Abstract
When words are transferred from a source language into a target language, they may become conventionalized and appear to fully adopt target-language morphosyntactic behavior. Such words are traditionally regarded as borrowings. Even borrowings, however, are subject to probabilistic usage constraints, which we refer to as “accommodation biases” and which distinguish borrowings from native vocabulary. A case study is presented on accommodation biases in French-based verbs and adjectives in Middle English, showing that accommodation biases are robustly attested and can be diachronically persistent over long periods. In structural terms, accommodation biases resemble some of the familiar morphosyntactic constraints on code-switching. Combining the empirical evidence with theoretical argumentation, it is proposed that accommodation biases reflect a processing cost that is specifically associated with transferred items, and that arises from dual-language activation in bilingual speakers. Thus, accommodation biases indicate that even conventionalized borrowings may be more akin to code-switches than hitherto assumed.
Funding source: Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen
Award Identifier / Grant number: G0D1418N
Acknowledgment
We are grateful to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback, as well as to Carola Trips, Kate Bellamy, Mareike Keller, and Bram Vertommen for helpful and encouraging comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Research funding: Research for this paper was funded by the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen (grant G0D1418N).
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