparative analyses – in
terms of putatively universal tendencies – have been proposed. Thus, while progress has been made on the empirical side in terms of an extension of the number
of attested instances of morphological borrowing, on the theoretical side things
have proceeded more slowly. That is, despite the fact that linguists have recognized in their approaches the potential of contact-induced morphological change
as a source of evidence for the structure of grammar (see, e.g. Myers-Scotton 2002,
2006; Gardani 2008, 2012; Meakins 2011a), more theoretically inspired work needs
to be pursued in order to get deeper insights into the matter and be able to formulate more valid generalizations.
The present book presents advancements in research in morphological borrowing, addressing the need for improving the conceptual and methodological
basis of this field of linguistics. The contributions to this volume reflect heterogeneous theoretical and methodological tools, based on the editors’ belief that only
a variety of approaches can help capture the array of diverse phenomena with
which the data confront us.
In the sections that follow, we will sketch the state-of-the-art of current
research in morphological borrowing and situate the volume’s articles within
the research landscape. Among the issues addressed in the volume, one fundamental question concerns the borrowability of morphology. Is morphological
borrowing an infrequent phenomenon in cross-linguistic terms, or is it not as
rare as is often purported in the literature? A scientific treatment of this question
requires, first and foremost, an elaboration of several fundamental distinctions,
such as the questions about what is borrowed in terms of matter versus pattern
(Section 2), and which type of morphology, derivational or inflectional, is borrowed (Section 3). A further central query relates to the relationship (or distinction) between morphological borrowing sensu stricto and phenomena such as
code-switching, creolization, and the genesis of mixed languages. Pursuing this
last question requires a better understanding of the interplay between sociolinguistic and cognitive conditioning factors of interlinguistic transfer, on the one
hand, and different degrees of borrowing, on the other. These issues are treated
in Section 4. On the methodological side, the investigation of morphological borrowing is of great importance to historical-comparative linguistics, as correspondences between inflectional and derivational morphemes have often been taken
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Borrowed morphology: an overview
3
as strong indicators of, or even diagnostic evidence for, genetic relatedness (see,
e.g. Meillet 1921; cf. the discussion in Ross and Durie 1996: 7) (Section 5). No less
important are the understanding of cross-linguistic tendencies in morphological
borrowing as well as its linguistic and social motivations for linguistic typology
and the study of language universals, because morphological borrowing, especially pattern borrowing, is among the principal factors responsible for the diffusion of structural traits and the development of linguistic areas (see, e.g. Ross
1999 or Donohue 2012).
2 mat-borrowing versus pat-borrowing
Adopting the terminology of Sakel (2007) and Matras and Sakel (2007b), we
distinguish between two types of borrowing: the borrowing of concrete phonological matter (mat-borrowing); and the borrowing of functional and semantic
morphological patterns (pat-borrowing) from a SL into a RL. (Both types are
compatible with borrowing derivation and borrowing inflection; on this, see
Section 3.) This distinction is by no means new, and looks back at a rich terminological history. The first type has traditionally been referred to as “borrowing”, “direct
transfer”, “direct diffusion”, “transfer of fabric”; the second type has often been
called “replication”, “indirect transfer”, “indirect diffusion”, “loan-formation”,
“calque”. See also Johanson’s (1999, 2008) terms of “global copying” (roughly
corresponding to mat-borrowing) vs. “selective copying” (roughly corresponding
to pat-borrowing).
Morphological pat-borrowing implies that a RL rearranges its own inherited morphological structure in such a way that it becomes structurally closer to
the SL. An instance of pat-borrowing from derivational morphology is found in
Basque, which replicates a Romance pattern to form deverbal verbs through a
prefix expressing repetition. The Basque formative that replicates the Romance
pattern expressed by re‑ (cf. Spanish reproducir ‘to reproduce’) is bir‑ (or its
allomorph berr‑), as in (1a), compared to the corresponding Spanish lexemes in
(1b) (Basque data from Jendraschek 2006: 158–159).
(1)
Basque
a. aztertu
‘examine’
berr‑aztertu
‘re-examine’
Spanish
b. examinar
re‑examinar
In nominal morphology, a pertinent example of pat-borrowing is the use of the
category of nominal past in Mawayana (Maipurean, Guyana), which has emerged
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Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev and Nino Amiridze
because of contact with the Cariban languages. In Mawayana, the form ‑ba is
suffixed to a nominal element and replicates the Cariban obligatory marking of
the nominal past, used to express former possession, deceased persons, gone
objects, or pity (Carlin 2006: 322–325). See the use of the suffix to express a former
possession in Mawayana, in (2a), and compare it to the Trio (Cariban) equivalents
of the nominalized form, in (2b).
(2) a.
katabi‑ke‑ba
jimaaɗa
(Mawayana)
human.being
catch-ag.nmlz-pst
jaguar
‘Jaguar used to catch people.’ (lit. jaguar was a catcher of people)
njee
b. wïtoto
apëi‑ne‑npë
teese
kaikui
human.being catch-ag.nmlz-pst he.was jaguar
‘Jaguar used to catch people.’
