Borrowed Morphology

Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev, Nino Amiridze, Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev, Nino Amiridze

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781501515873
• eBook ISBN: 9781501500374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

By integrating novel developments in both contact linguistics and morphological theory, this volume pursues the topic of borrowed morphology by recourse to sophisticated theoretical and methodological accounts. The authors address fundamental issues, such as the alleged universal dispreference for morphological borrowing and its effects on morphosyntactic complexity, and corroborate their analyses with strong cross-linguistic evidence.

Part I Theory

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Sarah G. Thomason

When is the diffusion of inflectional morphology not dispreferred?

1 Introduction

The common consensus among historical linguists has always been that morphology – in particular inflectional morphology – is the grammatical subsystem least likely to be affected by language contact. The most popular explanation for this fact has been that foreign elements cannot easily make their way into the inflectional morphology because its tightly interconnected paradigmatic structures form a barrier (see Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 14–15 for discussion and references). As with so many generalizations in historical linguistics, this one needs some shading when it is confronted with the evidence from a wide range of contact situations. In this paper I argue that there is no global dispreference for morphological diffusion. In certain types of contact situations, even inflectional morphology passes readily from one language to another. I do not mean to suggest that inflectional morphology is transferred as frequently as other structural features and lexicon; it isn’t. My goal, instead, is to show that the diffusion of inflectional features is considerably more common than one might guess from the general language-contact literature.

The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 has two purposes: first, it covers preliminary issues that set the stage for the discussions to follow; and second, it characterizes the kinds of contact situations in which morphological transfer is most likely to occur. Section 3 focuses on borrowing situations with low levels of typological distance, Section 4 explores morphological transfer in instances of shift-induced interference, and in Section 5 we will consider cases involving deliberate morphological change. Section 6 is a brief summing-up conclusion.

2 A few preliminaries

Several distinctions must be made in order to address the issue of morphological diffusion between languages. Most importantly, a distinction needs to be drawn between two quite different kinds of intense contact situations and their linguistic outcomes (as outlined in Thomason and Kaufman 1988: chapter 3), one is morphological borrowing in a narrow sense of “borrowing”, where bilingual speakers transfer grammatical morphemes and/or morphological patterns from one of their languages into the other; the other type of diffusion is shift-induced interference, where (thanks to imperfect learning) shifting speakers introduce morphological features from their original L₁, their heritage language, into the target language, the language they are shifting to. In this paper I will use the term “borrowing” only in the narrow sense. By including both of these types of contact-induced change, I depart from the definition of “morphological borrowing” adopted by Gardani (2012), which excludes shift-induced interference.

The distinction between interference via borrowing and interference via shift correlates robustly with a difference in the kinds of linguistic features transferred from one language to the other. In borrowing, the predominant interference features are words, with structural features lagging behind and confined to intense (rather than casual) contact situations. In shift-induced interference, by contrast, the predominant interference features are structural, specifically phonological and syntactic; there may be few transferred lexical items in a shift situation. (Although these correlations are robust, they are not exceptionless. In some cultures, for instance, lexical borrowing is considered inappropriate; when such cultures come into intense contact with other cultures, therefore, the linguistic outcome might involve structural borrowing without lexical borrowing –for examples, see e.g. Kroskrity 1993 and Aikhenvald 2002.)

The reason this distinction is important in the present context is that contact-induced morphological changes are most likely to occur in two distinct kinds of situations: first, cases of borrowing (in my narrow sense) in which the languages in contact are very closely related, perhaps even dialects of the same language; and second, cases of shift-induced interference in which the shifting speakers’ version of the target language displays numerous learners’ “errors”. In the borrowing situations, the typological distance between the source language and the receiving language, at least at the relevant structure point(s), is minimal. As we will see in Section 4 below, typological distance appears to be less important in shift situations than in borrowing situations.

