Direct copying of inflectional paradigms: Evidence from Lamunkhin Even

Abstract

Language contact studies have shown that, cross-linguistically, the transfer of morphology from one language to another, where it is then used with inherited roots, is relatively rare (Grant 2012, Matras 2015); copying of verbal inflectional morphology is particularly infrequent (Seifart 2017). Copied morphemes are frequently assumed to enter the recipient language via “indirect affix borrowing”, whereby complex lexemes are copied and subsequently analysed into their component parts in the recipient language, thus enabling the use of the copied affixes with native roots (Grant 2012, Seifart 2015, Evans 2016). Although “direct affix borrowing”, in which speakers of the recipient language identify the meaning of affixes in the model language and transfer them directly for use with native roots, is known to occur, this has up to date been identified only for derivational morphemes (Seifart 2015). In contrast, in this article I provide evidence that four Sakha (Yakut) TAM markers plus associated subject agreement paradigms found in the Lamunkhin dialect of Even were copied directly by fully bilingual speakers of the recipient language. This argument is based on the absence of Sakha verbal roots found with these paradigms in a corpus of Lamunkhin Even recordings, as well as on patterns of co-occurrence of these morphemes in clauses with Even grammatical morphology.