Direct copying of inflectional paradigms: Evidence from Lamunkhin Even

Language-contact studies have shown that the transfer of morphology from one language to another is relatively rare (Gardani 2008, Grant 2012, Matras 2015), and the copying of verbal inflectional morphology is particularly infrequent (Seifart 2017). Copied morphemes are frequently assumed to enter the recipient language via 'indirect affix borrowing', whereby complex lexemes are copied and subsequently analyzed into their component parts in the recipient language, thus enabling use of the copied affixes with native roots (Grant 2012, Seifart 2015, Evans 2016). Although 'direct affix borrowing', in which speakers of the recipient language identify the meaning of affixes in the model language and transfer them directly for use with native roots, is known to occur, it has until now been identified only for derivational morphemes (Seifart 2015). I here provide evidence that inflectional morphemes, namely four Sakha (Yakut) tense-aspect-mood markers plus associated subject agreement paradigms, were copied directly into the Lamunkhin dialect of Even by fully bilingual speakers. This argument is based on the absence of Sakha verbal roots found with these paradigms in a corpus of Lamunkhin Even recordings, as well as on patterns of cooccurrence of these morphemes in clauses with Even grammatical morphology.