Valency and Tranitivity in Contact: The Case of Coptic

Languages change over time. The study of language change is crucial to any explanatory account of synchronic language structures, since the latter are the result of diachronic processes (Greenberg 1979, Givón 2001, Bybee 2008). Language contact is a major mechanism of language change. Bilingual speakers are often the agents of innovations in lexicon and in grammar which, if diffused within a linguistic community, can become conventionalized, even among monolingual speakers of the ‘recipient’ language. One result of bilingualism is lexical borrowing or ‘matter replication’ (Matras & Sakel 2007), which has been the focus of extensive language-specific and cross-linguistic research. The typology of verb borrowing has been studied intensively. However, most studies have focused on the relative borrowability of particular meanings, on the one hand (e.g., Haspelmath & Tadmor 2009), or the morphosyntactic means of integrating loan verbs into the grammatical structure of the target language (e.g., Wohlgemuth 2009). However, almost entirely neglected is the integration of loan verbs into recipient language transitivity and valency patterns. The proposed project aims to address this lacuna by providing an account of this phenomenon with respect to a single contact situation, taking as a test case Coptic-Greek contact in Late Antique and Early Islamic Egypt. Coptic has approximately 5000 attested Greek-origin loan word types, with many hundreds of thousands of tokens. Of these types, nearly 1000 are loan verbs.