Feature Borrowing in Language Contact

Networks uncover hidden lexical borrowing in Indo-European language evolution

Language evolution is traditionally described in terms of family trees with ancestral languages splitting into descendent languages. However, it has long been recognized that language evolution also entails horizontal components, most commonly through lexical borrowing. For example, the English language was heavily influenced by Old Norse and Old French; eight per cent of its basic vocabulary i...

Language Change and Language Contact

Language Contact: Peaceful Coexistence or Emergence of a Contact Language

This paper presents a simple model of linguistic priming between languages in contact, based on the utterance selection model (USM) for language change of Baxter et al. (2006). It will be shown that the emergence or the non-emergence of a new contact language depends on the way potentially bilingual agents choose a language to communicate.

Rochester Borrowing-proofness Borrowing-proofness

We formulate and study the requirement on an allocation rule that no agent should be able to benefit by augmenting his endowment through borrowing resources from the outside world (alternatively, by simply exaggerating it). We show that the Walrasian rule is not “borrowing-proof” even on standard domains. More seriously, no efficient selection from the endowments-lower-bound correspondence, or ...

Determining language contact effects in ancient contact situations

Proving the existence of ancient language contacts is easy; proving the existence of ancient contact-induced language change is much more difficult, by comparison to analyses of modern contact situations. This paper surveys some ancient contacts and their effects on the languages. The main conclusion is that the historical methods used for analyzing better-documented contact situations can be a...