• DOI:10.1515/ling.1984.22.1.99
• Corpus ID: 14465695

Borrowing: the synchrony of integration

@inproceedings{Poplack1984BorrowingTS,
  title={Borrowing: the synchrony of integration},
  author={Shana Poplack and David Sankoff},
  year={1984}
}

• Shana Poplack, D. Sankoff
• Published 1984
• Linguistics

The notion of loanword assimilation is operationalized in a number of d~flerent ways, focusing on both linguistic and social aspects. The indices of integration thus constructed are applied to a set of lexical data elicited from Puerto Ricatz children and adults from East Harlem, New York. The results of this survey are analyzed statistically using the method of principal components. We interpret the output in terms of the social and linguistic trajectory of words during the borrowing and integration process. Of particular importance are the relatively close relationship between increase in usage frequencies and the processes of phonological ititegration, the transient nature of inconsistencies in gender assignment, and the fates of competing lexical items for a single referent. The lexical stock of languages may contain a considerable proportion of words borrowed from one or more other languages. The historical record, together with methods of historical and comparative linguistics, can help us infer which words were borrowed, from what language, and approximately when. On the synchronic level, however, making such inferences can be more difficult, particularly because there is no unequivocal way of deciding when a lexical item from one language, used during discourse in another language, whether by a single speaker, or repeatedly in a community, should be considered a loanword. It may constitute all or part of a code-switch, which is a phenomenon quite distinct from borrowing. It may be a manifestation of incomplete acquisition of one of a bilingual's two languages. It might be a momentary lapse of the type often classified as 'interference'. Or we might want to characterize it as still another kind of result of language contact. It has been claimed that 'from synchronic examination [i.e. without comparative or etymological evidence] no loans are discoverable or describable' (Fries and Pike 1949; see also Haugen 1950a; Weinreich