(Trio)
In this volume, Thomas Stolz provides a fascinating cross-linguistic study on
pat-borrowing, with a focus on NP-internal agreement (concord). Based on a
wealth of cross-linguistic data, Stolz proposes and exemplifies three scenarios of
change in adjective-noun agreement in contact situations: (1) loss of agreement
(Armenian in contact with Turkic); (2) reshaping of agreement on the model of the
SL (Nahuatl in contact with Spanish); and (3) rise of agreement (Baltic-Finnic in
contact with Indo-European languages).
A subtype of pat-borrowing is contact-induced grammaticalization or, in
Heine and Kuteva’s (2003) terminology, “replica grammaticalization”, which, as
they claim, involves the replication of a process of grammaticalization rather than
of a fixed pattern. For a recent reassessment of contact-induced grammaticalization, see Wiemer et al. (2012) and in particular, Gast and van der Auwera (2012). For
example, based on the model of neighboring Ewe, Likpe (both belong to different
branches of the Kwa family in the Niger-Congo phylum, Ghana, Western Africa) has
developed plural-marking on a subset of kin terms (the ego’s parents’ generation)
and proper names (Ameka 2006: 126–127). The pluralizing suffix ‑mə́, in (3a), has
the same form and meaning as the 3pl pronoun mə́, in (3b) (Ameka 2006: 130).
(3) Likpe
a. éwú
grandmother
b. mə
lə́
3pl
loc
‘among them’
éwu‑mə́
grandmother-pl
ntí
midst
The evolution from (3b) to (3a) parallels the Ewe patterns in (4). In Ewe, wó is both
a plural clitic on nouns (4a) and a third person plural pronoun (4b).
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(4) Ewe
a. ame
(eve
má=)wó ko
person two
dem=pl only
‘only (those two) people’
b. wó‑dzo
(wó)
3pl-fly
3pl
‘They flew (them).’
As we have already mentioned, mat-borrowing concerns the concrete phonemic matter that an RL takes from an SL. An appropriate example of mat-borrowing has been described by Breu (1991) for Bulgarian, Macedonian, and other
Balkan languages. Throughout the Balkan Sprachbund, the formative ‑s‑ is
productively used as a loanverb marker. It was borrowed from the Greek verbalizer ‑iz‑, such as in alat‑íz‑o ‘to salt’ from aláti ‘salt’. In Macedonian, for
example, the Turkish verb bit‑mek ‘to finish’ has been integrated as a composite stem biti‑s‑, to which the stem-building formative and the inflections apply
(data from Breu 1991).
(5) Macedonian
biti‑s‑uv‑a
finish-lvm-suff-prs.1sg
‘I finish’
In our volume, the issue of borrowed loanverb formatives is taken up by Metin
Bağrıaçık, Angela Ralli and Dimitra Melissaropoulou, who analyze it in areal
terms. Two distinct Turkic suffixes borrowed into several typologically distinct
languages are used to create “input forms” (Wohlgemuth 2009, Ch. 5) to accommodate loanverbs from Oghuz Turkic. The distribution pattern of the borrowed suffixes enables the authors to identify two separate linguistic areas. The perfect/inferential marker -mIş (accompanied by a light verb) is found in the area including
Eastern Asia Minor, Transcaucasia, and Transoxiana, while the past marker ‑D(I)
(with no light verb present) occurs in borrowed Turkic verbs in various languages of the area encompassing the Balkan peninsula and Western Asia Minor.
Crucially, the paper shows that structural reasons are at hand for the selection
of either formative: in the case of ‑D(I), the selection is determined by the type of
base that “is operative in the recipient language for word-formation purposes”,
whereas in the second area, the selection of -mIş is guided by the independent
existence of both perfect grams and the use of a light verb strategy to create denominal verbs in the RLs.
The illustration of mat-borrowing through example (5) suffices to fill the
space of this brief overview, because nine out of ten papers of the volume focus
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Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev and Nino Amiridze
on mat-borrowing. This preponderance has been the editors’ explicit choice, not
least because to date publications have been focusing on pat-borrowing rather
than on mat-borrowing (see Mithun 2012, for a very recent paper, and many
articles in Matras and Sakel 2007a; for contact-induced grammaticalization, see
Grandi 2002; Heine and Kuteva 2003, 2005, 2006; Gast and van der Auwera 2012;
Wiemer et al. 2012).
Another issue that we placed on the agenda of research on morphological
borrowing and which is not systematically represented in the present volume
(though cf. the contribution by Felicity Meakins, who investigates the functional
development of the Gurindji ergative marker in Gurindji Kriol) is the question of
the degree of semantic-functional matching between a borrowed morpheme in
the RL and its counterpart in the SL. For example, the study of “relabelling” in
creoles and mixed languages (Lefebvre 2008), that is, the process whereby phonetic strings drawn from the lexifier language replace original forms expressing
the same concept in the substrate language(s), has shown that the new lexeme
has the same semantic and syntactic properties of the original one, but its phonological representation is different. Conversely, lexical borrowing need not involve
the transfer of the full polysemy of the SL’s lexical items (see, e.g. Weinreich 1953:
55–56; Rohde et al. 1999). Finally, Heine (2012) claims that, in contact-induced
grammaticalization, the replica element or construction in the RL almost invariably occupies a less advanced stage of functional-semantic development than
its model in the SL. There is thus no reason to assume that mat-borrowed grammatical morphemes in a RL take over the full gamut of functions of their sources,
as is implied, e.g. in Johanson’s notion of global copying. As has been repeatedly
shown by different scholars (see Winford 2003: 91–92, for an overview), if interlinguistic transfer of morphemes occurs at all, it is the morphemes with a higher
degree of functional transparency that are borrowed more frequently. From this,
it follows that morphemes that are polyfunctional in the SL, are borrowed into
the RL primarily with their more concrete and transparent functions. This claim
is supported by studies on the borrowing of Slavic and Germanic verbal prefixes
and particles into various contact languages, such as varieties of Romani (see,
e.g. Rusakov 2001; Schrammel 2002) or Balkan Romance languages. For instance,
in the varieties of Romanian spoken in Serbia, the prefix do- borrowed from Slavic
denotes the attainment of the final point of motion or activity (Petrović Rignault
2008), as the following example shows.
(6)
Vlach Romanian
a. do‑facu
b.
prv-do:pst.3sg
‘S/he finished doing sth.’
Serbian
do‑jesti
prv-eat:inf
‘to finish eating’
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Importantly, however, in Vlach Romanian, the borrowed prefix does not have the
perfectivizing role characteristic of the SL, Serbian, as well as of the Slavic verbal
prefixes, in general. That means that the more abstract function realized by the
morphemes of the SL, or even associated not just with particular morphemes but
with the whole make-up of the verbal system, has not been introduced into Vlach
Romanian. This example alone shows that the semantic aspect of morphological
borrowing is de facto quite complex and deserves much more attention than, to
our knowledge, it has received so far.
In addition to mat-borrowing and pat-borrowing, there seems to be a type
of morphological transfer that lies in between. In our volume, Eleanor Coghill
portrays a complex issue of verbal derivational patterns borrowed from Arabic by
three distinct modern Aramaic languages. The distribution of phonological material in the Semitic verbal stem is organized by segmental morphology and more
abstract structural templates. Coghill shows that Arabic loan derivations are first
largely limited to Arabic loanverbs, but can subsequently spread to the inherited
Aramaic lexical stock, giving rise, for example, to a new mediopassive category
in Western Neo Aramaic.
3 Borrowability of morphology
It is common knowledge that morphology is a cover term for a rather wide range
of phenomena, roughly including compounding, derivation, and inflection,
which seem to be processed in different areas in grammar. Accordingly, claims
have been made that different areas of morphology show different degrees of
propensity for borrowing, which is reflected in the various borrowability scales
mentioned above. Generally, it is assumed that derivation is borrowed more
frequently than inflection: for example, Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 74–75)
situate derivational borrowing (der-borrowing) at level 3 of their borrowing
scale, whereas inflectional borrowing (inf-borrowing) ranks at level 4, the
highest level.
With respect to inflection, Gardani (2008, 2012) has shown that variance in
the degree of borrowability of inflectional formatives correlates with their classification as realizing either inherent inflection or contextual inflection, according
to Booij’s (1994, 1996) famous dichotomy. In this connection, the borrowing of
formatives that realize features of inherent inflection (i.e. context-autonomous
inflection), such as nominal number or semantic case, verbal voice, tense, aspect,
negation, mood, or evidentiality, largely outweigh the borrowing of formatives
that realize contextual inflection (i.e. inflection induced by obligatory syntactic
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Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev and Nino Amiridze
government or agreement), such as nominal grammatical case or verbal person,
number, and gender.1
As a prototypical value of inherent inflection, nominal plural has a higherthan-average borrowing rating (Gardani 2012). As a case in point, consider the
case of Bolivian Quechua nouns ending in a vowel (the vast majority), which
realize the plural via a suffix ‑s borrowed from the contact language, Spanish
[data in (6a) from Muysken (2012: 33), based on Urioste (1964)].
(7)
Bolivian Quechua
a. algu
‘dog’
algu‑s
‘dogs’
Spanish
b. perro
perro‑s
An example of the rare cases of borrowed formatives that realize contextual
inflection is found in Megleno-Romanian, a Balkan Romance language spoken
in south-eastern Macedonia and northern Greece. In the Megleno-Romanian
varieties spoken in the villages of Nănti, Ošinj, Lundzinj, and Kupă, some verbs,
belonging to a specific theme vowel class (‑a‑) and ending in the consonant
cluster muta cum liquida, display the formative ‑ş, for the 2sg of the indicative
present, which is added to the corresponding native Romance formative -i on
inherited Romance bases (a antra ‘to enter’ < Latin intrare) [data in (8a, b) from
Capidan (1925: 159) and Atanasov (1990)].2 The formative ‑ş has been borrowed
from south-eastern Macedonian dialects. In (8), the verb form with borrowed
formative (8a) is contrasted with the corresponding form both of the same verb in
the standard variety of Megleno-Romanian (8b) and of the Macedonian verb gali
‘to caress’ (8c).
