1. Introduction
This paper is about the distribution of a specific linguistic feature, the bilingual [verb + verb] compound verb (BCV). The feature in question does not show up in the native monolingual varieties under consideration, which only have [noun + verb] compound verbs, but exclusively in the results from the interaction of the native monolingual varieties with other languages in a
contact situation (for a similar analysis, see also Bhatia and Ritchie [
1,
2]).
Furthermore, the feature is present in a series of geographically contiguous languages, many of which have had long-standing interactions in the course of their development. Roughly, it appears in the languages in the geographical area between Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Athens, Greece. It is thus an areal feature as well, and a feature of an extended area, at that. However, it is not limited to the linguistic area in question and occurs elsewhere as well, although it is certainly characteristic of this particular linguistic area.
The distribution of BCVs could be explained in different ways, which may not exclude, but actually complement each other. First, it could be that we have something here that we may want to term an areal contact feature: a linguistic pattern that can only be defined in terms of the contact between two languages, but at the same time shows considerable areal spread. The combination of these features—limited to contact settings and with considerable areal spread—would tend to show how important bilingualism is as a historical phenomenon in a large area. This long-standing bilingualism would make it possible that contact features, patterns characteristic of bilingual settings only, actually spread from one language to the next.
A second possible explanation is in terms of
universals: the feature in question then would be simply an option present in universal grammar that is realized under specific circumstances, when particular structural conditions are met. This option may be termed
typological poise [
3],
i.e., a shared universal structural propensity to develop a certain pattern, in this case bilingual compound verbs, in situations of language contact, due to another shared areal feature which may have resulted from earlier linguistic diffusion, namely [noun + verb] compound verbs in the native monolingual varieties. Enfield [
3] (p. 5) defines typological poise as “the overall structural profile of a linguistic system, which can serve to promote or inhibit a given course of evolution”, and [
3] (p. 353) “the notion that possible or likely developments in a language depend on, or emerge from, existing grammatical/typological structure, making typologically similar languages more likely to independently follow similar paths of development.” The explanation in terms of typological poise can be phrased in more formal (e.g., generative) terms or in more functional terms.
I will begin by outlining what BCVs are (
Section 2). Then, in
Section 3, I turn to their distribution in the languages spoken from Colombo (Sri Lanka) to Athens (Greece).
Section 4 is devoted to possible universalist explanations for the feature in question in terms of typological poise, and
Section 5 to possible historical sources for the areal spread. I conclude in
Section 6.
2. Bilingual Compound Verbs (BCVs)
The pattern involved is illustrated in the Turkish/Dutch bilingual sentence in (1). The italicized words are embedded into the Turkish matrix language from Dutch. The bold element is the helping verb:
1. | Türk-ler | alsa, | [klant-lar] | [wegjagen | yap-ıyor] | |
| Turk-pl | taking, | customer-pl | chase-away | do-pr.3sg | |
| ‘If he were to take Turks, he chases away customers.’ | (Turkish/Dutch) [4] |
Here a grammaticalized Turkish native helping verb, typically yap- ‘do’ (presented in bold in example (1) and the examples to follow) is freely combined with an imported Dutch verb, here wegjagen ‘chase’ (presented in italic in (1) and in the examples to follow). The resulting verb is transitive, and the object is inflected in Turkish (even while containing a Dutch root klant ‘customer’). The bracketing indicates that the two verbs form a unit, while the Dutch verb and the Dutch noun do not.
The pattern in (1) is productive in the speech of Turkish/Dutch [
4,
5], Turkish/German [
6], and Turkish/Norwegian [
7,
8] bilinguals, and it mostly occurs with verbs, although nouns and other elements may occur occasionally as well. In the native monolingual variety, monolingual Turkish itself, the [verb + verb] pattern does not occur. Instead, we have a native [noun + verb] pattern. More generally, we can say that the native pattern in (2a) is replaced, in the bilingual setting, with the pattern in (2b):
2. | a. | native: | | [lovenoun do] | ‘to perform love’ |
| | | => | | |
| b. | bilingual: | | [loveverb [do]] | ‘to do something (namely loving)’ |
In Muysken [
9,
10], it is argued that the shift from the native to the bilingual pattern also involves a shift from a complementation to an adjunction structure. The pattern in (2) involves an inseparable lexical compound rather than a separable [auxiliary + infinitive] structure (see also
Section 3). Crucial in the analysis in [
9] is the shift from nominal to verbal features in the first element in the compound. Muysken [
10] argues that the [v + v] pattern does not occur in monolingual, native varieties, only in bilingual varieties, and hence is inevitably a product of non-child acquisition.
