Borrowability scale

Translations

scala/gerarchia di “prestabilità” | hiérarchie de l'empruntabilité | Entlehnbarkeitsskalen

Article

A borrowability scale is a hierarchy of borrowings that is meant to measure and predict the greater or lesser ease of borrowing of the different linguistic elements, both lexical and grammatical.

A borrowability scale can be represented in the following way:

lexical > non-lexical

This is a very basic example, essentially meaning that lexical items are more easily borrowed than non-lexical (i.e. grammatical) elements, which is almost unanimously accepted by linguists (cf. e.g. Tesnière 1939: 85: “La miscibilité d’une langue est fonction inverse de sa systematisation”, Weinreich 1953: 35: “the fuller the integration of the morpheme, the less likelihood of transfer”, Deroy 1956: 66: “plus l’élément est lexical, plus il est empruntable, mais plus il est grammatical, moins il est empruntable”).

However, this is not the only way to read a borrowability scale. Indeed, as stressed by Haspelmath (2008), among others, such scales can be interpreted in four different ways:

1. temporal: elements on the left are borrowed before those on the right;
2. implicational: a language that contains borrowed elements on the right also has those on the left;
3. quantitative: borrowed elements on the left are more than those on the right;
4. probabilistic: elements on the left are more likely to be borrowed than those on the right.

Since they are formulated on the basis either of specific case studies or a more or less large amount of comparative data, different borrowability scales have been set up by linguists, the first one by Whitney (1881: 19-20):

«By universal consent, what is most easily transferred from one tongue to another is a noun; the name of a thing is language-material in its most exportable form. Even an adjective, an attributive word, has a more marked tinge of formal character, and is less manageable; and a verb, a predicative word, still more: this part of speech is, in fact, to no small extent wanting in human languages. […] Next to the verb, among parts of speech, would come the adverb, with the yet more formal prepositions and conjunctions, and the pronouns; and, not far from these, the formative elements proper, the prefixes and suffixes, first of derivation and then of inflection; and last of all, the fundamental features of grammatical distinction.»

Haugen (1950: 224), based on the data of American Norwegian and American Swedish, observed that, although all the linguistic elements can be borrowed, the percentage of the different parts of speech in the total number of loanwords significantly varies, and they are distributed in the following scale of adoptability:

nouns > verbs > adjectives > adverbs-prepositions, interjections.

Further scales were proposed over the decades, e.g. by Moravcsik (1978); Muysken (1981); Matras (2007: 61); Field (2002: 36-40).

The concept is related to the differeng types of contact scenartios. Thomason and Kaufman (1988: 74 ff.) identify five degrees of language contact: (1) casual contact: only lexicon (non-basic vocabulary > basic vocabulary); (2) slightly more intense contact: lexicon (function words: conjunctions and adverbial particles) and structures (minor phonological [new phonemes/phones only in loanwords] syntactic [new functions and new orderings], and lexical semantic features); (3) more intense contact: lexicon (function words: adpositions), derivational affixes abstracted from borrowed words and added to native vocabulary (while inflectional affixes remain confined to borrowed items), personal and demonstrative pronouns, low numerals; structures: phonemicization of previously allophonic alternations, prosodic and syllable-structure features; initial shift towards a different syntactic typology (e.g. borrowing of postpositions in a prepositional language); (4) strong cultural pressure: phonology: introduction of new distinctive features and loss of some contrasts, new syllable structure constraints, extensive word order changes, borrowed inflectional affixes and categories (e.g. new cases); (5) very strong cultural pressure: significant typological disruption: morphophonemic rules, phonetic changes, loss of phonemic contrasts, changes in word structure rules (e.g. prefixes in a language that only has suffixes; change from flexional to agglutinative morphology), more extensive ordering changes.

Support of the idea of a borrowability scale or hierarchy is not universa.. Campbell (1993) challenged many of the alleged universals of grammatical borrowing, showing that for each of them a number of counterexamples can be found. For example, as far as the borrowability scales are concerned, there are clear counterexamples that falsify the claim that free morphemes are more easily borrowed than bound morphemes, or that inflectional affixes cannot be borrowed unless derivational affixes are also borrowed.

What is important to stress, however, is that such scales should be regarded only as general tendencies, not as absolute rules, because exceptions can always be found. As per Campbell (1993: 100), “the circumstances of each borrowing situation may lead to violations in individual languages of any proposed borrowability scale”.

References

Campbell, Lyle (1993), On Proposed Universals of Grammatical Borrowing, in H. Aertsen, R.J. Jeffers (eds.), Historical Linguistics 1989. Papers from the 9th International Conference on Historical Linguistics. Rutgers University, 14-18 August 1989 (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science IV/106), Amsterdam – Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp. 91-109. Deroy, Louis (1956), L’emprunt linguistique, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Field, Fredric W. (2002), Linguistic Borrowing in Bilingual Context (Studies in Language Companion Series 62), Amsterdam: Benjamins. Haspelmath, Martin (2008), Loanword Typology: Steps toward a systematic cross-linguistic study of lexical borrowability, in T. Stolz, D. Bakker, R. Salas Palomo (eds.), Aspects of language contact: New theoretical, methodological and empirical findings with special focus on Romancisation processes, Berlin – New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 43-62. Haugen, Einar (1950), The Analysis of Linguistic Borrowing, Language 26, pp. 210-231. Matras, Yaron (2007), The Borrowability of Grammatical Categories, in Y. Matras, J. Sakel (eds.), Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 31-74. Moravcsik, Edith A. (1978), Language Contact, in J.H. Greenberg, C.A. Ferguson, E.A. Moravcsik (eds.), Universals of Human Language. Vol. 1: Method and Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 93-123. Muysken, Pieter (1981), Halfway between Quechua and Spanish: the case for relexification, in A. Highfield, A. Valdman (eds.), Historicity and Variation in Creole Studies, Ann Arbor: Karoma, pp. 52-78. Tesnière, Lucien (1939), Phonologie et mélange des langues, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 8, pp. 83-93. Thomason, Sarah G., Kaufman, Terrence (1988), Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics, Berkeley: University of California Press. Whitney, William Dwight (1881), On Mixture in Language, Transactions of the American Philological Association 12, pp. 5-26.