Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics
Charles University, Czech Republic
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
Borrowing is a word-formation process whereby a word from one language is adapted for use in another. More specifically, one can speak about borrowing morphemes, as, for example, a foreign word might be used as a newly imported root morpheme in a target language, which is immediately completed with derivational and inflectional morphemes already established in the target language (but also the other way round: a grammatical affix adopted from a source language can be used for enriching the vocabulary of a target language). Eventually, one can find a massive amount of correspondences in morpheme repertories of some languages caused by long-time co-evolution of the languages. The goal of the thesis is to develop and evaluate computational models of various borrowing channels along which such morphemes spread among languages, using evidence from modern synchronous multilingual corpora and other multilingual language data resources.