It should be immediately clear that there are many cases of monolingual [v + v] constructions in the languages of the world (a convenient short overview of some of the relevant constructions is found in [
11]). A familiar example is the French
faire construction:
3. | Jean l’a | fait | partir. |
| John 3sg.pro=have.3sg | make.pp | leave |
| ‘John has made her/him leave.’ [12] (p. 25) | |
As argued by Rosen [
12] and others, the fact that the object clitic (the interpreted subject of the verb ‘leave’) appears on the higher auxiliary is an argument for the fact that
a fait partir ‘has made leave’ functions as a unit here. Crucially, however, (3) does not mean: ‘John left her/him’. In the monolingual varieties, the ‘do’-verb has a causative interpretation.
Chatterjee [
13] likewise reports on monolingual verbal complexes in Bengali, as in (4):
4. | ami | boi | gulo | guchi-e | Di-echil-am |
| 3sg | book | pl | arrange-pfv.pp | give-pst.pfv-1sg |
| ‘I have arranged the books (completely for someone else.)’ [13] (p. 51) |
The verb carrying person marking here is termed the vector verb, and it affects the aktionsart of the lexical verb in various ways. Typical vector verbs are ‘go’, ‘come’, ‘throw’, ‘sit’, ‘give’ and ‘take’. Crucially, the equivalent of the verb ‘do’ cannot be used in this construction. From what I understand of the literature, this pretty much reflects the general picture for the Indo-Iranian languages, which have a lot of these [v + v] structures.
However, even though it is not the focus of the present paper, some discussion is called for regarding the status of the “helping verb” from the matrix language in the grammaticalized BCV [v + v] category. Even though the grammaticalization it has undergone has led to its being completely or partially “bleached” of its content, as a “dummy” verb, there is still an agentivity or intentionality distinction in some languages.
1 Another property to be considered is the separability between the two elements in the construction. On the whole, they form a tight unit, but this is not always the case in the [v + v] construction.
2 A third important question is the grammatical status of the content verb from the donor language. This verb does not have the status of the native verb in the monolingual variety. That is, the bilingual content verb cannot take the verbal inflections found on its monolingual counterpart. Does the imported verb partially or completely lose its status as verb in the bilingual compound verb construction in the matrix language?
3 It is clear from the range of elements that can occur with the helping verb can vary, with verbs being the most productive category (see, e.g., the discussion of Sarnami Hindustani below), but with other elements as well in this position. Please recall that I am assuming that the content element is not a complement proper, but an explicative adjunct: ‘to do something, namely X/to be in state of something, namely X.’
Altogether, and this is a question which would require an entire monograph to be treated adequately, is the issue of the structural similarity or difference of the BCVs in the languages under study. The helping verb ‘do’ occurs in all of the languages, but does it always have a similar function? Is there one helping verb or are there more? Can the two verbs be separated? What is the categorical status of the content element in the BCV?
4. Universality and Typological Poise
The next question to ask oneself is: is the [verb + verb] pattern described in the previous section not a universal one in language contact situations, since it apparently occurs so frequently?
In a comparative study of loan verbs involving 207 languages and 553 language pairs, Wohlgemuth [
32] distinguishes four ways of incorporating verbs from another language (see also the typology in [
9]):
Direct Insertion
Indirect Insertion
The Light Verb Strategy
Paradigm Insertion
Strategy 4 is rare and need not be discussed here further (but see e.g. [
33,
34]). Strategy 1, Direct Insertion, is relatively frequent: the foreign verb stem is simply treated like a native stem. In many languages without overt inflection, the imported verb may simply be used on its own, such as Chinese, forms of Malay, and Creole languages. Here is an example of a Dutch verb in Sranan, cited from Bolle [
35]:
32. | Den | mean | waardeer | en | heel veel. | |
| det.pl | man | appreciate | 3sg.pro | very much | |
| ‘The men appreciate it very much.’ | (Sranan/Dutch) |
Similarly, in some languages like Quechua, imported verbs can freely appear with agglutinative verbal suffixes. An extreme example of this are bilingual songs, termed
wayno's, in which in adjacent lines a Quechua verbal root and a semantically parallel Spanish verbal root appear. The Quechua suffixes they receive are identical. In the following examples, culled from different
wayno's, the Spanish origin verb
sabi- ‘know’ (<Sp.
saber) alternates with Quechua
yacha- ‘know’ [
9]:
33. | yacha-/sabi-lla-n-man | ‘if (s)he would know’ |
| yacha-/sabi-ra-nki-taq | ‘you did know’ |
| yacha-/sabi-ru-chun | ‘(s)he should know’ |
| yacha-/sabi-na-y rayku | ‘because of me knowing’ |
| yacha-/sabi-y-lla-wan | ‘with knowledge’ |
| yacha-/sabi-lla-y-man | ‘if I only knew’ |
| yacha-/sabi-y-lla yacha-/sabi-y-man | ‘if known I had known’ |
In the case of strategy 2, Indirect Insertion, a specialized morpheme is added to the foreign verb stem, as illustrated by Moravcsik [
36]. Moravcsik claims that alien elements are never imported as verbs, but always as nouns. It could be that those languages that seemingly adopt an imported verb freely also have productive native noun verbalization strategies. This is certainly true in part for Quechua: many noun roots are also used as verbs. It also holds for Malay and Chinese. Southeast Asian languages are characterized by considerable multifunctionality in their lexicon.
There is additional evidence for Moravcsik’s claim from an unexpected corner, namely the incorporation of imported verbs into Spanish and Germanic. Spanish has three conjugations (-
ar, -ir, -er), of which the -ar conjugation class is the most productive one. Not unexpectedly, imported verbs are assigned to this class. However, they always take the ending -
ear rather than -
ar:
34. | box-ear | ‘to box’ | (* box-ar) |
| parquear | ‘to park’ | |
| surfear | ‘to surf’ | |
| mixear | ‘to mix’ | |
| rockear | ‘to rock’ | |
| hikear | ‘to hike’ | |
The suffix -
ear is a verbalizing suffix in native Spanish morphology, generally with a causative or inchoative meaning similar to English -
en, and used either transitively or intransitively:
35. | blanquear | ‘to whiten’ |
| flojear | ‘to weaken’ |
| hermosear | ‘to embellish’ |
| negrear | ‘to mix with blacks’ |
| rojear | ‘to redden’ |
Similarly, in Dutch, imported verbs are generally affixed with -
eren (German -
ieren is a parallel case) [
37], unless they are recent loans from English.
36. | control-eren | ‘to check’ (< Fr. contrôler) |
| farc-eren | ‘to stuff’ (< Fr. farcir) |
| antichambr-eren | ‘to wait in a waiting room’ (< Fr. antichambre) |
37. | sav-en | ‘to save (a file)’ |
| boost-en | ‘to boost’ |
| screen-en | ‘to screen’ |
The cases involving -eren, as can be seen, do not always derive from French -er infinitives.
Regarding Strategy 3, the Light Verb or BCV strategy, it is clear that it is not limited to the language area under consideration in this paper. To begin with, we find several cases involving Amerindian languages. One involves the Mexican Otomanguean language Popoloca as it interacts with Spanish. In non-contact Popoloca, two verbs combine with a noun to form active and inactive predicates, respectively:
38. | tú | ‘pass, occur’ |
| tú šu:a? | ‘be cured’ (cf. šu:a? ‘medicine’) |
39. | č?e: | ‘cause, make’ |
| č?e: šu:à | ‘cure’ (cf. šu:a? ‘medicine’) |
These same verbs can be combined with Spanish elements, mostly but not exclusively verbs [
38] (pp. 160, 289, 290, 441, 479). Again, there is a distinction between active and inactive predicates:
40. | tú yuda | ‘help’ (<Sp. ayudar) |
| tú mantene | ‘maintain oneself’ (<Sp. mantener-se) |
| tú kompara | ‘compare’ (<Sp. comparar) |
41. | č?e: pinta | ‘Paint’ (<Sp. pintar) | |
| č?e: rega | ‘irrigate’ (regar) | |
| č?e: daniu | ‘damage’ (<Sp. daño `damage' (n.)) | |
| č?e: kasa | ‘hunt’ (<Sp. cazar) | |
| č?e: kompone | ‘repair’ (<Sp. componer) | |
| č?e: kompaña | ‘accompany’ (<Sp. acompañar) | (Popoloca/Spanish) |
A similar contrast can be found in Navaho/English language contact, as described in Canfield [
39]. Once again, two different Navaho verbs are involved, one used in intransitive, and one in transitive predicates.
