Borrowing

<p>Studies of bilingual behavior have been proliferating for decades yet short shrift has been given to its major<em> </em>manifestation the incorporation of words from one language into the discourse of another.<br />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.<br />In contrast to most other treatments which deal with the <em>product </em>of borrowing (if they consider it at all) <em> </em>this book examines the <em>process: </em>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<em>. </em>Though the shape the borrowed form assumes may be colored by community convention Poplack shows that the act<em> </em>of transforming donor-language elements into native material is universal.<br />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 <em>Borrowing </em>an indispensable reference on language contact and bilingual behavior.</p>