Morphosyntactic borrowing in closely related varieties
Domain:
natural language processingRecord type:
paper
Creator:
LUTHan
Publisher:
Joh
Host:
Abstract
The paper examines contact-induced morphosyntactic change in Swahili, where material which had
historically been lost is ‘reintroduced’ through contact with closely related languages which have retained the original
feature. The paper discusses three examples of these morphosyntactic ‘false cognates’: diminutive marking, habitual marking
and demonstrative forms, and shows that if it were not from the evidence from different diachronic stages and varieties of
Swahili, these forms could well be analysed as inherited from Proto-Bantu. The paper contributes to our understanding of the
historical development of Swahili, patterns of variation found in Swahili and Bantu languages more widely, as well as the
importance of comparative evidence for the unravelling of historical and contemporary relations between closely related
linguistic varieties.
Similar
Corpus-Guided Contrast Sets for Morphosyntactic Feature Detection in Low-Resource English VarietiesA morphosyntactic approach to language contact in African varieties of English. Studia NeophilologicaOpenLID-v3: Improving the Precision of Closely Related Language Identification -- An Experience ReportData from: Pollinator-mediated isolation promotes coexistence of closely related food-deceptive orchidsWildlife in Cameroon harbor diverse coronaviruses including many isolates closely related to human coronavirus 229EBuilding semantic maps for closely related languages: Words for ‘grain’ and their kin in South Mande