Loanword

Form of lexical interference. It involves the transfer of a linguistic sign (typically a word) from a model to a target language, in which the signifiant of the model is reproduced into the target, with or without a certain degree of phonological adaptation and with or without morphological adaptation, and the meaning may also undergo more or less drastic changes (as a general rule, a word is usually not borrowed with all its range of meanings).

Borrowing occurs in contexts of either direct or indirect cultural contact, and may involve languages that belong to close or distant areal settings. Contrary to some hyper-functionalist interpretations, no functionalist or emic reason (e.g. lack of a designation in target language) is strictly required for the borrowing of words to occur. Structural constraint, on the other hand, may apply, based on types of words that are more or less easily transferred (see borrowability hierarchy).

A traditional distinction is made between adapted and non-adapted loanwords, the former including loans whose signifiant is adapted to the phonological rules of the target language and are assigned its inflectional morphology, thus becoming not immediately recognisable as borrowings (this is particularly evident in the Italian word lanzichenecco, borrowed from German Landsknecht, in which the original complex consonant clusters are simplified according to the Italian phonology and the word also receives an inflectional morpheme in final position), while the latter includes those loans whose original significant remains (more or less) unchanged in the target language, and thus are clearly identifiable as foreign words.

Note that phonological integration should be distinguished from phonetic adaptation, which almost always occurs in the target language (Italian mister is commonly pronounced as ['mistɛr], vs. its English model ['mɪstə]). On the other hand, morphological integration only concerns overt morphology, because the acquisition of some morphological features of the target language is unavoidable (e.g., in a target language with a pervasive gender system, borrowed words, even if non-adapted, are necessarily assigned to a grammatical gender, regardless of the addition of a specific morpheme).

To the basic distinction between adapted and non-adapted loanwords, some linguists add a halfway type, the so-called “acclimatised” loanwords (see e.g. Cotticelli Kurras 2012, with further references), i.e. phonologically and morphologically non-adapted loanwords that, however, are well established in the lexicon and produce derivative words based on productive word-formation rules of the target language (this is the situation of many loanwords in Italian, e.g. bar, scanner, etc., from which the noun barista and the verb scannerizzare are derived respectively). However, base productivity should be regarded as a distinct parameter, because adapted loanwords may or may not be productive too. Therefore, based on the two criteria of phonological and morphological integration and base productivity, the following categorization in four types established by S. Merlin and V. Pisaniello is employed in our framework:

Type of loanword	Phonology and inflectional morphology of the target language	Base productivity in the target language
I = non-productive foreign word	-	-
II = productive foreign word	-	+
III = non-productive integrated loanword	+	-
IV = productive integrated loanword	+	+

	- base productivity	+ base productivity
- phonology and morphology	Type I	Type II
+ phonology and morphology	Type III	Type IV

	- base productivity	+ base productivity
- phonology and morphology	Type I	Type II
+ phonology and morphology	Type III	Type IV