Borrowing: Loanwords in the Speech Community and in the Grammar

by Shana Poplack

Studies of bilingual behavior have been proliferating for decades, yet short shrift has been given to its major manifestation, the incorporation of words from one language into the discourse of another.
This volume redresses that imbalance by going straight to the source: bilingual speakers in their social context. Building on more than three decades of original research based on vast quantities of spontaneous performance data and a highly ramified analytical apparatus, Shana Poplack characterizes the phenomenon of lexical borrowing in the speech community and in the grammar, both synchronically and diachronically.
In contrast to most other treatments, which deal with the product of borrowing (if they consider it at all), this book examines the process: how speakers go about incorporating foreign items into their bilingual discourse; how they adapt them to recipient-language grammatical structure; how these forms diffuse across speakers and communities; how long they persist in real time; and whether they change over the duration. Attacking some of the most contentious issue in language mixing research empirically, it tests hypotheses about established loanwords, nonce borrowings and code-switches on a wealth of unique datasets on typologically similar and distinct language pairs. A major focus is the detailed analysis of integration: the principal mechanism underlying the borrowing process. Though the shape the borrowed form assumes may be colored by community convention, Poplack shows that the act of transforming donor-language elements into native material is universal.
Emphasis on actual speaker behavior coupled with strong standards of proof, including data-driven reports of rates of occurrence, conditioning of variant choice and measures of statistical significance, make Borrowing an indispensable reference on language contact and bilingual behavior.

Genres: Linguistics

272 pages, Hardcover

Published October 31, 2017

Reviews

[the great gretsby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm using this as one of my source texts for an oral exam and found it quite helpful and accessible. I usually find this topic quite dry, but the author's arguments are very clear and the whole volume is structured in a way that makes it easy to follow, so I definitely got more out of this than some of the other texts I've looked at.

[Marc Salomón · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shana Poplack summarizes decades of research into lexical borrowing and borrowing strategies in just 200 pages, full with a comprehensive list of sources, examples and a wide range of case studies, complete with robust methodology and criticism of the state of the question. Her conclusions are shown in a very easy to understand language, getting straight to the point while not lacking any detail on the cognitive processes and analysis that lead to the strong conclusions proposed by the author. All in all, it is a wonderful resource to establish a good foundation for linguistic contact and lexical borrowing studies. The only two weaknesses that I have felt with the book are 1) the lack of diachronical analysis, which is acknowledged by the book and palliated by the use of late-nineteenth century corpora, but which shapes the methodology used and 2) the very little role that linguistic attitudes and linguistic ideologies play in the analysis until the last chapter of the book, playing very little role on the quantitative approach offered by the author. It is, nonetheless, a very enjoyable reading for those interested in the subject, and it points to many studies which critizise and nuance the common sense assumptions made by previous (and even some contemporary) research on the matter.

[Dimitrii Ivanov · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit dry at times, which is, alas!, inevitable with so much of the sources being data, and often grammatical data at that. But very clearly presented, and very persuasive - and much of it is counterintuitive, going against the flow and so on, which is rare in scientific literature I tend to read.