[Lingtyp] CfP WS Matter borrowing vs pattern borrowing in morphology at SLE 2017

Mon Sep 26 16:42:28 UTC 2016

***Apologies for cross-posting***

Matter borrowing vs pattern borrowing in morphology

Workshop to be proposed for the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Zurich, 10–13 September 2017

Workshop organizers:

Francesco Gardani  <mailto:francesco.gardani at uzh.ch> francesco.gardani at uzh.ch

with Rik van Gijn, Stefan Dedio, Florian Matter, Florian Sommer, Manuel Widmer (all Zurich University)

Call deadline:    25 October 2016

Workshop description

When languages are in contact, the morphology of one language can influence the morphology of another. There are two fundamentally distinct ways in which this can occur. Speakers of a recipient language can borrow from a source language either morphological material, that is, actual morphemes, or morphological techniques, that is, structural patterns but no forms. These fundamental types, exemplified in (1) vs. (2), are frequently referred to as ‘matter borrowing’ as opposed to ‘pattern borrowing’ (Sakel 2007; Matras & Sakel 2007). 

(1)         matter-borrowing

                            Turkish                             Persian

              a.           yengeç‑vari                      b.           pishrow-var

                            ‘crab-like’                                       ‘leader-like’

(2)         pattern-borrowing

                            Basque                                           Spanish

              a.           aztertu                              b.           examinar                          

                            ‘examine’                                                     

                            berr-aztertu                                   re-examinar

                            ‘re-examine’

In Turkish, the adjectivizer ‑vari, borrowed from Persian (1b), can occur on Turkish native bases, such as yengeç ‘crab’ (1a) (Gardani forthc.). In Basque (2a), the native morpheme bir‑ (or its allomorph berr‑), meaning ‘repetition’ or ‘emphasis’, replicates a Romance pattern to form deverbal verbs through the prefix re‑ (2b) (Jendraschek 2006: 158–159).

These two phenomena, however, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A third type of contact-induced morphological change is attested, in which matter borrowing and pattern borrowing are combined (Gardani forthc.). Modern Persian is a case in point. Here, some nouns with native Indo-European etyma, realize their plural forms just as Arabic, the long-standing contact language, does. For example, farmān ‘order’ (3a) (< Old Persian fra‑ ‘forward’ + mā‑ ‘measure’) yields a plural farāmīn, not only replicating a Semitic non-concatenative morphological technique, CVCV:CV:C, but also resorting to the same set of vowels, CaCa:Ci:C, which occurs, e.g., in Arabic ṣanādīq ‘boxes’ (3b) (data from Jensen 1931: 45; see also Mumm 2007: 41). 

(3)         Modern Persian

              a.           farmān ‘order’                b.           ṣandūq ‘box’

                            farāmīn ‘orders’                           ṣanādīq ‘boxes’

In all of these cases, the morphological design of a recipient language has become closer to that of its source language in terms of either form identity or similarity (i.e., matter-borrowing), or structural re‑arrangement and convergence (i.e., pattern-borrowing), or a combination of both. 

As is generally acknowledged, morphology is relatively resistant to borrowing (Gardani et al. 2015a). This fact makes the study of morphological borrowing a valuable heuristic tool in investigations of the genealogical relatedness of languages or language groups (good examples are Law 2013, 2014; Robbeets 2015). While, however, the topic of morphological matter borrowing has recently received slightly more attention in contact linguistics (Gardani 2008, 2012; Gardani et al. 2015b; Seifart 2013, 2015), the phenomenon of morphological pattern borrowing and in particular, its cross-linguistic diffusion and areal dimensions, are still largely understudied. The workshop matter borrowing vs pattern borrowing in morphology endeavors to fill this gap and aims to provide a cross-linguistic survey of matter borrowing and pattern borrowing, in order to seize their global extension and incidence in the evolution of morphology. We are especially interested in the following questions (but potential contributors should not feel restricted by them):

1. Which areas of morphology are more frequently affected by which type of borrowing?

2. What are the conditions that promote or inhibit the spread of which type of morphological borrowing?

3. Are the processes that underlie pattern borrowing the same that underlie contact-induced grammaticalization (Heine & Kuteva 2003)?

