Verbal borrowability and turnover rates
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20344767 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Timofey Arkhangelskiy (0000-0001-6195-0139, Universität Hamburg, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 451-473 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-10 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Diachronica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0176-4225 • E-ISSN: 1569-9714 |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1075/dia.19032.ark |
| OpenAlex | W3084043026 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 26 |
Conventional wisdom holds that verbs are more difficult to borrow than nouns. Recent studies have supported this claim, inferring it from the fact that synchronically almost every language studied contains a larger proportion of identifiable borrowings among nouns than among verbs. In this paper, I demonstrate that, while true, there is a logical fallacy in this inference. Using a large diachronic corpus of Russian texts, I show that verbs have lower turnover rates and, consequently, longer life expectancies than nouns, i.e., they are generally more difficult to replace. I argue that this fact alone could theoretically result in the synchronically observed disparities. The hypothesis of cross-linguistically lower verbal turnover rates, which I propose based on these findings, is difficult to verify directly on a large sample of languages. However, it makes a non-trivial prediction, which can be tested more easily. It predicts that if a contact situation lasted for a while, but ceased to exist several centuries ago, the proportion of verbs borrowed during that period and surviving to the present day may equal or exceed the proportion of such borrowings among nouns. The data found in the World Loanword Database ( Haspelmath & Tadmor 2009 ) are consistent with this prediction, thus providing evidence in favor of the hypothesis
Fallacy · Inference · Linguistics · Noun · Computer Science · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and language evolution · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy · Psychology · Artificial Intelligence
Language, Usage and Cognition
Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law
Human behavior and the principle of least effort.
Loanwords in the World's Languages
Social lives in language
Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary
Loanwords in Malagasy
The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century
The Functions and Value of Foreign Languages in Eighteenth-Century Russia
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |