Predicative and markedness bias in loan adjectives: Dutch and Middle English

Previous research on loan word accommodation has shown that English-origin verbs in Present-day Dutch and French-origin verbs in Late Middle English are subject to biases ([AUTHOR2] 2014; [AUTHOR1] & [AUTHOR2] subm.; [AUTHOR2] & [AUTHOR1] subm.). In both contact settings, loan verbs are disproportionally frequent in non-finite and morphologically unmarked forms as compared to native verbs. We, therefore, refuted Wohlgemuth's (2009) typology-based argument that inflection does not hinder loan word adoption. This follow-up corpus study demonstrates that accommodation biases are also present in loan adjectives. Concretely, French loan adjectives are more prevalent in predicative than in attributive syntactic position as compared to native adjectives (PREDICATIVE bias), and they are more prevalent in uninflected than in inflected forms (MARKEDNESS bias). The predicative bias is found to rank stronger than the markedness bias, which is consistent with the findings for verbs. Additionally, biases are more pronounced in the English-Dutch than in the French-Middle English contact setting.

Publication year:2022

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