Are There Borrowing Constraints? The case of Daman Indo-Portuguese adpositions скачать в хорошем качестве

Are There Borrowing Constraints? The case of Daman Indo-Portuguese adpositions

Seminário CLUL de 26 de Março de 2025 apresentado pelo investigador J. Clancy Clements. Abstract: Daman Indo-Portuguese (DamIP) and Diu Indo-Portuguese (DiuIP) are two highly restructured Indo-Portuguese varieties (aka creole languages) that have been in contact with Portuguese in varying degrees of intensity since the 16th century. Both DamIP and DiuIP are in-group languages and virtually all speakers of these varieties also speak Gujarati (the substrate/adstrate language), and many also speak English and other languages. The topic of this talk is the postposition junt ‘with’. Although DamIP and DiuIP are prepositional languages, both languages have one postposition: junt ‘with’ in DamIP (the main focus), and jũt ‘with’ in DiuIP. Regarding DiuIP, Cardoso (2009:134) states that ‘[o]ne adposition sometimes contradicts the canonical PREP + NP word order: jũt də ‘COMITATIVE’ sometimes occurs in a (də) + NP + jũt construction.’. He cites the example shown in (1), and adds that there is variation in the placement of jũt in DiuIP. (1) mĩ jũ nã te muyt diŋer nã te. 1SG.OBL together NEGcl EXS.NPST much money NEGcl EXS.NPST ‘I don’t have much money.’ [lit. with me/next to me there isn’t much money] (Cardoso 2009:134) In DamIP, the distribution of junt ‘with’seems to be more predictable based on the data available: it appears as a postposition with pronominal objects (e.g., del junt [lit. of him with] ‘with him’) but as a preposition with full NPs (e.g., junt de Paulo ‘with Paulo’). The DamIP data used for this study comes from three sources spanning about 140 years and all strongly suggest that DamIP contains no borrowed postpositions from Gujarati. Thus, the speakers of DamIP, and probably those of DiuIP, as well, borrowed a structural property (the postposition of a preposition) without having borrowed a postposition from Gujarati that would have served as a model. I argue that this is important because borrowing a structural property from a source language (Gujarati in our case) without having borrow a grammatical element containing the structure represents a clear counterexample to King’s (2000) claim that the borrowing of a structural property cannot take place unless the borrowing language speakers have also borrowed an element (lexical or grammatical) with the relevant structural property. I also argue that it also seems to be a counterexample to the contact intensity-sensitive borrowing scale proposed by Thomason & Kaufman (1988). But the finding is in line with other comments made by Thomason & Kaufman (1988:35), namely, that “[b]oth the direction of interference and the extent of interference are socially determined; so, to a considerable degree, are the kinds of features transferred from one language to another.” Poderá consultar a apresentação através deste link: https://www.clul.ulisboa.pt/sites/def...