In the broader context of
the loanword
typology
project at MPI EVA,
and under the supervision of Martin Haspelmath, I worked on
a typology of verbal
borrowings.
The question as to why most languages have more trouble
borrowing verbs
than nouns, and as to the possible mechanisms and paths by which verbs
can be borrowed, were addressed by Edith Moravcsik in her 1975 paper "Borrowed
verbs" (WLG 8, pp 3-30) on the basis of a small sample of
languages.
George Huttar gave a brief summary of the state of the art on LinguistList
in
March 2002; and in mid-2004 Soeren Wichmann collected further
data on mechanisms of verbal borrowing through the LinguistList.
As far as I know, however, no truly substantial typological research
had been undertaken in this field thus far.
I started working on this subject in March 2004. My dissertation
topic (working title) was "Towards a typology of
verbal borrowing", and
the first step towards such a typology was the collection and
classification of data and examples of loan verbs and their
accommodation patterns from a large
number of languages. From time to time, I reported on my progess at
workshops and conferences.
Please, if you have
examples of verbal borrowings in whatever pair of languages, share them
with me!
You can use this
online form to send me your example(s).
My working definition of "borrowed verb"
is: A loanverb is any occurrence of a loanword which can count as a
verb (or is predomonantly verby) in
the recipient (borrowing) language.
For the time being, I do not want to limit the input to a selected
sample of languages, so any pair of languages is welcome.
[LWT] [Jan Wohlgemuth]