The typology of adposition borrowing

The Typology of Adposition Borrowing
Israel Science Foundation Grant 248/13

 Background
Typological approaches have proved extremely illuminating for language contact research. To date, they have been applied to a range of grammatical and lexical categories, as well as a number of basic meanings. This project aims to fill a significant gap in the typology of language contact phenomena, namely, a cross-linguistic study of the borrowing of adpositions and other case markers, based on an extensive language sample. A systematic worldwide study of this phenomenon has never been conducted.

Adpositions – prepositions, postpositions, and other minor types – are well attested in the world’s languages, and they tend to occur in a wide range of grammatical constructions. They are usually situated between grammar and lexicon, and most borrowability scales locate them in the middle, between clear lexical items and grammatical items such as inflectional morphology. However, these scales have been constructed on partial evidence, rather than the basis of a comprehensive cross-linguistic sample. One of the goals of this project is to evaluate the empirical adequacy of such scales, as well as other ‘smaller’ scales that have been proposed in the literature.

Preliminary research has turned up a number of exciting research questions – beyond borrowability – that have not yet been adequately dealt with in discussions of adposition borrowing, e.g., linear order conflicts, case government, polysemy narrowing, the morphosyntactic integration of adpositions, the role of text-type or discourse situation in facilitating or motivating adposition borrowing (or code-switching), areal and historical factors, and more. This project will address these questions in order to identify the observed patterns of adposition borrowing across languages.

Since the issue of adposition borrowing is a multifaceted one, this project will tackle it in a number of ways: a survey of secondary literature, grammars, the construction of a detailed database, as well as several in-depth studies of adposition borrowing in primary text corpora in a number of languages.

This project is intended primarily as a contribution to the typology of language contact, but also as a contribution to the typology of adpositions in general: while it is well known that adpositions are borrowed, this phenomenon rarely makes it into general typological treatments of adpositions. The proposed project aims to address this gap. As Yaron Matras has pointed out, language contact ‘acts as a natural laboratory of language change where properties may become transparent that are otherwise obscure, and so it may allow deeper insights into the functions of grammatical structures and categories.’ As such, the study of adposition borrowing across languages is likely to lead to insights that have relevance for our understanding of language in general.

Ongoing work

At the moment, we are collecting data in order to build a worldwide database of languages that have borrowed adpositions or other case markers. We have well over a hundred language pairs so far, and the sample is growing every week.

We are also beginning to conduct in-depth studies of particular languages and language areas, focusing right now on Neo-Aramaic, Yiddish, and Coptic.

In September 2013, we had a terrific workshop on adposition borrowing as part of the 46th meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. At the moment, we are working on the publication of a thematic volume on the topic.