3. Reanalysis in language contact: Perceptive ambiguity, salience, and catachrestic reinterpretation

Abstract

Some lexical borrowings show striking divergences with respect to the source language items they originate from, as illustrated by F. people ‘celebrities’ (borrowed from E. people), G. Testimonial ‘person expressing a testimonial’ (< E. testimonial), and F. / It. dancing (< E. dancing hall / dancing room). According to previous research, semantic and morphological innovations in the situation of borrowing (going beyond the adaptation of pronunciation, spelling, and morphological features of the loanwords) are rather exceptional cases. The present paper aims at studying similar cases of innovation in order to determine their importance and ask how they can be explained from a usage-based perspective. I will show that semantic and morphological change is much more frequent than generally assumed. Moreover, I will argue that the concept of reanalysis permits us to analyse many of the semantic and morphological innovations in a straightforward way in which reanalysis turns out to be a type of linguistic change central to linguistic borrowing. The reflections will be mainly based on a survey of 500 lexical items borrowed from English into Italian as documented by the etymological dictionary DELI (Dizionario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana), but occasionally point to parallel developments in other recipient languages and contact situations as well. Based on Detges’ and Waltereit’s (2002) approach, I will elaborate a semiotic model of reanalysis which helps us to account for the paradox that the innovations happen without being intended or even noticed by the speakers and hearers. The notion of perceptive ambiguity will be proven to be of key importance to explain this paradox and provide new insights into the restrictions that have been identified in previous research. Additionally, it will be shown that the salience of the concepts and referents involved as well as the semantic and morphological transparency of the linguistic items represent important factors in this explanatory framework. Finally, I will comment on a specific subtype of semantic innovation which can be labelled catachrestic reinterpretation and which is characterised by the fact that the loanwords obtain a new meaning and thereby fill a lexical gap in the recipient language (e.g. It. policeman ‘police agent in English-speaking countries’, E. sombrero ‘broad-brimmed hat’, F. grappa ‘Italian pomace brandy’, F. flipper ‘pinball, pinball machine’).