Typological approaches have proved extremely illuminating for language contact research. To date, they have been applied to a range of grammatical and lexical categories, as well as a number of basic meanings. This project aims to fill a significant gap in the typology of language contact phenomena, namely, a crosslinguistic study of adposition borrowing based on an extensive language sample. A large-scale, systematic study of this phenomenon has never been conducted.

Adpositions – prepositions, postpositions, and other minor types – are well attested in the world’s languages, and they tend to occur in a wide range of grammatical constructions. They are usually situated between grammar and lexicon, and most
borrowability scales locate them in the middle, between clear lexical items and grammatical items such as inflectional morphology. However, these scales have been constructed on partial evidence, rather than the basis of a comprehensive cross-linguistic sample. One of the goals of this project is to evaluate the empirical adequacy of such scales, as well as other ‘smaller’ scales that have been proposed in the literature.

Preliminary research has turned up a number of exciting research questions – beyond borrowability – that have not yet been dealt with based on a large language sample in discussions of adposition borrowing, e.g., linear order conflicts, case government, polysemy narrowing, the morphosyntactic integration of adpositions, the role of text-type or discourse situation in facilitating or motivating adposition borrowing (or codeswitching), areal and historical factors, and more. This project addresses these questions in order to identify – and ultimately, explain –  observed patterns of adposition borrowing across languages.

This research is intended primarily as a contribution to the typology of language contact, but also as a contribution to the typology of adpositions in general: while it is well known that adpositions are borrowed, this phenomenon rarely makes it
into general typological treatments of adpositions. However, as Yaron Matras has pointed out, language contact ‘acts as a natural laboratory of language change where properties may become transparent that are otherwise obscure, and so it may allow deeper insights into the functions of grammatical structures and categories.’ As such, the study of adposition borrowing across languages is likely to lead to insights that have relevance for our understanding of language in general.