[Corpora-List] Corpora Digest, Vol 51, Issue 30

[Anne Schumann]

Hi,

I find this discussion very interesting, but I do think it's reasonable to be careful with terminology and hypotheses. First of all, I don't see a reason why one should resort to a source of evidence as intractable as "speakers' knowledge about language". Are we talking about "ideal speakers" here or what would be a representative "corpus" of speakers? Moreover, I think that linguists tend to forget that most people don't care for language and know even less about it in terms of theory: Most native speakers don't know anything about many of the useful distinctions that are common in linguistics. For foreignness, just ask some people in the street whether "Portemonnaie" is a foreign word in German. Then show them the written form. I hypothesize that more people will recognize the written form as foreign than the spoken form because the written from has strange spelling. Spelling, however, is a linguistic category and we don't need huge surveys to detect strange spelling. In short: The problem of foreignness, to me, is not related to psycholinguistics. Or does anybody know of evidence for a psychological difference between "normal" and "foreign" words (differences in storage and/or processing)? I just remembered that I was the first on this list to mention the native speaker criterion, but maybe it's not the best criterion after all^^.
I believe it's possible to model "foreignness" in terms of linguistic "weirdness": Just compare an older  borrowing from French, such as "das Portemonnaie", again, which is now adjusted to German spelling rules ("Portmonee") and normally inflected etc. to "die/das E-Mail/Email/email", for which Germans cannot even agree on an article. Both are "weird" linguistically, but Portemonnaie/Portmonee may be "less weird". To me this looks like an opportunity for the application of a scalar metric forming a continuum in which one could even locate broader categories. Empirical evidence for the ranking could come from various linguistic levels.
Secondly, loan words like "Grenze/granica", "Karton/carton" and "Ziegel/tegula" should be distinguished from foreign words. And I think, again, there's an empirical basis to that besides speakers' knowledge (linguistic weirdness = 0 or close to 0). However, I am not a specialist in this field and my hypotheses are open to correction.
Last but not least, a fun question on "Boot/boat": If we talk about Proto-Germanics living in a Proto-Germanic territory, can we really call this a "borrowing from English to German"? Did "German" or "English" exist back then? Besides that, fork/Forke may also be proto-Germanic. 

Best,
Anne
PhD Student
University of Vienna
Tilde


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