Borrowing matter and pattern in morphology. An overview
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Borrowing matter and pattern in morphology. An overview Francesco Gardani1
Accepted: 22 October 2020 / Published online: 30 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Morphological inventories and structures of languages in contact can converge by means of either increasing formal similarity (MAT borrowing), or structural congruence (PAT borrowing), or a combination of both (MAT&PAT borrowing). In order to understand whether and how these borrowing types covary with specific grammatical features and modules of grammar, I propose a typology of MAT and PAT borrowing that distinguishes between functional and realization levels and covers all areas of grammar that can be affected by borrowing. I exemplify selected subtypes of borrowing with a number of crosslinguistic cases focusing on morphology and morphosyntax. Keywords Grammatical borrowing · Morphological borrowing · Language contact · Matter borrowing · Pattern borrowing
1 Introduction One of the possible triggers of grammatical change is language contact. Generally speaking, a source language (SL) can influence the grammar of a recipient language (RL) in two fundamentally distinct ways: either concrete material is taken over or abstract patterns are calqued. These fundamental types, which concern all components of grammar and are not specific to morphology, have been given many names in the literature, including ‘direct diffusion’ (Heath 1978:21), ‘direct transfer’ (Heath 1984; Weinreich 1953), ‘transfer of fabric’ (Grant 2002), ‘global copying’ (Johanson 2002), for the former, and called ‘replication’ (cf. Weinreich 1953:31 ‘replica language’), ‘indirect transfer’ (Silva-Corvalán 1994), ‘indirect diffusion’ (Heath 1978:21), ‘structural convergence’ (Heath 1984), ‘selective copying’ (Johanson 2002) and generally,
B F. Gardani 1
Institute of Romance Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
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F. Gardani
‘calque’ (Haugen 1950), for the latter. More recently the terminological pair introduced by Matras and Sakel (2007a) and Sakel (2007) of ‘matter borrowing’ (henceforth MAT borrowing) as opposed to ‘pattern borrowing’ (henceforth PAT borrowing) has become commonly used. Applying this dichotomy to morphology, MAT borrowing concerns actual morphological formatives, such as in (1), while PAT borrowing concerns morphological techniques, that is, structural patterns but no forms, as exemplified in (2). (1)
MAT borrowing a. Turkish (RL) yengeç-vari crab-ADJZ ‘crab-like’
b.
Persian (SL) pishrow-var leader-ADJZ ‘leader-like’
The data in (1a) exemplifies the borrowing of a formative, viz. the adjectivizer -vari meaning ‘resembling’ (and corresponding to English -like or -ish),1 from Persian (1b), into Turkish, where the formative occurs on native lexical bases such as yengeç ‘crab’ (Gardani 2020:104; Seifart 2013).2 The data in (2) showcases the borrowing of a pattern, viz. the overt marking of plural on nouns, when these follow numerals, in Imbabura Quichua, a Quechua language spoken in the Northern Andes of Ecuador, which has been in contact with Spa
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