1 There is no disguising the fact that the distinction between inflection and derivation is neither
obvious nor uncontroversial, and so is the distinction between morphological compounding
and formation of phrases in syntax (see, e.g. Booij 2005, 2010). Both dichotomies are to a large
extent language-specific. Born out in linguistic studies focusing on Indo-European languages,
the distinction between inflection and derivation has proved “particularly elusive” to capture
(Laca 2001: 1215). Some scholars (e.g. Bybee 1985; Dressler 1989; Plank 1994) have advocated
a non-discrete, gradual distinction along a continuum which matches that ranging from the
syntax to the lexicon, while others, like Bauer (2004), have proposed a more refined typology
of morphological processes with several, instead of just two or three, major types. Still others
(e.g. Behrens 1996; Haspelmath 2013) challenge the validity of this distinction as a universally
applicable comparative concept. See Laca (2001: 1215–1218), for an insightful discussion.
2 While an explanation of the phenomenon in terms of an internal Romance development is
conceivable, too, the explanation in terms of the influence of Macedonian on the MeglenoRomanian dialects cannot be ruled out completely (see Friedman 2012: 324–328).
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(8)
Megleno-Romanian
a. antri‑ş
enter:2sg-2sg
‘you enter’
b. antri
enter:2sg
‘you enter’
9
Macedonian
c. gal‑iş
caress-2sg
‘you caress’
While there seems to be a consensus that inflectional borrowing is a relatively
rare phenomenon (although its actual frequency in different contact situations
is still to be determined in a world-wide typological study), derivational morphology seems to be more susceptible to borrowing. The amount of data collected in a
wealth of publications indicate this tendency, although to date there has been no
comprehensive survey of the great amount of borrowed derivational morphology
in the world’s languages. The general consensus about this claim rests ultimately
on the abundance of derivational borrowings in the most studied language of
the world – English – dating back to the time when (Middle) English extensively
borrowed from French. Recent works, such as the papers collected in Matras and
Sakel (2007a), Matras (2009: 209–212) and, especially, Seifart’s (2013) newly published A world‑wide survey of affix borrowing (AfBo) have provided a collection of
numerous instances of derivational borrowing.
A superficial look at AfBo shows that adjectivizers, diminutives, and nominalizers rank highest among the borrowed derivational affixes. This conforms
to the long-held opinion that categories which carry out “concrete” meaning
are more prone to borrowing. We exemplify this with a case from Tetun Dili, an
Austronesian language spoken in East Timor, which has borrowed the agentive
suffix ‑dór (9a) from Portuguese (9b) and applies it to native roots, as in the following example from Hajek (2006: 172).
(9)
Tetun Dili
a. hemu‑dór
‘someone who likes to drink’
Portuguese
b. descobri‑dor
‘discoverer’
On the basis of the currently available evidence and the publications mentioned
above, we propose the following tentative borrowability scale for morphology: derivation > inherent inflection > contextual inflection (an idea originally developed in
Gardani, in press). Further empirical research and theoretical insights are certainly
needed in order to test and refine this generalization and especially to provide a principled explanation for the “differential access” of different kinds of morphology to
borrowing, grounded in identifiable cognitive factors rather than in the rather vague
and elusive dichotomy between inflection and derivation (cf., e.g. Myers-Scotton’s
4M-model as a possible approach to this issue, see Myers-Scotton 2002).
In this volume, the general issues of borrowability of morphology are addressed
from different perspectives by two leading experts in the field of contact linguistics.
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Sarah Thomason argues that inflectional borrowing is “considerably more common
than one might guess from the general language contact literature” and shows that
the borrowing of inflectional matter is especially common in situations characterized by intense contact and by close relatedness of languages and varieties of
the same language. In contrast, Yaron Matras argues that cognitive, communicative, and sociocultural constraints inhibit the borrowing of morphological matter,
especially inflectional morphology. He maintains that “[s]traightforward cases of
borrowed inflectional morphemes are hard to find” and addresses the issue of the
differential susceptibility of derivational vs. inflectional morphology to borrowing
from the viewpoint of his “activity-oriented” approach (Matras 2009, 2012). Matras –
in our view similarly to Myers-Scotton’s theory – considers inflection to be indicative
of the language choice made by the bilingual speaker and related to their identity,
whereas derivational morphology, because of its heavier semantic load, is in charge
of constructing and modifying meanings. In Matras’ terms, “the purpose of borrowed derivational morphology is to replicate procedures of meaning derivation from
the source language in the recipient language”, while “the purpose of borrowed
inflectional morphology is to re-draw social boundaries”, and thus the borrowing of
inflectional morphology, having considerably more far-reaching effects on both the
language system and the social identity of the speakers, is “strongly dispreferred”.
