early 19th
late 19th
early 20th
late 20th
Pol.warto Ukr.varto Rus.stoit
impl
impl,action
impl
impl,action
impl, action
impl,action
1 Ukrainian borrowed varto from Polish
2 Polish may have provided an “implicature target” for Russian
3 Then Russian pulled Ukrainian towards the “action target”
Igor Yanovich (Universität Tübingen) Borrowing modals across Slavic 32 / 39
warto, stoit, varto: the complex interplay
Polish → Ukrainian: borrowing of form Polish → Russian: borrowing of pattern (?) Russian → Ukrainian: borrowing of pattern
Open question: why did Russian change, but Polish didn’t?
Heavy Russian→Ukrainian influence in another case: [Yanovich, 2015]
late 19th century Ukr.maty‘have’: futurate, necessity, possibility after mid-20th century: matyloses possibility
Russian lacks a three-way, fut-nec-pos ambiguity but Russian lacks nec-fut ambiguity, too!
⇒ erosion in Ukrainian, but not all the way to system identity
Conclusions and consequences
Conclusions and consequences
Igor Yanovich (Universität Tübingen) Borrowing modals across Slavic 34 / 39
Conclusions
Polysemy is important in modal borrowing Czech musiti: borrowed as polysemous
Ukrainianvarto: adding a new meaning under contact Ukrainianmaty: losing an old meaning under contact Role of gap filling unclear
Czech musiti: clearly not gap filling
Russian stoit: “grammatical accommodation” to Polish? gap filling?
perhaps both?
Conclusions and consequences
Conclusions
Pressure on bilinguals to increase alignment is clear in some cases Czech musiti: form alignment with German
Ukrainianvarto,maty: pattern alignment with Russian Polish and Russian: questionable (no widespread bilingualism) BIG remaining open question
Why modality???
Important issue for future contact-linguistic research Tension between:
The reality of Matras’s borrowing hierarchy
The fact that modals can get borrowed with multiple meanings
Igor Yanovich (Universität Tübingen) Borrowing modals across Slavic 36 / 39
Consequences
Our contribution today
We’ve shown with fine-grained historical data that:
modals can be borrowed with several meanings modals under contact can align their sets of meanings
⇒an important link for solving a long-standing puzzle
Overlap between epistemic and root modality [van der Auwera and Ammann, 2013]
Acknowledgements
Thank you!
Igor Yanovich (Universität Tübingen) Borrowing modals across Slavic 38 / 39
This work would not have been feasible if not for the enormous efforts of people creating historical corpora and digitizing historical texts. In particular, I would like to sincerely thank: the members of the language history department of the Institute of the Czech language, who maintain an excellent set of digitized dictionaries and an extensive Old Czech corpus; the creators of the PolDi and KTS corpora of Old Polish, respectively at Regensburg and the Old Polish department of the Institute of the Polish language; the team of the Russian National Corpus; and, last but not least, the often anonymous enthusiasts who scanned and digitized an enormous number of public-domain books in Ukrainian and Polish that I benefitted from.
Many thanks to Natasha Korotkova, Anna Szabolcsi, and Basia Tomaszewicz for comments, judgements, and discussions which turned out to be very relevant to this project even though not all of them were conceived so at the time; and to my colleagues at the “Words, Bones, Genes and Tools” research center and at the UniTübingen Institute of the Prehistory, who help me to contextualize archaeological research that can bear on linguistics.
I gratefully acknowledge the support by DFG under FOR 2237 (DFG Center for Advanced Study “Words, Bones, Genes and Tools”).
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