Yaron Matras (Manchester)
Borrowing verbs: Formal and functional aspects
Department Colloquium
Thursday, November 6, 2008
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
310 Hearst Mining
Numerous studies have contested an early claim by Moravcsik (1978) that verbal elements cannot be directly borrowed. Nonetheless, it is still widely accepted that the borrowing of verbs is more ‘problematic’ than that of nouns, adjectives, adverbs or other classes of content words. There also appears to be agreement that the borrowing of verbs is complicated by two principal factors: the potential morphological complexity of verbs, and, not least as a consequence of the former, considerable typological differences among languages in verbal morphology. As a result, languages tend to adopt a range of morphological adaptation strategies to accommodate borrowed verbs (cf. Myers-Scotton 1995, Muysken 2000, Wichman & Wohlgemuth 2008).
I will show that the various morphological adaptation strategies can be interpreted as a continuum ranging from full acceptance of the ‘verbness’ of a borrowed lexeme, to the denial and consequent need to reconstruct its verbness. Adaptation morphology is in other words functional in establishing ‘verbness’. ‘Verbness’ in turn is the ability to act as the anchor for the predication of the utterance: the ability to contextualise it within the presuppositional domain of the communicative interaction. At the same time, it is the finite verb that signals, more than any other element in the sentence, accommodation to the context, setting or addressee-dependent constraints on code selection: To switch from Dutch to Turkish means to switch from a Dutch predication, anchored by a Dutch finite verb, to a Turkish one.
It follows that borrowed verbs are points of potential ambiguity in respect of the base-language of the utterance. Borrowing the lexical component of a verb amounts to the transfer of the depiction of an action, state or event from one association world (‘language’) into another (as in the replication of the concept downloaden in a German context). Verb integration strategies are there to ensure that this transfer is not confused with an initiation of the predication itself in the contact language. It enables a separation of functions in the verb: labelling an event on the one hand, initiating the predication on the other.
Co-sponsored by: Department of Slavic Languaes and Literatures, Institute for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies