Contact Linguistics. Chap

-acioun. creacioun, temptacioun, etc. -ant. servant, ascendent, etc.
-age. mariage, pilgrimage, etc. -ard dotard, Spaignard, etc.
-aunce. acquaintance, obedience, etc. -esse countesse, goddess, etc.
-erie. flatterie, villainie, etc. -our confessour, prechour, etc.
-ment. ornement, instrument, etc.
-ite. adversite, chastete, etc.


Adjectival suffixes. Verbal suffixes.


-able. charitable, credible, etc. -ate. translate, etc.
-al. natural, spiritual, etc -ify. magnify, glorify, etc.
-ive. defective, subjectif, etc. -ize. baptise, chastise, etc.
-ous. amorous, corageous, etc.
Despite the apparent wealth of new affixes, the overall influence of French on Middle English morphology was not that great. French loans were overwhelmingly adapted to native morphological processes, so that formations involving a French stem and a Germanic affix far outnumbered those involving native stems with French suffixes.
Sometimes, lexical borrowing can also lead to borrowing of inflectional morphemes. An example is the introduction of the plural inflection -im into Yiddish with pairs from Hebrew such as mín/mínim "sort", gíber/gibójrim "strong man", etc. This ending was later generalized to other nouns. (T&K 1988:21). The borrowing of many Latin and Greek words into Early Modern English also introduced a number of foreign inflectional morphemes, some of which, though not productive, have survived. Thus from Greek we have criterion/criteria, phenomenon/phenomena; and from Latin, focus/foci, formula/formulae, etc. Some of these plural endings are being lost as the borrowings are adapted to English rules, thus criteria (sing. and plur.), formulas, etc.


9.2.1. Constraints on the productivity of imported morphemes.

It is not easy to predict which of the morphemes imported via lexical borrowing are likely to become part of the recipient language’s morphemic inventory. However, Dalton-Puffer (1996) does provide some insight into this question. Working within the framework of Dressler’s (1985) “natural morphology”, she attempts to explain why certain derivational morphemes imported as part of French loanwords became productive in Middle English. In this approach, morphological processes can be evaluated along two complementary dimensions: semantic and morphotactic transparency. Morpheme combinations are ranked in terms of how clearly they can be decomposed semantically as well as in terms of how well the phonological shapes of their parts coincide with their respective meanings. Rankings are assigned on two scales. For example, a compound like freedom (free+dom) is both semantically and morphotactically transparent, and is ranked high on both scales. On the other hand, conclusion (conclude+ion) is ranked high for semantic transparency but lower for morphotactic transparency, while cases like length (long+th) are ranked low on both scales. The two scales complement each other and provide a combined assessment of the degree of transparency of the combination.

Using this approach, Dalton-Puffer found that those borrowed French suffixes which were most transparent in both senses were the ones which tended to become most productive in later Middle English. They included suffixes like -erie, -able, -age and others which began to combine productively with native (Germanic) stems, e.g., husbondrie, aldermanrie; spekable, knowable; bondage, etc. She concludes that "Processes with higher constructional iconicity are more natural so that suffixes with good MTT [morphotactic & semantic transparency - DW] scores are acquired and suffixes with low MTT scores are lost from the language (or, if encountered in a contact situation, not borrowed)" (1996:224).


9.3. Impact of lexical borrowing on the lexicon.

Lexical borrowings can also have consequences for the wider semantic fields of which the imported items become part. Indeed, entirely new lexical fields may be created in a recipient language, for instance, in science and technology, agriculture or other areas of new cultural knowledge. A modern example is the spread of "computerese" across the world's languages. Another effect of heavy lexical borrowing may be the creation of distinct choices of vocabulary reflecting different levels of style, when both native and imported words are retained. An example is the distinction between the more formal vocabulary borrowed into English from French, Latin and Greek, and the more informal native Germanic lexicon.

A final issue raised by heavy lexical borrowing is how far it may affect the genetic affiliation of the recipient language. It's been estimated that some 65% or more of English vocabulary is of foreign (non-Germanic) origin. Yet English is still classified as Germanic, mainly because most of its structure as well as its basic vocabulary can be traced to Germanic roots. The same is true of Swedish, which has over 65% foreign (mostly Low German) vocabulary, and Albanian with about 90% foreign vocabulary drawn from Greek, Latin and Slavic in particular. The extent of borrowing in these cases, by contrast with others such as Icelandic where foreign loans are minimal, only highlights the difficulty of predicting which factors promote or inhibit the borrowing of vocabulary.