Replicated inflection? Plot twists behind apparent borrowed plurals
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Replicated inflection? Plot twists behind apparent borrowed plurals Marianne Mithun1
Received: 10 May 2018 / Accepted: 10 February 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Morphology, particularly inflectional morphology, has sometimes been considered among the last features of language to be transferred under conditions of language contact. It has become clear, however, that numerous factors can affect the susceptibility of bound morphology to transfer. One of these involves typological similarities among the languages involved, similarities which might increase over long periods of contact and in turn set the stage for elaboration of particular domains. Here such effects are examined in what is commonly viewed as a prototypical kind of inflection: plural marking on nouns. The languages involved are indigenous to a well-known linguistic area in Northern California, but they represent three unrelated families: Pomoan, Yukian, and Wintun. While shared plural markers often ride into languages in contact on the backs of borrowed nouns, speakers of these languages have a history of avoiding much lexical borrowing. The shared markers apparently entered the languages via a more circuitous route. Throughout the area, inflectional number marking on nouns is rare, but related distinctions on verbs can be elaborate. It appears that what was transferred were verbal distributive and collective suffixes, which then evolved within the individual languages, to varying degrees, into number marking on nouns. Keywords Inflectional borrowing · Plural · California · Pomoan · Wintun · Yukian
1 Inflection in contact Morphology is notoriously resistant to borrowing, typically cited last on hierarchies of borrowability (Haugen 1950; Moravcsik 1978; Thomason and Kaufman 1988; Wilkins 1996; Haspelmath 2008; Matras 2009; Bakker and Hekking 2012). Where
B M. Mithun
[email protected]
1
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
M. Mithun
types of morphology are differentiated, inflection has often been considered the least transferrable of all. There are now, however, numerous examples in the literature of borrowed inflectional markers (Heath 1978; Gardani 2008, 2012, 2018; Sakel 2007; Eliasson 2012; Meakins 2011; Thomason 2015; Seifart 2015a, 2016; and more) and even whole paradigms (Golovko 1996, 2003; Thomason 1997; Matras 2000; Myers-Scotton 2002; Pakendorf 2009, 2015 among others). It has become clear that a number of factors can affect the susceptibility of bound morphology to transfer. One that has frequently been hypothesized for a variety of domains is typological similarity among the languages involved. Here such effects are examined in what might appear to be an unlikely kind of replication: plural marking on nouns. The languages involved are indigenous to a well-known linguistic area of Northern California. They represent three unrelated families: the Pomoan languages, Wappo of the Yukian family, and Wintu, Nomlaki and Patwin of the Wintun family. Though there have been numerous efforts at finding genealogica
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