Calquing, Structural Borrowing and Metatypy in the Dongxiang language (original) (raw)

Abstract

The Dongxiang language, spoken in Southern Gansu province in the People’s Republic of China, is a Mongolic language that has been in contact with Linxianese, a neighboring Chinese dialect. These contacts have induced massive phonological and lexical changes in the Dongxiang language, but only a few syntactic changes due to the influence of Linxianese can be traced. In this paper, I describe and analyze two particular cases of the grammatical function expansion of two suffixes, -ni and -ji, used with ­adjectives in Dongxiang. From those examples, I try to show that there is a difference between two phenomena present in the Dongxiang language, one being closer to a calque and the other closer to grammaticalization, and eventually metatypy. I also describe a hypothetical borrowing process reflecting the grammatical integration of these two suffixes.

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