42. | swimming | asht'í | (intransitive verbs) |
| | 1.do/be | |
| ‘I am swimming.’ |
43. | Nancy | bich'i' show | ánílééh | (transitive verbs) |
| | 3.to | 2.make | |
| ‘Nancy shows me.’ | | (Navaho/English) [39] (p. 219) |
These examples (and as shown by Wohlgemuth [
32] there are other cases as well) show that these structures are indeed also possible in other language families.
There is one pattern not distinguished by Wohlgemuth. There are a number of languages where a native auxiliary meaning ‘do’ is combined with a verb phrase containing an imported infinitive, such as Moroccan Arabic/Dutch bilingual speech [
40], and Hausa/English bilingual speech [
41]. These must be distinguished from the BCVs discussed in this article on a number of grounds, all coming back to the fact that the combination in Turkish, Sarnami,
etc. forms a single unit. As argued by Muysken [
9,
10], the Moroccan Arabic/Dutch example is more like an auxiliary construction.
In conclusion of this section, we can say that BCV [verb + verb] compounds are a frequent, though not universal pattern in the process of incorporating foreign verbs. Cases where foreign verbs are incorporated using a verbalizing suffix used with native nouns and adjectives may be a special case of the bilingual compound pattern. Obviously, much more thorough cross-linguistic research is needed here.
Given the array of languages in which BCVs occur, we can ask ourselves if there is a particular parametrized typological property that would tend to give rise to this pattern. In
Table 3, I present some of the possible features that may be involved in the rise of these constructions.
At first sight, the Indo-Iranian cluster of languages would seem to have the most “typological poise” for the BCV construction: they have a range of complex verb constructions, they have fairly rigid OV order (with the verbs as a cluster in post-object position), and they have inflectional morphology, making simple incorporation of verb stems via either Strategy 1: Direct Insertion, or Strategy 2: Indirect Insertion very difficult.
Tamil and Turkish are less likely candidates, from the perspective of typological poise, and Arabic and Greek frankly unlikely candidates from the perspective of word order and presence of complex verbs, but their fusional and inflectional morphologies are propitious for the rise of BCVs.
Given the variety of typological profiles of the languages involved, I think it is difficult to embrace the “typological poise” argument wholeheartedly at this point. Of course, “typological poise” as a notion needs to be further theorized and empirically explored, but to give but one example, the contrast between Turkish and Quechua as regards BCVs is striking. The languages have been argued to be typologically uncannily similar (leading to ill-founded claims of historical relatedness), but in Quechua Spanish verbs are freely adopted via the direct strategy, while this is not possible in Turkish. Of course, it could be that other factors (such as the presence of vowel harmony in Turkish but not Quechua) have played a role, but this simply illustrates the difficulty of the concept of “typological poise”. It is also interesting to consider the cases, such as Moroccan Arabic and Hausa, where BCVs have not emerged in bilingual varieties, but rather a parallel strategy of auxiliary insertion. These cases suggest that the absence (Moroccan Arabic, Hausa) or presence (Indo-Iranian) of verb compounding in the monolingual variety could be a triggering factor.
In the next section, we turn to possible historical explanations for the emergence of BCVs. It is possible of course, that the languages at the heart of the linguistic area discussed here, the Indo-Aryan languages, did show the requisite typological poise, as did neighboring Tamil and Turkish to a lesser extent, but that the spread into Greek and Arabic is better seen as the result of prestige language pressure in Ottoman times.
5. Historical Sources for the Areal Feature: Persian or Turkish?
In discussing the historical origin of BCVs in the languages of the area under consideration, we need to distinguish two issues: the spread of complex verb constructions altogether, and the spread of BCVs.
To begin with the first category, Hook [
42] (p. 62) argues that the complex verb construction as such was innovation in Indo-Aryan: “It may have come into Indo-Aryan as a calque on parallel (and more ancient) structures in Dravidian or in Altaic.” Thus, the ultimate source of complex verbs as such remains an open question. It is clear that they were widely spread in all branches of the Indo-Aryan family in the more recent periods, relevant to the BCV at stake here.
In a scenario where the BCV feature is assumed to be a specific areal phenomenon with a historical source, there are two likely candidates for its origin: Persian and Turkish. Masica [
43] (p. 368) discusses the compound verbs in the Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia in some detail and notes that they always involve a noun or adjective preceding the verb. He also notes [
43] (p. 368) that the construction at hand is mostly characteristic of northern Indo-Aryan languages, suggesting Persian influence. It was in northern India that Persian influence was strongest. In addition, he mentions the bi-verbal compound construction [
43] (p. 75): “English
verbs (emphasis CM) are typically borrowed by incorporating them into the ‘nominal’ slot of such complexes.”
