Abstract
In contact between closely related languages like Old Norse (ON) and Old English (OE), higher similarity between units of the languages in contact can favour integration of loans as selective copies (Johanson, 2002). This can result in the copying of cognates like Middle English (ME) reisen ‘to raise’ (<ON reisa) which shows intransitive rísan as a formally similar cognate in OE. A mixed-methods analysis of ME corpus data shows that the argument realisation patterns used with forms representing either cognate verb show semantic and combinational features of both verbs. It is argued that ambiguity between cognate phonological forms of OE rísan, ON causative reisa and ON anticausative rísa during contact served as the source for structural ambiguity between valency constructions later available to both ME verbs rísen and reisen. Thus, this work proposes that formal ambiguity between identifiable cognates in contact can disguise existing meaningful structural and semantic contrasts and lead to argument structural changes like the labilisation of historically contrasting, non-labile verbs. This work provides evidence that copying of cognates can serve as a source for argument structural change because, not despite, of linguistic closeness.
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Notes
- 1.
This work focuses on the contact influence between rise and raise. The relation between raise and rear is not subject of this work. Etymologically both verbs descend from Germanic derived causatives and Anglo-Scandinavian contact leads to their status as near synonyms in English (rear v.1. OED Online).
- 2.
Levin (1993) lists arise and rise as non-alternating verbs in the causative/inchoative alternation. Raise is not listed.
- 3.
- 4.
This alternation is also known under the name causative/anticausative alternation (Ottósson, 2013).
- 5.
See Pons-Sanz (2013) for a detailed account.
- 6.
Ordering of multiple lemma associations by the BASICS lemmatizer is not probabilistic. The author thanks Carola Trips and Michael Percillier for sharing insights into the annotation process.
- 7.
Data extraction protocol: the penn2svg tool from the BASICS Toolkit (Percillier, 2016–2021) was used to generate a html structure embedding the CorpusSearch2 output. Relevant metadata, annotations and text for each token were extracted from this for analysis in a csv dataset using an in-house script.
- 8.
The author thanks Gjertrud Stenbrenden for her correspondence on these forms where <ai> might reflect a diphthong and thus potential ambiguity between the cognates or could reflect a northern form for southern á.
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Elter, W.J. (2023). Integration of Cognate Loan Verbs in Contact Between Closely Related Languages Effecting Valency Changes. In: Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B., Trojszczak, M. (eds) Language in Educational and Cultural Perspectives. Second Language Learning and Teaching. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38778-4_12
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