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English phrases, French verbs: Causes and consequences of loan word accommodation biases

Boek - Dissertatie

When loan words enter their recipient language, they accommodate to the structure and paradigms of that language. The most common accommodation strategy cross‑linguistically is 'direct insertion', where recipient‑language inflections can be added directly to the loan verb stem. However, this PhD project has shown that - even under direct insertion - loan words can be biased towards specific inflectional and grammatical categories, and we have called these tendencies 'loan word accommodation biases'. Such biases are attested in English loan words in Present‑day Dutch and Anglo‑French loan words in Middle English. More concretely, loan verbs are favoured in non‑finite and uninflected categories compared to native verbs, and loan adjectives are favoured in predicative position and in uninflected categories compared to native adjectives. Accommodation biases have also been shown to be highly persistent through time, occurring as of the first loan attestations and persisting until centuries later. We have attributed the presence of accommodation biases to the increased processing cost associated with the syntactic integration of loan words. Since accommodation biases involve periphrastic structures where an auxiliary or modal verb carries most of the grammatical information, biases can aid in lowering the increased processing cost coming with loan word integration. Additionally, we have found that the presence of accommodation biases can impact the grammar of the recipient language in the long term. We have specifically shown this for Middle English, which was in long‑term contact with French for roughly 400 years. The sharp increase of non‑finite forms in Late Middle English (1350-1500) coincided with the borrowing peak from French, meaning that French influx may have promoted the overall reliance on non‑finite forms in Late Middle English (and its aftermath). This was corroborated for do‑support and light verb constructions, two periphrastic constructions where French‑origin verbs are significantly more common than English‑origin verbs. It is unlikely that French influx has instigated the rise of do‑support (e.g. Did you read it?) and of light verbs (e.g. to take notice of), since both constructions predated the French borrowing peak. However, we have concluded that French influx has accelerated the already ongoing rise of both constructions. Therefore, this PhD project has provided more insight into the role of French in the history of the English language. Although the syntactic influence of French on English has traditionally been deemed low, we have shown that French has affected English syntax indirectly, namely through accommodation biases attached to lexical borrowings.
Jaar van publicatie:2022
Toegankelijkheid:Open