Query borrowing of integration markers

[Paolo Ramat]

Dear Colleague,
as for the 'falsche Trennung' and misinterpretation of  morpheme boundaries 
you may refer to my forthcoming article 'Sturtevant’s paradox revisited',
to appear in the volume “Irregularity in morphology (and beyond)”edited by 
Johan van der Auwera, Thomas Stolz, Aina Urdze and Hitomi Otsuka, Akademie 
Verlag:
"We find other kinds of irregularity which give rise to new regular 
paradigms. A well-known example is the so-called false segmentation (falsche 
Trennung). A case in point is the French new interrogative morpheme -ti in 
forms such as Je peux-ti voir?, Tu viens-ti?: ti derives from 3rd Person 
interrogatives like vient-il?, viennent-ils? with eli-sion of [l] (cf. i’ 
vient, i’ viennent ). The -t-i’ sequence was reinterpreted as a separate 
unit marking the question and consequently extended in substandard, 
vernacular French to the other persons: Je peux-ti? et aussi ça va-ti?(see 
Ball 2000: 35–37).
We are faced here not with sound change creating irregularity,  but with a 
morpho-syntactic reanalysis leading to a new morpheme, valid for the entire 
paradigm (gram-maticalization of -ti).
Similarly, in some Frankish and Bavarian dialects we find hamir, 1PRES.PL of 
“to have”, from ham wir < haben wir (with assimilation of -w- to the 
preceding m). This has created a new 1PL pronoun mir, extracted from the 
ending. Thus, we get mir ha-mmer(/-mər) where the 1PL is redundantly 
indicated twice. In the same way, we find habtir < habt îr ‘you (2PL) have”, 
which again has originated a new 2PL pronoun tîr instead of îr: tîr habtir; 
(cf. Girnth 2000: 176 and Gaeta 2003: 186–187).

You write further: What I miss in all publications I've read so far are 
cases of this kind in nouns.
Perhaps one could quote  cases like Engl. -age-ness where the first suffixe 
denotes an LNM and the second has more or less the same function as -age- 
but is not a loan.
Best
P.Rt.




Prof.Paolo Ramat
Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS )
Direttore del Centro "Lingue d'Europa: tipologia, storia e sociolinguistica" 
(LETiSS)
Viale Lungo Ticino Sforza 56
27100 Pavia
tel. ++390382375811
fax ++390382375899
-----Messaggio originale----- 
From: Gardani Francesco
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 6:24 PM
To: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Subject: Query borrowing of integration markers

Dear Colleagues,

I am studying cases of borrowed markers that act as integration elements in 
the recipient language. To give just an example, the integration of Greek 
loans into Arvanítika, a variety of Tosk Albanian spoken in Greece, occurs 
through the Greek conjunctive aorist stem: given, for example, the Greek 
verb agapo ‘I love’ and its conjunctive aorist form na agapíso, the stem 
agapís‑ displaying the Greek aorist stem formant ‑s‑ is used to form 
Arvanítika agapís ‘I love’ and agapísa ‘I loved’. This marker has become the 
general integration suffix throughout the Balkan Sprachbund.

Cases like these have been well described by Breu (1991a, 1991b), among 
others, and labelled as “borrowing of accommodation patterns” by Wohlgemuth 
(2009: 224-241; see also my critique in Gardani 2011: 144).

What I miss in all publications I've read so far are cases of this kind in 
nouns. Theoretically, it would be possible to have a marker -fn- borrowed by 
a recipient language GLR from a source language GLS and used in GLR to 
integrate nouns which have been borrowed themselves from GLS or from other 
source languages. Let us create an example and imagine Ancient Greek as a 
GLR that systematically uses a marker -am-, borrowed from a GLS Latin (in 
which ‑am marks the ACC.SG of the a-stems) to integrate nouns which Ancient 
Greek has borrowed from Latin (or from other source languages). We would 
call the morpheme ‑am- a borrowed loan noun marker (LNM) of our imaginary 
Latin. From  Latin hortus 'garden' we would get something like *hortus-am-os 
garden-LNM-NOM.SG(1DECL) 'garden'.

Enough of fantasy now! If you find the issue interesting and you know of 
some instances of borrowed both loan NOUN- and loan VERB markers, I would 
appreciate it a lot if you could get in touch with me and share your data.



Thanks in advance and best regards,

Francesco Gardani



References:
Breu, Walter. 1991a. Abweichungen vom phonetischen Prinzip bei der 
Integration von Lehnwörtern. In Klaus Hartenstein & Helmut Jachnow (eds.), 
Slavistische Linguistik 1990, 36-69. München: Otto Sagner.

Breu, Walter. 1991b. System und Analogie bei der Integration von 
Lehnwörtern. Versuch einer Klassifikation. Incontri Linguistici 14. 13-28.

Gardani, Francesco. 2011. Review of Jan Wohlgemuth. 2009. A typology of 
verbal borrowings. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Linguistic Typology 15(1). 
139-146.

Wohlgemuth, Jan. 2009. A typology of verbal borrowings. Berlin: Mouton de 
Gruyter.



=========
Dr. Francesco Gardani
Assistant Professor
Institute for Romance Languages
Vienna University of Economics and Business
Nordbergstraße 15
A-1090 Vienna
Tel  +43-1-31336-4840
Fax +43-1-31336-729
francesco.gardani at wu.ac.at
http://www.wu.ac.at/roman/mitarbeiter/gardani