Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-grxwn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-11T06:09:17.407Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

28 - Contact and Borrowing

from Part Six - Language, Society, and the Individual

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2022

By
Francesco Gardani
Edited by
Adam Ledgeway  and
Martin Maiden
Adam Ledgeway
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Martin Maiden
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Get access

Summary

Language contact is at the base of potential changes in language, whose extent may vary considerably depending on the degree of multilingual interaction. Therefore, the study of language contact is key to the understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of language. The Romance linguistic landscape cuts across multiple possible contact-setting types, and the empirical evidence for contact-induced change involving Romance is abundant. The Romance languages thus qualify as an ideal testbed for language contact studies. This chapter highlights the difference between innovative and conservative effects of language contact and discusses borrowing as the fundamental process and result of contact-induced language change, distinguishing between RL and SL agentivity, and between matter borrowing and pattern borrowing. Several case studies of borrowing are presented in relation to different components of grammar, namely phonology, prosody, morphology, and syntax. The upper limits of borrowing are discussed (in terms of areal formation and mixed language genesis) and a number of predictors of grammatical borrowing are reviewed. Issues concerning the so-called borrowability hierarchies are critically addressed.

Keywords

areal formationborrowingborrowability hierarchiesconservative vs innovative effects of language contactlanguage contactmixed language genesismorphological borrowingphonological borrowingprosodic borrowingsyntactic borrowing
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics , pp. 845 - 869
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Selected References

Adamou, E., Breu, W., Scholze, L., and Shen, R. (2016). ‘Borrowing and contact intensity: a corpus-driven approach from four Slavic minority languages’, Journal of Language Contact 9: 515–44.Google Scholar
Bakker, P. (1997). A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Metis. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Enrique-Arias, A. (2010). ‘On language contact as an inhibitor of language change: the Spanish of Catalan bilinguals in Majorca’. In Breitbarth, A., Lucas, C., Watts, S., and Willis, D. (eds), Continuity and Change in Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins, 97–118.Google Scholar
Gardani, F. (2008). Borrowing of Inflectional Morphemes in Language Contact. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, J. H. and Hill, K. C. (2004). ‘Word order type change and the penetration of Spanish de in modern Nahuatl’, STUF – Language Typology and Universals 57: 23–48.Google Scholar
Muysken, P. (2012). ‘Root/affix asymmetries in contact and transfer: case studies from the Andes’, International Journal of Bilingualism 16: 22–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quinto-Pozos, D. and Adam, R. (2015). ‘Sign languages in contact’. In Schembri, A. and Lucas, C. (eds), Sociolinguistics and Deaf Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 29–60.Google Scholar
Saade, B. (2020). ‘Quantitative approaches to productivity and borrowing in Maltese derivation’, Morphology 30: 447–67.Google Scholar
Sakel, J. (2007). ‘Types of loan: matter and pattern’. In Matras, Y. and Sakel, J. (eds), Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 15–29.Google Scholar
Seifart, F. (2017). ‘Patterns of affix borrowing in a sample of 100 languages’, Journal of Historical Linguistics 7: 389–431.Google Scholar
Sessarego, S. (2017). ‘Chocó Spanish double negation and the genesis of the Afro-Hispanic dialects of the Americas’, Diachronica 34: 219–52.Google Scholar
Van Coetsem, F. (1988). Loan Phonology and the Two Transfer Types in Language Contact. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×