'Invisible' loans: how to borrow a bound form

Abstract

If speech communities are in a long-term intensive contact with each other, they come to share grammatical patterns and actual forms. The Vaupés River Basin linguistic area is characterized by a long-term obligatory multilingualism based on language-determined exogamy. There is a strong cultural inhibition against recognizable loan forms, so as to keep distinct languages diffferent. Tariana, the only Arawak language in the area, has hardly any free forms which are borrowed. There is, however, a fair number of hard-to-recognize borrowed bound forms—verb roots, and grammatical enclitics—in addition to numerous patterns and constructions developed under contact influence. This goes against popular belief that free morphemes are easier to borrow than bound ones, reflecting the way in which languages tend to influence each other in every possible sphere in diffferent sociolinguistic situations.