In an attempt to reconcile Thomason’s and Matras’s proposals on the borrowability of inflectional morphology in situations of ordinary language contact
(for extreme borrowing and language mixing, see Section 4), one might hypothesize that, given a disparity between linguistic communities in terms of prestige,
speakers of the less prestigious language who strive for a higher social status
may be more prone to borrowing inflectional matter the higher the degree of
structural similarity between the languages is. Obviously, only the investigation
of morphological borrowing based on the largest possible number of contact
situations, diverging in terms of degree of genealogical relatedness, structural
congruity of the languages involved, and sociolinguistic scenarios, will allow for
robust generalizations and principled explanations of what are preferred and
dispreferred types of morphological borrowing.
4 Extreme borrowing and mixed language genesis
Different language contact situations can give rise to different linguistic processes
and results. Thomason (2001: 60) proposes a three-fold outline, based on the
structural effects induced by language contact, including contact-induced language change, extreme language mixture, and language death. With respect to
morphological borrowing, some scholars (e.g. Thomason and Kaufman 1988) treat
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ordinary contact-induced change and mixed languages as separate phenomena,
based on the argument that languages which have undergone contact-induced
change, but are clearly traceable back to a single ancestor from which they
descend, cannot be treated on a par with new languages that emerged from the
mixture of two or more SLs under specific social circumstances. However, other
scholars (e.g. Field 2002; Meakins 2011a), do not differentiate between “ordinary”
contact-induced change and language mixing and use “borrowing” to describe
both developments due to ordinary contact-induced language change and occurrences of SL-derived formatives in creoles and mixed languages. Clearly, the type
of morphology that is found in mixed languages differs – in both quantitative
and qualitative terms – from that found in languages that have undergone ordinary contact-induced morphological change. As a matter of fact, the status of a
language as a mixed language is acknowledged precisely because it shows (complete) paradigm borrowing.
The transfer of entire inflectional paradigms has long been regarded as the last
challenge to morphological borrowability. Weinreich (1953: 44) had observed that
the adoption of a full set of morphemes “has apparently never been recorded”. The
later-reported case of the Russian-derived finite verbal paradigm in Mednyj Aleut,
which was spoken east of Kamchatka in Russia, has been dealt with as a case of borrowing of entire inflectional paradigms (Menovščikov 1969; Golovko and Vakhtin
1990; Thomason 1997). But considering this to be a case of borrowing is not uncontroversial, for the very fact that Mednyj Aleut is a mixed language. In (10), we exemplify paradigm borrowing in Mednyj Aleut, comparing the present tense forms of
Mednyj Aleut (10a) with those of Russian (10b) and of Bering Aleut (10c) (data from
Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 234–235; based on Menovščikov 1969: 132).
(10)
Russian3
Mednyj Aleut
a.
1sg
2sg
3sg
1pl
2pl
3pl
b.
uŋuči‑ju
uŋuči‑iš
uŋuči‑it
uŋuči‑im
uŋuči‑iti
uŋuči‑jat
‘I/you/he/she/we/they sit’
Bering Aleut
c.
stro‑ju
stro‑iš
stro‑it
stro‑im
stro‑iti
stro‑jat
‘I etc. build’
uŋuči‑ku‑q
uŋuči‑ku‑x̣t
uŋuči‑ku‑x̣
uŋuči‑ku‑s
uŋuči‑ku‑x̣t‑xičix
uŋuči‑ku‑s
‘I etc. sit’
3 We have replaced the Russian example given by Thomason and Kaufman through a verb from
a more productive inflectional class showing more direct correspondences to the Mednyj Aleut
borrowed morphemes; Russian wordforms are given in a broad phonological transcription.
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Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev and Nino Amiridze
In our volume, Brigitte Pakendorf reports on a case of paradigm borrowing in Lamunkhin Ėven. This endangered Western dialect of Ėven (Northern
Tungusic), spoken in the village of Sebjan-Küöl in the Republic of Sakha
(Yakutia, Siberia, Russia), has heavily borrowed from the Turkic language of
Sakha (a.k.a. Yakut). Two paradigms, the necessitative and the assertive, are
established borrowings, while two other paradigms, the indicative present
tense and the hypothetical mood, are potentially ongoing borrowings. Also,
Pakendorf compares morphological borrowing in Lamunkhin Ėven with that
in Sakha (Turkic) and shows that, while affixes borrowed from Sakha into
Lamunkhin Ėven are mostly inflectional, the majority of Mongolic morphological borrowings in Sakha are derivational suffixes. The author demonstrates
that it is not similar structural preconditions, such as structural congruence,
and similar contact situations (both RLs are subordinate in socio-political
terms), but divergent sociocultural characteristics of the two contact situations that have played a determining part in the borrowing asymmetry found.
