English Verbs in Welsh Speech: Borrowing or Codeswitching?

1. English Verbs in Welsh Speech: Borrowing or Codeswitching? Jonathan Stammers & Margaret Deuchar University of Wales, Bangor

2. The Project • This, and the following two papers present results from an AHRC-funded project on “Code-switching and convergence in Welsh”, September 2005 – August 2010. • Corpus of 40 hours of Welsh/English bilingual speech collected for the project • Naturalistic recordings of informal conversations, typically between 2 speakers, & 30 minutes long • Total of 149 speakers in 69 recordings • Questionnaire data from each speaker will allow us to consider certain extralinguistic factors (age, gender, L1, level of education, etc.)

3. Borrowing or Codeswitching? • Highly controversial distinction, especially for single-word other-language items • This study is an attempt to assess the relative value of two approaches (Myers-Scotton and Poplack) • Focusing on English verbs in Welsh as a case study

4. Poplack & Meechan (1998) Approach • Borrowing and CS are fundamentally different processes. Theoretical distinction is important • Can be distinguished linguistically by “comparative method” • Borrowings pattern morphosyntactically like recipient-language items • Switches pattern like donor-language items • Frequency is irrelevant in distinction between borrowing and switches • Non-frequent (integrated) items classed as “nonce borrowings”

5. Myers-Scotton’s (1993; 2002) Approach • Borrowing and CS on a continuum • Matrix Language Framework able to account equally well for borrowings and switches • Theoretical distinction therefore not important • Lone (1-word) EL items no particular problem: MLF assumes asymmetrical relationship between ML & EL • Distinction should be made extra-linguistically based on frequency in the corpus, or inclusion in a dictionary

6. Is there a third way? • Are Poplack’s and Myers-Scotton’s positions notational variants of one another, or is there a distinction between borrowings and switches based on linguistic criteria which both would recognize? • Test case: English verbs in Welsh

7. English Verbs in Welsh Typically: English verb stem + “–(i)o” +auxiliary. pan dach chi’n defnyddio wide-angle when be.2PL.PRES PRON.2PL-PRT use.NONFIN wide-angle lenses dach chi’n emphasize-io ’r foreground. lenses be.2PL.PRES be.2PL.PRES emphasize-VBZ DET foreground “when you use wide-angle lenses, you emphasize the foreground.” [Fusser17: 792] • How well integrated are English verbs in Welsh? • How well can Poplack’s quantitative methods tell us what is a switch and what is a loan?

8. Analysis : English Verbs • Analysis of 3 Transcriptions (total 1h45min) • 2 conversations between pairs of women in their mid- 20s; • 1 conversation between a married couple in early 40s. • Every English-origin verb classified

9. Morphosyntactic integration of English Verbs in Welsh

10. Non-integrated English Verbs • Of 5 non-integrated tokens, 1 had English inflection: mae hi’n taking it day by day be.3S.PRES PRON.3SF-PRT taking it day by day “she’s taking it day by day” [Fusser29: 886] • Remaining 4 tokens: “fancy” dw’m yn fancy eistedd mewn be.1S.PRES.NEG-NEG PRT fancy sit.NONFIN in gornel efo hi trwy’r nos timod? corner with PRON.3SF through-DET night you know “I don't fancy sitting in a corner with her all night, you know?” [Fusser29: 170] • Bare form or partially integrated? (cf. poeni, profi)

11. Are there other criteria of integration? • Need criterion other than morphosyntactic integration by derivational suffix • Proposal: choice between synthetic and periphrastic verb constructions

12. Variation in Constructions Periphrastic: (inflected auxiliary verb + non-finite main verb) a be wnaeth ddigwydd? and what do.3S.PAST happen.NONFIN “and what happened?” [Fusser19: 117] Synthetic: (inflected main verb) dyna be ddigwyddodd, wrth gwrs. there what happen.3S.PAST of course “that’s what happened, of course.” [Fusser4: 682]

13. Discussion • Following results based only on main verbs in finite clauses. • Excluded: • Verbs in non-finite clauses • Imperatives • Monolingual English clauses • Auxiliary verbs • Forms of bod (to be).

14. Results

15. Discussion • At first sight it looks as though native verbs behave differently from all English items whether or not they are established loans • BUT maybe frequency makes a difference?

16. Distribution of verbs in alternative constructions according to frequency

17. Total frequency as main verb Frequency synthetic Percentage synthetic

18. Conclusions • Based on these early results, distribution of native Welsh verbs seems to vary from one verb to another, and according to frequency. • Less frequent verbs tend not to appear in synthetic constructions at all • So frequency may be more important than contrast between switches and loans • Future research will test this result on a larger sample • If replicated, the result will be consistent with the idea that Poplack’s and Myers-Scotton’s theoretical frameworks are notational variants of one another.

19. Jonathan Stammers elp22a@bangor.ac.uk Margaret Deuchar m.deuchar@bangor.ac.uk Diolch / Thank You Key References: Myers-Scotton (1993) Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Code-switching. pp163-207. Oxford University Press. Myers-Scotton (2002) Contact Linguistics. Poplack & Meechan (1998) (eds.) International Journal of Bilingualism 2 (2).