Windfuhr [
44] (p. 123); see also [
45]) discusses “... the general tendency, beginning in Early New Persian, to replace simple verbs by compound verb constructions consisting of a nominal followed by a relatively small set of verbs, the most frequent of which are
kard-án ‘to do, make’ and
šodan ‘to become’ (originally ‘to go’).” Along the same lines, Mahootian [
46] (p. 283) mentions four verbs used in these Persian noun + verb compounds. Notice that the nonverbal element precedes the verb.
44. | kærdæn | ‘do’ |
| šodæn | ‘become’ |
| zædæn | ‘strike’ |
| dadæn | ‘give’ |
Thus Early New Persian is a plausible source for the construction in the Indo-Aryan varieties.
However, Johanson (personal communication; see also [
47]) suggests that it is unlikely that Persian was the source for the construction in Turkish. There are many Turkic languages with [noun + verb], and some even with [verb + verb] combinations. In Azerbaijanian [
48], (p. 253) nouns and adjectives are combined with
<e.>le-,
<e.>t-, and
gïl- ‘do’, and
ol- ‘become’. An example is:
45. | niyyet <e.>le- |
| intention do |
| ‘intend’ |
In a similar vein, Kirchner [
49] (p. 324) notes about Kazakh: “Numerous verbs consist of a native or foreign nominal element plus an auxiliary verb such as
et- or
gïl-, ....”. Examples include:
46. | čarg et- ‘flash up’ |
| ümit gïl- ‘hope’ |
In Turkmen [
50] (p. 266), a number of verbs can be combined with adjectives and nouns:
47. | et- | ‘make’ |
| bol- | ‘become’ |
| ber- | ‘give’ |
| ček- | ‘draw’ |
| gör- | ‘see’ |
| at- | ‘throw’ |
| tut- | ‘take, keep’ |
In Chuvash [
51] (p. 451), we find combinations such as:
48. | as-tu- |
| memory-make |
| ‘remember’ |
For Tatar and Bashkir Árpád [
52] (p. 291) provides examples such as:
49. | xedmet it- |
| job do |
| ‘work’ |
Stachowski and Menz [
53] (p. 430) give several examples for Yakut of combinations involving
gïn- ‘do’:
50. | külü: gïn | ‘ridicule’ |
| svoni gïn | ‘make a telephone call’ (<Ru. zvonit) |
| bïrasti gïn | ‘apologise’ (<Ru. prostit') |
In the first example, a native noun is combined with
gïn, while in the other two it is an imported Russian word. Stachowski and Menz [
53] (p. 430) note that “Russian verbs may be copied in stereotyped forms and inserted into a Yakut frame by means of pro-verbs such as
gïn ....”
From the other, western, side of the Turkic area, Kerslake [
54] (p. 191) provides examples of Arabic verbal nouns combined with the Ottoman Turkish auxiliary verbs
<e.>t- and
ol-:
51. | tesli:m <e.>t- | ‘surrender’ |
| irsa:l <e.>t- | ‘send’ |
| na:il ol- | ‘obtain’ |
| za:yi ol- | ‘be lost’ |
Thus there are data from a variety of Turkic languages as diverse and distant from each other as Azerbaijanian, Kazakh, Turkmen, Chuvash, Tatar and Bashkir, Yakut, and Ottoman Turkish showing that there are [noun + verb] combinations, some of which are also used as a structure to accommodate imported elements, including verbs. This makes it unlikely that the structure in question is due to Persian influence. If anything, a reverse direction of influence would be more likely at the time of emergence of Early New Persian.
This does not mean that there has been no influence of Persian on varieties of Turkic. Johanson [
55] (p. 334) argues that “In Irano-Turkic varieties, most phraseological verbs consisting of a nominal item and an auxiliary verb are mixed copies of Persian originals.” The following examples are given:
52. | täl<ao>š elä- | ‘endeavour’ (<Pe. tala:š kardan) |
| telefon vur- | ‘telephone’ [telephone strike] (<Pe. telefon zadan) |
| saggal vur-/ri:š vur- | ‘shave’ [beard strike] (<Pe. ri:š zadan) |
Furthermore, Durroei [
56] argues that complex verbs in Persian are a new phenomenon. They are used to build new verbs from Arabic loans.
