On morphological borrowing

Abstract

For virtually as long as linguists have studied contact‐induced grammatical change, the borrowing of morphological formatives and patterns has been considered a relatively infrequent phenomenon—a view which is reflected in all well‐known borrowability scales. Yet all those scales have been constructed from limited data sets, thus producing rather intuitive generalizations, for example, that inflection is more resistant to borrowing than derivation. In reality, we do not have a precise idea of the global extent of the phenomenon. In pa Show more