TPCS 27: A usage-based approach to borrowability

By Ad Backus

Abstract

Borrowability has been a topic in language contact research since the field began. It has been approached from various angles, and has led to borrowability hierarchies that rank parts of speech according to the ease with which they can be borrowed. Such hierarchies provide a starting point for explanatory efforts: why is it, for example, that nouns are eminently borrowable, and why is inflectional morphology rarely borrowed? Several methodological problems, however, plague the investigation of borrowability. One is the availability of sufficient data. Most hierarchies are based on reported summaries in the literature and relatively small corpora. Since funding agencies will not easily fund the building of large corpora of bilingual speech, it is important to develop additional methods. In fact, psycholinguistic experimentation would be a welcome addition to the field of contact linguistics, as it will allow investigating questions about borrowability that are only beginning to be asked. These questions are driven by the advent of the usage-based approach in linguistics, an approach that has not been applied much to contact data yet, but which is very compatible with how most theorists have accounted for language contact. The paper goes over some of these theoretical issues, and discusses the methodological implications. Most importantly, a usage-based approach to borrowability demands we collect data on loanwords’ entrenchment in individual speakers and their conventionalization across speech communities. In doing this, the paper attempts to solidify the links between contact linguistics and cognitive linguistics, thereby contributing to 1) a better understanding of the phenomenon of borrowing; 2) the account of language contact phenomena in a Cognitive Sociolinguistics framework (more specifically a usage-based account of contact-induced change); and 3) a further appreciation of the methodological issues involved in researching borrowing from these perspectives.

How to quote: Backus, A. (2012). A usage-based approach to borrowability. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 27).

Read the full working paper here: A usage-based approach to borrowability.