Language contact, borrowing and codeswitching

Abstract

Within the larger rubric of language contact we will analyze in this chapter the two phenomena of lexical borrowing and codeswitching as represented in the languages of the CorpAfroAs database. After establishing a theoretical background concerning the difficult distinction between borrowing and codeswitching (§ 1), the study analyzes the semantic, phonological and morphological integration of lexical borrowings in different languages of the corpus (§ 2). The core of the paper (§ 3) focuses on the relation between morphosyntactic and prosodic constraints of codeswitching in CorpAfroAs. Finally, the study argues (§ 4) that, even though syntactic constituency admittedly tells us a great deal about the types of boundaries where speakers are likely to codeswitch, prosodic segmentation plays a pivotal role in the definition of codeswitching. Furthermore, we will show that variation in intonation contours provides a good litmus test for telling the two phenomena of borrowing and codeswitching apart.

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