While molecular anthropological material reveals no intimate contact between
the Sakha ancestors and Mongols, genetic evidence discloses an intimate,
long-lasting social and physical interaction between the Ėven and the Sakha,
which makes the existence of contact on a close level (through intermarriage
and bilingual families) a probable factor boosting inflectional borrowing.
In the discussion of structural changes in language mixing, the case of
Gurindji Kriol (northern Australia) is of particular relevance, because it is – to
date – the only mixed language to have been documented diachronically from
the mid-1970s through to today (McConvell 1988; McConvell and Meakins 2005;
Meakins 2011b), although with serious lacunae in the 1980–90s, when extensive
code-switching between the Australian language Gurindji and the English-based
Kriol started to stabilize, giving rise to the mixed language (Meakins 2011b: 145).
Meakins shows that, in Gurindji Kriol, the ergative and dative case-formatives are
Gurindji-derived. In the following example, (11a) shows a Kriol-derived noun (cf.
English pussycat), to which the Gurindji-derived ergative suffix applies (Meakins
2011a: 68), while (11b) shows a noun marked by the same source formative, in
Gurindji (Meakins 2011b: 14).
(11)
Gurindji Kriol
a. pujikat‑tu‑ma
cat-erg-top
b. ngakparn‑tu
frog-erg
In our volume, Meakins deepens her research on Gurindji Kriol and shows that
the ergative case suffix not only applies to transitive subjects only optionally
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Borrowed morphology: an overview
13
but can also mark (again optionally) intransitive subjects and is thus analyzable
as an optional marked nominative rather than an ergative. Meakins shows
that the development of the case morpheme from an obligatory and exclusively ergative marker in Gurindji to a pragmatically loaded nominative marker
in Gurindji Kriol, is linked to differences in word order and syntactic encoding
of information structure between Gurindji and Kriol. All this makes the paper
an important contribution not only to the study of mixed languages and morphological borrowing but also to the diachronic typology of case systems.
A topic that has so far never been addressed in the language contact literature is the borrowing of so-called “autonomous morphology” (Aronoff 1994;
Maiden et al. 2011).4 In our volume, Clancy Clements and Ana Luís investigate a peculiar case of morphological borrowing in Korlai Indo-Portuguese, a
Portuguese-based creole language in contact with Marathi, which, in addition
to the three conjugation classes inherited (in reduced form) from Portuguese,
has created a new inflectional class, specifically for integrating Marathi loan
verbs. By investigating the Marathi verbal paradigm, the authors show that
the source of the new inflectional class in Korlai Indo-Portuguese was the
non-finite form occurring in the Marathi negative imperative construction,
and that this inflectional affix was reanalyzed as an inflectional class marker
in the RL.
Language mixing under special sociolinguistic conditions seems to be the
only known type of language contact in which contextual inflection, such as
nominal case markers or verbal person-number inflections, is systematically
transferred from one language to another. Going back to Matras’s claim that the
borrowing of inflection is a function of “redrawing of social boundaries”, we
should relate the fact that the transfer of contextual inflection does happen in
situations of language mixing to the sociolinguistic frame in which language
mixing occurs. According to a well-established assumption, language mixing
can be motivated by dissociation of identity, that is, the wish of one of the groups
involved in the contact situation to establish a new social and linguistic identity,
distinct at least from the identity of the sociolinguistically and culturally dominating group language. From this, we can infer that the conditions under which
4 Autonomous or pure morphology is a kind of morphology that has relevance only for the
morphological component of grammar; it doesn’t serve the syntax, nor contribute any kind of
meaning, and thus stands by itself. Inflectional class formatives, e.g. in the Slavic and Romance
languages, are examples of autonomous morphology.
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14
Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev and Nino Amiridze
language mixing occurs, favor the transfer of formatives that realize contextual
inflection (on this issue, see, e.g. Croft 2003; Matras and Bakker 2003: 13–15;
Meakins 2013: 181, 184–185).
5 Borrowing or inheritance?
As already claimed by Boas (1917, 1920), language contact can affect languages to such an extent that genealogical traceability becomes impossible (see
also Swadesh 1951, for the so-called Boas-Sapir controversy). Thomason and
Kaufman (1988, especially chapter 8) have proposed to assess genealogical
affiliation in situations of language contact in terms of a distinction between
“normal” language transmission and abnormal or “interrupted” transmission. In “normal” language transmission, the genealogical traceability of
a language is possible even in cases of strong contact influence, whereas in
abnormal transmission, usually involving imperfect adult language acquisition, genealogical ties are disrupted and can pave the way for the emergence
of mixed languages. In particular, Thomason and Kaufman argue that languages in which the lexicon and the morphology come from different sources are
suspect of having undergone abnormal transmission sometime in their history
(see Donohue 2013, for a discussion of this issue with respect to the genealogical classification of some Melanesian languages as either “Austronesian” or
“Papuan”). Recently, Karatsareas (2009, 2014) has established clarity in the
much debated and intricate study of Cappadocian Greek as an extreme case
of language change. Focusing on the loss of the Greek traditional tripartite
gender distinction into masculine, feminine, and neuter, the author demonstrates that this innovation is not the result of language contact with Turkish, as
has been generally claimed in the literature, but rather the result of a series of
internal analogical processes, which were probably boosted, but not triggered,
by language contact.
