Accountability in morphological borrowing: Analyzing a linguistic subsystem as a sociolinguistic variable.

 

Tara Sanchez

https://goo.gl/gkTEKc

Principle of Accountability (PofA)

Analysts should record all occurrences of a variable rather than selecting those variants of a variable that tends to confirm their argument while ignoring others that do not.

 

*source

Thomason and Kaufman

Social factors can explain all structural borrowing

Principle of Accountability (PofA)

Intense contact → intense structural

But...
Cannot objectively measure contact intensity → lacks predictive force, shows that increasing levels of structural borrowing

 

Contact situation

  1. Location: Aruba and Curaçao
  2. Contacted languages: Papiamentu, Dutch, Spanish, English and CEC(Caribbean English Creole)
  3. Recipient language: Papiamentu 
  4. Borrowings can come from four structurally distinct language varieties.
  5. Social circumstances are distinct and have drastic changes

The corpus

  1. Real-time data

  2. 171 written texts

  3. Assuming no major changes in an individual's grammar after age 20

  4. The dependent variable
    is whether or not a form
    or function from the
    verbal morphology of
    Dutch, Spanish, or
    English is borrowed
    into Papiamentu.

  5. The list of possible
    borrowings is given
    in Table 2.

There are 191 possible borrowings: 21 from English, 22 from CEC, 38 from Dutch, and 110 from Spanish.

Social/demographic variables

Linguistic variables

Three borrowing universals

Methodology

  1. Coded each foreign form in Table 2 as “not borrowed”, “borrowed”(used productively)
  2. Ran data from the two islands separately
  3. Each of the 191 forms in Table 2 was coded as borrowed or not once (i.e., as types) per
    period, for a total of 1719 tokens from 9 periods
    (191 * 9 = 1719)
  4. The data were analyzed with the Goldvarb 2001 statistical program

 

Productive means occurring at least three times in one text or one or more times per text in at least three texts during a given period.

Results

Once a foreign form becomes productive, it remains productive.

Results

Results

Two nonlinguistic factors were excluded:

  1. Time period 1 (1775–1837): reflects precontact Papiamentu when borrowings were not expected.
  2. CEC: The lack of borrowings from CEC→ prestige

Contributions of the principle of accountability

 

The statistically significant factors support the following proposed constraints on borrowing:

  1. morphological renewal,
  2. perceptual salience,
  3. convergence,
  4. other paradigm-member borrowed, and
  5. length of bilingualism.

Types of linguistic factors proposed

Of the three borrowing universals proposed, none were significant as proposed in the literature.

Allomorphy <-> isomorphic <-> complexity <-> convewrgence

  • Shared features in languages in contact are likely to be transmitted to another
  • Items in a tight paradigm → difficult to borrow
    when they are borrowed, they are borrowed together

Prevalence of linguistic factors

  • Social factors: no strong evidence 
  • Length of bilingualism: only significant external factor, but this finding is indirect.

Againsts Thomason and Kaufman’s view of the deterministic role of social factors 

Relationship of form and function

The morphological encoding of structure was borrowed separately from the abstract structure it represents.

Discussion and conclusions

Conclusions

  1. Specific linguistic circumstances, with one relevant social factor
  2. Structural factors play a deterministic role in borrowing
  3. Once a borrowing becomes a productive part of the grammar of the recipient language, it may become sensitive to social status, but will vary only inasmuch as linguistic factors permit variation.
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