4. To what extent are abstract paradigmatic structures, such as morphomes (Maiden 2005), borrowed?

5. How can the study of pattern borrowing relate to phylogenetic patterns and contribute to the study of areal patterns in morphology?

The workshop is planned to be held at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) in Zurich, 10–13 September 2017. We invite 20 minute presentations (+ 8 minutes for discussion). Preliminary abstracts (300 words, excluding references, DOCX and/or PDF) should be sent to Francesco Gardani ( <mailto:francesco.gardani at uzh.ch> francesco.gardani at uzh.ch) by 25 October 2016. They will be selected and serve to prepare a workshop proposal to be submitted to the SLE.

Important Dates: 
25 October 2016: deadline for submission of 300-word abstracts to the workshop organizer

10 November 2016: notification of acceptance by the workshop organizer

25 November 2016: submission of the workshop proposals to SLE 
25 December 2016: notification of acceptance of workshop proposals from SLE
15 January 2017: deadline for submission of abstracts to SLE for review
31 March 2017: notification of paper acceptance

10–13 September 2017: SLE conference 

References

Gardani, Francesco. forthc. Morphology and contact-induced language change. In Anthony Grant (ed.), The Oxford handbook of language contact. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gardani, Francesco. 2008. Borrowing of inflectional morphemes in language contact. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Gardani, Francesco. 2012. Plural across inflection and derivation, fusion and agglutination. In Lars Johanson & Martine I. Robbeets (eds.), Copies versus cognates in bound morphology, 71–97. Leiden & Boston: Brill.

Gardani, Francesco, Peter Arkadiev & Nino Amiridze. 2015a. Borrowed mophology: An overview. In Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev & Nino Amiridze (eds.), Borrowed morphology (Language Contact and Bilingualism 8), 1–23. Berlin, Boston & Munich: De Gruyter Mouton.

Gardani, Francesco, Peter Arkadiev & Nino Amiridze (eds.). 2015b. Borrowed morphology (Language Contact and Bilingualism 8). Berlin, Boston & Munich: De Gruyter Mouton.

Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2003. On contact-induced grammaticalization. Studies in Language 27(3). 529–572.

Jendraschek, Gerd. 2006. Basque in contact with Romance languages. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & Robert M. W. Dixon (eds.), Grammars in contact: A cross-linguistic typology, 143–162. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jensen, Hans. 1931. Neupersische Grammatik: Mit Berücksichtigung der historischen Entwicklung. Heidelberg: Winter.

Law, Danny. 2013. Inherited similarity and contact-induced change in Mayan Languages. Journal of Language Contact 6(2). 271–299.

Law, Danny. 2014. Language contact, inherited similarity and social difference: The story of linguistic interaction in the Maya lowlands. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Maiden, Martin. 2005. Morphological autonomy and diachrony. In Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of morphology 2004, 137–175. Dordrecht: Springer.

Matras, Yaron & Jeanette Sakel. 2007. Introduction. In Yaron Matras & Jeanette Sakel (eds.), Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective, 1–13. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Mumm, Peter-Arnold. 2007. Strukturkurs Neupersisch. Universität München.

Robbeets, Martine. 2012. Shared verb morphology in the Transeurasian languages: Copy or cognate? In Lars Johanson & Martine I. Robbeets (eds.), Copies versus cognates in bound morphology, 427–446. Leiden & Boston: Brill.

Robbeets, Martine. 2015. Diachrony of verb morphology: Japanese and the Transeurasian Languages (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 291). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Sakel, Jeanette. 2007. Types of loan: Matter and pattern. In Yaron Matras & Jeanette Sakel (eds.), Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective, 15–29. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Seifart, Frank. 2013. AfBo: A world-wide survey of affix borrowing. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Available online at  <http://afbo.info> http://afbo.info.

Seifart, Frank. 2015. Direct and indirect affix borrowing. Language 91(3). 511–532.

Dr. Francesco Gardani

Institut für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft

Universität Zürich

https://francescogardani.wordpress.com/

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