[Lingtyp] CfP: Morphological Borrowing in the Languages of Europe

[Danguole Kotryna Kapkan]

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the conference
*"Morphological
Borrowing in the Languages of Europe"*, which will take place in *Riga,
9-11 August 2027*. Abstracts can be submitted until *28 February, 2027*.

For further details, please see the conference website
<https://sites.google.com/view/mble-26/home> and the call for papers below.

Best regards,
_________________________________
Danguole Kotryna Kapkan (she/they)
Institut für Slavistik
Universität Potsdam


Although morphology is often considered relatively resistant to borrowing
(Matras 2007; Moravcsik 1978; Thomason & Kaufman 1988; Field 2002, inter
alia), contact-induced transfer of both derivational and inflectional
morphology is well attested across the world’s languages (Seifart 2017).
Europe’s diverse contact settings offer rich opportunities to investigate
how morphological material and patterns spread across languages, become
integrated into recipient systems, and contribute to linguistic convergence.

Contact-based explanations of linguistic similarities have traditionally
been considered complementary to explanations based on common inheritance
(Trubetzkoy 1923, 1928; Jakobson 1931). A growing body of research in
contact linguistics highlights the importance of contact-induced
convergence at all levels of linguistic structure, including between
closely related languages, whose structural similarity may facilitate
transfer (Haig 2001; Matras 2007; Epps et al. 2014; Bowern 2014; Arkadiev &
Kozhanov 2023; Seržant et al. 2026). Such similarity, however, can also
make the effects of contact difficult to identify.

These difficulties are particularly relevant to the study of morphological
borrowing across languages of Europe because most languages of Europe are
genealogically (closely) related. A central challenge is to distinguish
contact-induced similarities from those arising through common inheritance
or independent parallel development. Within contact-induced change, a
further challenge is to distinguish the transfer of morphological material
(MAT-borrowing, Matras & Sakel 2007) from the replication of morphological
patterns (PAT-borrowing), and to establish how these processes interact.

This conference aims to bring together research on morphological borrowing,
encompassing contact between both closely and distantly related varieties.
We welcome contributions addressing the mechanisms, histories, and outcomes
of morphological borrowing from synchronic or diachronic perspectives. We
invite abstracts addressing, among others, the following questions:

- How derivational and inflectional morphology is exactly borrowed, and
what accounts for differences in their susceptibility to transfer?
- How can morphological matter borrowing be distinguished from pattern
borrowing, common inheritance, and independent parallel development,
particularly in closely related languages and dialects?
- Through what pathways do borrowed affixes become integrated into
recipient morphology? What roles do complex loanwords, reanalysis, and
speakers’ knowledge of the source language play here?
- How do borrowed affixes spread across the lexicon, and what does their
distribution across borrowed and inherited bases reveal about their
productivity and degree of integration?
- How do sociolinguistic conditions and speakers’ contact practices
facilitate or constrain morphological borrowing?
- How can evidence from European languages refine existing models of
morphological borrowing and linguistic convergence?

Important Dates:
Submission: February 28, 2027
Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2027
Conference: August 9–11, 2027

Please keep in mind that this conference is an exclusively in-presence
event, and participating/attending online is not possible.

Abstracts of no more than around 1000 characters (including spaces,
excluding references) should be sent via email to:
morphologicalborrowing at gmail.com.

References:
Arkadiev, Peter & Kirill Kozhanov. 2023. Borrowing of Morphology: With a
Case Study of Baltic and Slavic Verbal Prefixes. In Peter Ackema, Sabrina
Bendjaballah, Eulàlia Bonet & Antonio Fábregas (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell
Companion to Morphology, 1–33. 1st edn. Wiley.
https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119693604.morphcom011.
Bowern, Claire. 2013. Relatedness as a factor in language contact. Journal
of Language Contact 6. 411–432.
Field, Fredric & Bernard Comrie. 2002. Linguistic Borrowing in Bilingual
Contexts (Studies in Language Companion Series). Vol. 62. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.62.
Haig, Geoffrey. 2001. Linguistic Diffusion in Present-Day East Anatolia:
>From Top to Bottom. In Alexandra Y Aikhenvald & R M W Dixon (eds.), Areal
Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance, 195–224. Oxford University PressOxford.
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198299813.003.0008.
Haynie, Hannah, Claire Bowern, Patience Epps, Jane Hill & Patrick
McConvell. 2014. Wanderwörter in languages of the Americas and Australia.
Ampersand 1. 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amper.2014.10.001.
Jakobson, Roman. 1931[1971]. Über die phonologischen Sprachbünde, Travaux
du cercle linguistique de Prague 4, 234–240. Cited after the reprint in:
Jakobson, Roman. 1971. Selected writings I: Phonological studies, 137–143.
The Hague: De Gruyter Mouton.
Matras, Yaron. 2007. The borrowability of structural categories. In Yaron
Matras & Jeanette Sakel (eds.), Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic
Perspective, 31–74. Mouton de Gruyter.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110199192.31.
Matras, Yaron & Jeanette Sakel. 2007. Investigating the mechanisms of
pattern replication in language convergence. Studies in Language 31(4).
829–865. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.31.4.05mat.
Moravcsik, Edith. 1978. Language contact. In Universals of Human Language,
vol. 1, Method and Theory, 93–122. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Seifart, Frank. 2017. Patterns of affix borrowing in a sample of 100
languages. Journal of Historical Linguistics 7(3). 389–431.
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.16002.sei.
Seržant, Ilja A., Berfin Aktaṣ, Masha Ovsjannikova, Manfred Stede. 2026.
Distance-based approach reveals convergence effects in word order among the
languages of the Circum-Baltic linguistic area. Studies in Language 50(2).
259-293.
Thomason, Sarah Grey & Terrence Kaufman. 2023. Language Contact,
Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. 1st edn. University of California
Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.8501341.
Trubetzkoy, Nikolai S. 1923. Vavilonskaja bašnja i smešenie jazykov.
Evrazijskij vremennik 3. 107–124.
Trubetzkoy, Nikolai S. 1928. [Proposition 16]. Acts of the 1st
International Congress of Linguistics 17–18. Leiden.
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