Lending Credence to a Borrowing Analysis: Lone English-Origin Incorporations in Igbo Discourse

Abstract

This paper offers an empirical analysis of data from natural Igbo-English bilingual discourse which demonstrates how the two most important manifestations of language contact, namely, codeswitching and borrowing, can be unambiguously and consistently distinguished. The paper focuses on showing how inherently ambiguous lone English-origin nouns and verbs, incorporated into otherwise Igbo discourse, can be assigned language membership, not solely on the basis of their surface appearance as has been the case in the literature, but only by situating the ambiguous forms in the context of the entire system. Using diagnostics such as vowel harmony, inflection, and word order of verbs as well as modification structures of nouns, the paper demonstrates beyond a shadow of doubt that lone English-origin items are distributed among syntactic slots in the same way as native items of Igbo and differ from codeswitches to English which show distinct patterns. The inescapable conclusion is that the lone English-origin nouns and verbs in otherwise Igbo discourse cannot be classified as codeswitches but rather, must be considered to be borrowings.