The integration of English-origin verbs in Welsh

Abstract

This thesis addresses the controversy over distinguishing between code-switching and borrowing. Many criteria have been suggested for making the distinction, but none are without difficulties. A theory-independent analysis is carried out on English verbs inserted into Welsh, based on a new 40 hour, half-million-word corpus of informal spoken Welsh/English, the "Siarad" corpus. English verbs are incorporated into Welsh by means of a highly productive routine involving the Welsh
verbaliser suffix "-(i)o". For some researchers ( e.g. Pop lack & Meechan 1998), this would be sufficient to count the entire class as borrowings, but their integration is investigated further, largely because other researchers, such as
Myers- Scotton (1993 ; 2002), would disagree with this interpretation, interpreting the same results as evidence for Welsh as the matrix language of the clause.
Analysis of distribution between two alternative types of Welsh verbal construction (periphrastic and synthetic) appears to show differences between the patterning of native Welsh and English-origin verbs, but further investigation shows the differences can be put down to frequency effects, with synthetic constructions largely restricted to the highest frequency verbs. Analysis of the occurrence of soft mutation on the verb compares native Welsh verbs with two groups of English-origin verbs throughout the corpus, defined according to a dictionary criterion, but is also complicated by effects of overall word frequency of verbs. Statistical testing shows that frequency is a strong predictor of mutation rate when logarithmic values are used, but also that English-origin verbs not listed in a dictionary are significantly less likely to be mutated in expected environments than native Welsh verbs or listed English-origin verbs, so could be labelled switches despite their
Welsh suffixes. This evidence goes against the nonce borrowing hypothesis proposed by Poplack, whose "distinct phenomena" approach to the issue is problematised through this study.

Date of Award	Aug 2009
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Bangor University
Sponsors	Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Supervisor	Margaret Deuchar (Supervisor)