Academic Paper |
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| Title: | Testing the nonce borrowing hypothesis: Counter-evidence from English-origin verbs in Welsh |
| Author: | Jonathan Roy Stammers |
| Email: | click here to access email |
| Institution: | Bangor University |
| Author: | Margaret Deuchar |
| Homepage: | http://www.bangor.ac.uk/linguistics/about/margaret_deuchar.php.en |
| Institution: | Bangor University |
| Linguistic Field: | Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics |
| Subject Language: |
English
Welsh |
| Abstract: | According to the nonce borrowing hypothesis (NBH), “[n]once borrowings pattern exactly like their native counterparts in the (unmixed) recipient language” (Poplack & Meechan, 1998a, p. 137). Nonce borrowings (Sankoff, Poplack & Vanniarajan, 1990, p. 74) are “lone other-language items” which differ from established borrowings in terms of frequency of use and recognition. Lone other-language items are singly occurring words from the “donor” language which are preceded and followed by words or phrases from the “recipient” language. Whether such other-language words belong only to the donor language (and are classed as codeswitches) or to both the donor and the recipient language (and are classed as borrowings) is both a theoretical and a practical issue. Poplack & Meechan (1998a) suggest that this question can be settled by measuring the linguistic integration of donor-language words, so that infrequent donor-language words which behave like their recipient-language counterparts are categorised as (nonce) borrowings. This suggests that frequency of use need play no role in the extent to which other-language items are linguistically integrated into the recipient language. We challenge this hypothesis with an analysis of soft mutation on English-origin verbs in Welsh, which shows that integration is related to frequency. |
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This article appears in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition Vol. 15, Issue 3, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST . |
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