Languages change over time. The study of language change is crucial to any explanatory account of synchronic language structures, since the latter are the result of diachronic processes (Greenberg 1979, Givón 2001, Bybee 2008). Language contact is a major mechanism of language change. Bilingual speakers are often the agents of innovations in lexicon and in grammar which, if diffused within a linguistic community, can become conventionalized, even among monolingual speakers of the ‘recipient’ language. One result of bilingualism is lexical borrowing or ‘matter replication’ (Matras & Sakel 2007), which has been the focus of extensive language-specific and cross-linguistic research.   

The typology of verb borrowing has been studied intensively. However, most studies have focused on the relative borrowability of particular meanings, on the one hand (e.g., Haspelmath & Tadmor 2009), or the morphosyntactic means of integrating loan verbs into the grammatical structure of the target language (e.g., Wohlgemuth 2009). However, almost entirely neglected is the integration of loan verbs into recipient language transitivity and valency patterns. The proposed project aims to address this lacuna by providing an account of this phenomenon with respect to a single contact situation, taking as a test case Coptic-Greek contact in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt. Coptic has approximately 5000 attested Greek-origin loan word types, with many hundreds of thousands of tokens. Of these types, nearly 1000 are loan verbs. The project will exploit the extensive database compiled by the Database and Dictionary of Greek Loanwords in Coptic (DDGLC) project.

The proposed project has potential for innovative descriptive, methodological, and theoretical results. In terms of method, it will develop a method for analyzing the integration of loan verbs into inherited transitivity and valency patterns, based on the comparison of language-specific descriptive categories (Haspelmath 2010). Preliminary research has turned up fascinating data and research questions. For example, Greek bivalent transitive verb lexemes can be borrowed as bivalent intransitives with oblique-marked arguments, viz., in accordance with the valency and transitivity patterns of semantically related native verbs. This raises the hypothesis that the primary motivating factor for the assignment of loan verbs to valency patterns is the meaning of individual verbs and the valency patterns in which they participate. Another aspect of the integration of loan verbs into transitivity patterns involves the overt marking of transitivity- and valency-changing morphology: while Greek verbs have an elaborate system of morphological marking, all Greek-origin verbs in Coptic are labile verbs (Kulikov 2011), in line with the inherited component of the Coptic lexicon. Yet another hitherto unexplored question is that of the introduction of innovative valency patterns into Coptic as the result of verb borrowing.

Beyond its descriptive value, this project aims to formulate hypotheses about constraints on the mechanisms and results of language contact – and as such, language change – which can in turn be empirically evaluated by further cross-linguistic research.