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The Perception of Loan Verb Integration Strategies in Romanian

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The Perception of Loan Verb Integration Strategies in Romanian The Perception of Loan Verb Integration Strategies in Romanian Master’s Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University by Riley D. Wagner Graduate Program in Linguistics The Ohio State University 2019 Advising Committee: Dr. Brian Joseph, Adviser Dr. Andrea Sims Copyrighted by Riley Dane Wagner 2019 Abstract The study of cross-linguistic lexical borrowing is a hot topic today, yet there remain some languages on which there has been little work regarding these words once they have been borrowed. In particular, the borrowing of verbs is of interest due to the amount of information that is encoded on them in the form of morphological endings. One language that has a rich morphological system and yet seems to have no issues with borrowing is Romanian. Borrowed verbs in Romanian tend to take one of three suffixes during conjugation: -ez, -esc, or -uiesc. These suffixes hold no meaning, and yet seem to be obligatory. This shows some similarity to the claims of Ralli (2016) in her work on verbalizers in Greek; therefore, I use this comparison as a starting point for analysis. In this study, I look to investigate speakers’ perceptions of the use of these suffixes, as well as the function of these suffixes, through the use of a perception study aimed at speakers’ reactions to the use of each suffix on various loan verbs. I also compare the ways in which loan verbs are integrated into Romanian to those in which they are integrated in Greek. ii Vita 2017………………………………...B.A. Linguistics, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Linguistics iii Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………….……….ii Vita………………………………………………………………………………....iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………..iv List of Tables……………………………………………………………………….v List of Figures……………………………………………………………………..vi 1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………...1 2. Background……………………………………………………………………...3 3. Methodology…………………………………………………………………….9 3.1 Stimuli…………………………………………………………………………12 3.2 Task………………………………………………..…………………………..14 3.3 Participants…………………………………………………………………….16 4. Analysis and Discussion………………………………………………………..17 5. Conclusions…………………………………………………………………….24 References……………………………………………………………………..….26 Appendix A………………………………………………………………………..28 Appendix B………………………………………………………………………..30 iv List of Tables Table 1. Classes by Theme Vowel……….…………………………………….……..4 Table 2. Present tense indicative conjugation table of a jura…………………...……5 Table 3. Present tense indicative conjugation table of a lucra………………...……..5 Table 4. Present tense indicative conjugation table of a privi………………………..5 Table 5. Test variants of the English verb ‘download’……………….………….….10 Table 6. Responses to “Is this phrase correct?”………………………………….….19 Table 7. Responses to “Is the phrase used?”…………………………….……….….20 Table 8. Usage Tally of Searched Forms………………………….…………….…..28 v List of Figures Figure 1. Example of a Survey Question………………………………………...…….12 vi 1. Introduction Language changes in many ways over time, with multiple independent processes that contribute to the overall making and remaking of a given language. Sound change, internal innovations, reanalysis, and intergenerational transmission are but a few examples of these processes. Of particular interest in the study of change in many languages is borrowing, or the process by which a language can adopt terms or phrases from other languages in order to fill a lexical gap. This process can become complicated when researchers pose the question of what a particular language does with the borrowed material. The answer to this question can vary wildly between different languages, and even between parts of speech within one language in particular. The phenomenon of borrowing is presented by Hock & Joseph (2009) in their introductory textbook on language change as a process that allows any linguistic material to be taken from one language for use in another, albeit with restricting factors on the ease of transmission based on the part of speech of the borrowed material. As they point out, the borrowing of nouns is actually quite simple, as demonstrated by the fact that it is very easy for someone who does not understand a particular language to simply point at an object to inquire about the word for that object. Nouns are generally somewhat concrete in nature, a fact that lends them quite well to borrowing. The borrowing of verbs, though, is much more difficult. Many languages are heavily dependent on the morphological endings applied to verbs in order to convey syntactic information that cannot be conveyed through other means. This makes it all the more curious that some verbs can not only be borrowed with the same or very similar meanings, but that there is variability in whether or not they can also be integrated into the morphological system of the recipient language. These morphological endings are so obligatory within such a 1 language that the possibility of their omission is unthinkable, yet the possibility still exists. As shown by Ralli (2016), different speakers can exhibit a large amount of variation in what they actually do with a borrowing, including in the degree to which they integrate a borrowing into their native language, which is intuitively counter to the previous point. This question of what speakers do with a word once it is borrowed is not always clear, and is therefore a key component to this thesis. One language on which there has been little said about what speakers do with loan verbs is Romanian. There have been a handful of studies on borrowing in general in Romanian (e.g. Miklosich, 1861; Leschber, 2012), but there is a gap in the literature regarding the integration of borrowed verbs whereas other languages, such as Greek, have been the subject of work on loan verb integration. The most relevant piece of literature on the subject of Romanian loan word adaptation at all is found in Manea (2005), in which the author discusses the ways in which loan words from English, as seen in a college-level economics textbook purchased in Romania, are adapted morphologically. He found that there are varying degrees of adaptation, ranging from full integration with Romanianized spelling and Romanian inflectional endings, to the wholesale borrowing of the word as it is in English. These findings are generally in line with those presented by Ralli (2016) in her study on variation between borrowing strategies in Greek dialects, which suggests that the findings may be applicable cross-linguistically. Unfortunately, Manea’s study covered only the integration of nouns in Romanian rather than verbs, although it does highlight the lack of research on loan verb integration in Romanian. The purpose of this study, then, is to remedy this lack of data in order to uncover a previously obscured facet of lexical borrowing. 2 2. Background In order to be clear about the phenomena that I discuss throughout this thesis, I begin with some background on the terms and processes that are relevant to this study. Loan verb integration strategies are the processes by which languages borrow verbal material from other languages and add morphological material from the recipient language. This phenomenon was observed and analyzed by Wichmann & Wohlgemuth (2008) and Wohlgemuth (2009) to first show that there are multiple strategies that are employed by various languages in order to handle borrowed verbs and integrate them into their morphological systems, and then subsequently show that more than one of these strategies can be employed by one language. In a broader sense, these strategies are subsumed under the banner of nativization, or adaptation, which is the process by which words are assimilated into any given part of a linguistic system so as to appear to be a native form of the language (Hock and Joseph, 2009). In order to more concretely discuss the issue at hand, I introduce first the conjugation classes of Romanian, as well as the integration strategies with a bit of their history and a few examples of these as they appear in the modern language. The debate over the exact number and function of the conjugation classes in Romanian is a hotly contested matter; therefore, as this distinction is not a key factor in my study1, I default to the traditional view of the issue, as presented by Șulea (2012), as it suffices to explain the basics of the situation. Each class is indicated by a particular theme vowel, or the vowel that terminates the infinitive form of the verb. Table 1 indicates each class by use of its corresponding theme vowel. 1 The key factor here is the distinction between how these verbs are conjugated, rather than the fact that there are different classes. The classes dictate how the verb is conjugated, which makes a speaker’s choice of class in which to place a loan verb an important one. 3 1 2 3 4 -a -ea -e -i/î Table 1. Classes by Theme Vowel. Taken from Șulea (2012). There is heated debate over the number of subclasses within this system, as evidenced by the fact that there are particular verbs that receive alterations in their conjugations, even though they may fall under one of these more general categories. Of most particular interest to this study are the first and fourth classes, as these include verbs that are conjugated in the regular fashion, as well as verbs that take one of two suffixes to the stem before being conjugated. In the case of the first class, these verbs take the -ez suffix, while these verbs in the fourth class take either the -esc or - uiesc2 suffix3. Also of note is the fact that verbs in the fourth class are required to take the suffix; however, this requirement is not present in the first class (Example conjugation paradigms are given in Tables 2, 3, and 4). 2 Both the -esc and -uiesc suffixes appear on class four verbs with identical functions, so for the purposes of this example I will be treating them as the same suffix, despite a clear difference in their distributions.
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