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 particular, the borrowing of compounding techniques is a virtually uninvestigated topic. In recent years, linguists have more intensively pursued a line of research that identifies in the study of contact‐induced change a source of evidence for the theory of grammar and aims to show that different degrees of borrowability reflect fine‐grained distinctions between subcomponents of morphology. The ever‐growing availability of comprehensive grammars and detailed case studies has supplied an adequate empirical basis to reach this goal.