37.3465, Confs: Morphological Borrowing in the Languages of Europe (Latvia)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-3465. Thu 22 Oct 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.3465, Confs: Morphological Borrowing in the Languages of Europe (Latvia)

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Date: 20-Oct-2026
From: Danguole Kotryna Kapkan [danguole.kapkan at uni-potsdam.de]
Subject: Morphological Borrowing in the Languages of Europe


Morphological Borrowing in the Languages of Europe

Date: 09-Aug-2027 - 11-Aug-2027
Location: Riga, Latvia
Contact: Danguole Kotryna Kapkan
Contact Email: danguole.kapkan at uni-potsdam.de
Meeting URL: https://sites.google.com/view/mble-26/home

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics; Morphology; Typology

Submission Deadline: 28-Feb-2027

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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