Extreme contact situations and their outcomes notwithstanding, recent
publications have shown how important it is to distinguish between cognate
and borrowed morphological elements (Johanson and Robbeets 2012). In cases
in which the genealogical relatedness of languages is still a matter of debate (as,
e.g. in the Transeurasian or Altaic hypothesis), this distinction is fundamental,
because the identification of certain formally and functionally corresponding
elements as inherited from a common antecessor language, and not as of a result
of borrowing, provides strong evidence for common genealogical ancestry.
Thus, the study of morphological transfer has proved a useful heuristic tool in
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Borrowed morphology: an overview
15
investigations of the genealogical relatedness of languages or language groups
(see Robbeets 2012, for a fruitful example with respect to the Transeurasian
hypothesis; and Whaley 2012, for a study of genealogical relatedness, based
on evidence from derivational morphology).5 No less relevant is the distinction between “copies” and “cognates” when the focus is both on the degree of
contact-induced convergence between genealogically related languages and the
origins of morphemes common to two or more languages (see, e.g. Bowern 2013;
Epps 2013; Law 2013; Mithun 2013, for morphological change induced by contact
between genealogically related languages).
A particularly telling example of difficulties that possibly arise in the study
of morphological borrowing between closely related languages comes from the
Slavic-Baltic contact area (see Koptjevskaja Tamm and Wälchli 2001; Wiemer
2003, 2004, 2009; Wiemer et al. 2014). For example, both Slavic and Baltic
have verbal prefixes expressing various spatial and non-spatial modifications
of the verbal lexical meaning, as well as Aktionsart and perfectivity. Most of
these prefixes are cognate, but instances of mat-borrowing are also attested.
In some cases, the Slavic and Baltic prefixes show non-trivial regular phonological correspondences, which makes their status as cognates seem indisputable, cf. Russian na- vs. Lithuanian nu- or Russian v(o)z- vs. Lithuanian už-. In
the event that formally close morphemes violate the independently established
phonological correspondences, borrowing is the only way to account for the
presence of a prefix both in Slavic and Baltic, as in the case of Russian razand Lithuanian dialectal raz- (regular sound change would predict Lithuanian
*arž-). However, regular phonological development can produce (nearly) homonymous forms, such as Russian pri- and Lithuanian pri- or Russian po- ([pa-] in
unstressed position) and Lithuanian pa- (both pairs of prefixes are considered
cognates), or Russian do- ([da-] when unstressed) and Lithuanian da-.6 When
this happens, cognates cannot be distinguished from potential borrowings on
formal grounds only, and more intricate methods should be invoked in order to
determine the origin of a particular morpheme; for instance, the distribution
5 As a word of warning, the methods of contact linguistics and historical linguistics should not
only be applied soundly but also complement each other. The long-held belief that morphology
is the most reliable basis for genealogical classification of languages (the so-called “Ludolf’s
rule”) may lead to wrong analyses, for example, if borrowings are not recognized as such (see
Grant 2008: 166).
6 Lithuanian linguists regard the Lithuanian da- as a borrowing from Slavic and therefore
exclude it from the standard language; this matter is, however, not uncontroversial, see, e.g.
Kozhanov (2014) for an assessment.
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16
Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev and Nino Amiridze
of its type frequency with respect to the geographical areas with more or less
contact between the languages in question and the degree of similarity between
the semantic profiles (polysemy patterns) of morphemes in these languages
(see Kozhanov 2014 on the application of these methods to the abovementioned
prefix da- in Lithuanian).
In our volume, the problem of “copy vs. cognate” in morphology is addressed
in the articles authored by Martine Robbeets on denominal verbalizers in the
Transeurasian languages and by Françoise Rose on pronominal paradigms in
Arawakan. Both papers provide detailed empirical analyses and arrive at negative conclusions concerning the possibility that morphological borrowing has
occurred. Robbeets investigates “suspect” derivational markers in the languages
traditionally known as “Altaic” (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungus-Manchu, Korean, and
Japanese) and tests four phonologically similar, denominal verbalizers against a
set of criteria designed to determine whether bound morphemes are borrowings
or cognates. The diagnostics of borrowing include, among others, the forms’
restriction to bases shared between the languages in question (which are thus
possibly lexical borrowing themselves); unilateral morphological complexity
of morphemes; morphological, phonological, and functional mismatches; and,
limitation of the shared morpheme’s distribution to contact zones. Based on a
wealth of data, the author concludes that the correspondences and similarities
between the studied forms indicate that they are inherited rather than borrowed.
Robbeets’s article is not only rich in empirical evidence but, crucially, provides
linguistics with a whole array of criteria to apply to other disputed cases in the
historical-comparative research.