It is also important to note that borrowing is more likely than shift-induced interference to include the transfer of morphemes in addition to structure. In shift-induced interference it is often (though by no means always) the case that only structures are transferred, so that the innovative structures are expressed by native morphemes in the receiving language. In this paper I consider both of these types of morphological interference – that is, with and without accompanying transfer of morphemes (for discussion of this distinction, see Heath 1978 on direct vs. indirect diffusion, e.g. p. 125, followed by later authors, e.g. Thomason and Kaufman 1988, e.g. p. 32; Matras and Sakel 2007). This is again in contradistinction to the approach adopted in Gardani 2012, where only morphological borrowing that includes transferred morphemes is considered. My main reason for being more inclusive is that general claims about the possibilities and probabilities of morphological interference can (in my opinion) contribute to our overall understanding of processes and results of contact-induced change only if they encompass the entire range of contact situations. Another reason for including shift situations and structure-only contact-induced changes is that in many or most shift situations, borrowing and shift-induced interference occur simultaneously, mediated by different agents; and it is not always possible to determine which process(es) has/have produced a given innovation. An example is the Chantyal-Nepali contact situation described by Noonan (2008: 84–85), in which Chantyal speakers used Nepali regularly and were far outnumbered by Nepali speakers, but in which many speakers of Nepali (and several other languages) learned Chantyal because of its speakers’ advantageous economic position. The sociolinguistic complexities of this situation most likely promoted both borrowing and shift-induced interference, including the transfer of morphemes such as a comparative, a benefactive “for”, and a comitative (Noonan 2008: 95).

Obviously, given the relevance of typological distance in morphological borrowing and its probable relevance in shift-induced morphological interference, we must also distinguish between pairs of languages in contact according to typological congruence: contact-induced morphological changes, especially in the inflectional morphology and especially in borrowing situations, occur much more frequently at typologically congruent structure points than at typologically disparate structure points. (The general argument about typological congruence facilitating structural borrowing was made as early as Weinreich 1953 and Heath 1978; the same argument has also been made by numerous later authors, e.g. Thomason and Kaufman 1988. The greater importance of typological congruence in borrowing situations as opposed to shift situations is discussed in more detail in Thomason 2014). The notion of typological congruence, as I am using it here, is not necessarily self-evident, so I will be explicit about two crucial aspects of the phenomenon: it is gradient, and it is structure-specific. A structure in one language may be more or less similar typologically to a functionally comparable structure in another language; the more similar two morphological structures are, the more likely they are to be the target of morphological transfer. Assessing the degree of typological congruence in a given instance is often not a straightforward either/or decision. In efforts to explain the linguistic outcomes of language contact, it is not useful to compare (for instance) morphosyntactic systems as wholes: the fact that languages A and B have more or less completely dissimilar verbal systems, for instance, does not make it less likely that cases can diffuse from A to B if the languages have overlapping categories in noun declension. Although typological distance is relevant for both borrowing and shift situations, its role is clearer in borrowing than in shift-induced interference. Given sufficiently intense contact – which, in shift situations, usually means that shifting speakers greatly outnumber target-language speakers – morphological innovations in the shifting group’s version of the target language can include typologically novel features. This can also happen even in borrowing situations, but it is relatively rare (see Thomason 2001b for discussion).

Another relevant distinction concerns the processes, or mechanisms, of contact-induced change. When morphology is borrowed, the mechanisms may (but need not) differ from the mechanisms in play in shift-induced morphological transfer. Borrowing of morphology between closely-related systems may proceed by passive familiarity, whereby speakers who speak only one of the varieties in contact adopt features from a variety they understand but do not speak. This won’t happen in shift-induced interference, because by definition shifting speakers do not have full familiarity with the target language. In shift-induced interference, the dominant mechanism will almost certainly be second-language acquisition strategies, usually combined with negotiation (for discussion of these and other mechanisms of interference, see Thomason 2001a: chapter 6).

Finally, in all analyses of contact effects we must consider social factors of various kinds, because social factors provide both motivation and opportunity for contact-induced changes of all kinds, including morphological interference. The importance of social factors is most obvious in the distinction between borrowing and shift-induced interference, which is ultimately a sociolinguistic dichotomy; most strikingly, however, it is seen in instances of deliberate language change, where linguistic factors such as typological congruence between source language and receiving language appear to play no role in determining the linguistic results of contact (see S...

Table of contents

• Language Contact and Bilingualism
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Borrowed morphology: an overview
• Part I Theory
• Part II Borrowing of derivation
• Part III 1 Borrowing of inflection
• Index of subjects
• Index of languages