Concluding this section, we may tentatively state that if there is a single source for the BCV pattern at hand, Turkish is a more likely candidate than Persian. Obviously, more research is needed here, however, and this goes against the discussion in
Section 4 about typological poise.
6. Conclusions and Further Discussion
High time to return to the original question posed at the beginning of this paper. From the areal perspective, there is the fact that two large and important language families, Turkic and Indo-Iranian, either rapidly developed or already had a productive [ noun + verb ] construction. On the universalist side, there is the fact that native [noun + verb] constructions very easily develop into [verb + verb] constructions in bilingual settings, though not in monolingual settings. Thus we have a bilingual universal here, as Muysken [
10] argues, a universal characteristic of adult second language, but not child first language behavior.
If the position taken there is correct, it would mean that children would not be capable of learning complex [verb + verb] constructions, and the areal spread under discussion would be an interesting case of language change due to adult rather than child language use. I know no studies which can throw direct light on this issue, and confirm or disconfirm the prediction made. One reviewer argues, however, that once an areal feature gets established it becomes an inextricable part of the grammar of the language taking part in a linguistic area. This would imply that children will naturally acquire the structure under consideration irrespective of its complexity. Thus child acquisition data are crucial to help clear up this issue.
There is a bit of evidence from verbalizing suffixes, in a study by Bolonyai [
57]. Bolonyai argues that in adult Hungarian–English BCVs the
-el,
-ol verbalizer is obligatory (
cf. also [
36]), as in
cover-ol-ja [cover-
vbz-pr.3
sg.def] ‘it covers it’, while young children (3;7–5;10) do not have this form very often. Instead, they have forms like
take-0-t-ünk [take-0-
pa-1
pl.indef) ‘they took’. Older children (6;8), Bolonyai has discovered, show a marked increase in the adult forms.
Three recent studies throw further light on these issues. In her analysis of oral narratives from Panjabi/English children (ages 4–6), Crutchley [
58] found that BCVs were particularly attested among less proficient bilingual children (
i.e., “beginner bilinguals”) who produced switched utterances that were shorter and less grammatically complex. Thus, Panjabi/English children’s use of BCVs were not associated with syntactic complexity or innovation at the utterance level.
Furthermore, in a cross-generational analysis of 1750 Spanish/English BCVs, Balam [
59] found that innovative forms of BCVs in passive and control structures were particularly found in the speech of highly proficient second generation Spanish/English bilinguals, suggesting that initial emergence of novel BCV forms may more likely occur amongst highly proficient adult bilinguals rather than children or adolescents with lower levels of bilingual proficiency (for relevant discussion, see Balam [
60]). In a subsequent paper, Balam and Prada Pérez [
61] found that BCVs did frequently occur in complex, clausal contexts. In fact, BCVs were found to occur particularly in subordinate nominal and adverbial clauses. Thus, BCVs in post-adolescent and adult speech are associated with high grammatical complexity. This means that even if these structures are indeed adult second language structures (and much more work is needed to establish that), they can be associated with high grammatical competence. Clearly, more work is needed on this point. A relevant issue that warrants further investigation is the role of language experience (
i.e., exposure to BCVs). Bhatia and Ritchie [
1,
2] discuss evidence based upon intuitional data from adult second language learners of Hindi (with only one year of exposure to Hindi) and propose that knowledge of the essential features of the light verb construction in bilingual (Hindi–English) sentences is available via Universal Grammar.
One important issue not touched upon in this paper so far concerns the social dimensions of the phenomenon of BCVs. Two dimensions should be taken into account here: first of all, the frequent occurrence of BCVs is only possible if the speakers of the community language either have fairly relaxed norms about proper usage, as with some heritage varieties in multilingual diaspora contexts (an example would be Sarnami Hindi in Surinam which accepts verbs both from Dutch and from the creole language Sranantongo in BCVs), or accept the use of words from a prestige language in a post-colonial context in BCVs.
The second dimension concerns the motivation for incorporating foreign verbs in BCV constructions. It is clear that in some cases this concerns words in very specific semantic domains prone to borrowing, as shown, e.g., in [
30]. However, it is clear even from early studies such as [
14] that there are few semantic bounds on the adoption of foreign words once a proper introduction channel, either morphological or via BCVs, has been established. The social dimensions of BCVs as a special case of borrowing and bilingual language use clearly requires more work.