By contrast, Rose investigates just one language, Mojeño, and portrays
an innovation occurred in its rich pronominal paradigm, in which a distinction based on the gender of the speaker has developed. This distinction is
not attested in Proto-Arawak, Old Mojeño, or elsewhere in the Arawak family.
Other innovations in Mojeño are the introduction of a non-human third person
category and the development of a non-specified third person category. Rose
considers all possible genesis explanations, both contact-induced and internally motivated, and shows that none of the potential candidates as SLs of
Mojeño’s innovative pronominal forms stands the test. She concludes that
there is not sufficient evidence for a borrowing scenario. Even this negative
result is, in our view, extremely valuable in terms of methodology, because it
makes explicit that the postulation of morphological borrowing requires an
extremely accurate examination of the existing linguistic and socio-historical
facts, and that the burden of proof for a borrowing hypothesis may sometimes
be insurmountable.
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6 Conclusion
This introductory chapter portrays the current trends of research in contactinduced morphological change and shows how far the articles published therein
advance the field. As we have seen, the volume enriches the research landscape
in terms of:
i. empirical evidence, by providing data on morphological borrowing from a
large number of languages;
ii. methodology, by explicitly addressing cases that are hard to attribute to
internal or external causation, or even to the result of multiple causation,
and by providing instruments to test the probability of borrowing rather than
genealogical inheritance;
iii. theory, by showcasing what types of morphology are borrowed in the languages of the world and how different degrees of borrowability are explainable,
owing to different approaches to language contact, both structurally, functionally, and sociolinguistically inspired.
The ten chapters published in the present volume are thematically divided into
three parts. In Section I – Theory – two articles (by Thomason and Matras) discuss
the ease of borrowability of morphology. The other three sections of the book are
defined by the theoretical issues focused upon in the respective articles. Section II
(Coghill; Bağrıaçık, Ralli and Melissaropoulou; and Robbeets) deals with the
borrowing of derivational morphology in terms of mat-borrowing, and Section III
discusses the borrowing of inflectional morphology, in terms of both mat-borrowing
(Pakendorf; Meakins; Clements and Luís; Rose) and pat-borrowing (Stolz).
Acknowledgments
The editors strongly believe in the advantages of serious selection procedures. Ten papers, out of fourteen submitted, have been selected for publication
in this book. The review procedure was three-fold, consisting for each submitted paper of a blind peer review by external experts, an internal review by the
fellow authors, and the editors’ review. We wish to thank Evangelia Adamou,
Mark Aronoff, Walter Breu, Petra Eccarius, Lenore Grenoble, Eitan Grossman,
Ilja Gruntov, Martin Haspelmath, Brian Joseph, Petros Karatsareas, Yury Lander,
Marianne Mithun, Pieter Muysken, Stefan Schnell, Eva Schultze-Berndt, Florian
Siegl, Donald Winford, Fernando Zúñiga, Inge Zwitserlood, as well as all contributors to the volume for their invaluable help. Thanks are due to Yaron Matras for
reviewing the whole manuscript. Usual disclaimers apply.
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Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev and Nino Amiridze
Abbreviations in glosses
1
2
3
ag
dem
erg
inf
lvm
nmlz
pl
prs
prv
pst
sg
suff
top
first person
second person
third person
agentive
demonstrative
ergative
infinitive
loanverb marker
nominalizer
plural
present
perfective
past
singular
suffix
topic
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Borrowed Morphology
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Language Contact
and Bilingualism
Editor
Yaron Matras
Volume 8
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Borrowed
Morphology
Edited by
Francesco Gardani
Peter Arkadiev
Nino Amiridze
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ISBN 978-1-61451-556-2
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-61451-320-9
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0037-4
ISSN 2190-698X
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Contents
Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev and Nino Amiridze
Borrowed morphology: an overview
1
Part I Theory
Sarah G. Thomason
When is the diffusion of inflectional morphology not dispreferred?
Yaron Matras
Why is the borrowing of inflectional morphology dispreferred?
27
47
Part II Borrowing of derivation
Eleanor Coghill
Borrowing of verbal derivational morphology between Semitic languages: the
case of Arabic verb derivations in Neo-Aramaic
83
Metin Bağrıaçık, Angela Ralli and Dimitra Melissaropoulou
Borrowing verbs from Oghuz Turkic: two linguistic areas
109
Martine Robbeets
Common denominal verbalizers in the Transeurasian languages: borrowed or
inherited?
137
Part III Borrowing of inflection
Brigitte Pakendorf
A comparison of copied morphemes in Sakha (Yakut) and Ėven
157
Felicity Meakins
From absolutely optional to only nominally ergative: the life cycle of the
Gurindji ergative suffix
189
J. Clancy Clements and Ana R. Luís
Contact intensity and the borrowing of bound morphology in Korlai IndoPortuguese
219
Françoise Rose
Innovative complexity in the pronominal paradigm of Mojeño: a result of
contact?
241
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vi
Contents
Thomas Stolz
Adjective-noun agreement in language contact: loss, realignment
and innovation
269
Index of subjects
Index of languages
303
307
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