Lexical borrowing in a French-English email corpus: Integration of English words in the electronic discourse of French immigrants in America

This study is the first to document and investigate the morphological integration of lexical borrowings in a corpus of email messages exchanged in a language contact situation. It identifies rules that account for the inflectional behavior of English nouns, adjectives, and verbs in a corpus of over 5,500 personal email messages, a new source of data for the collection and examination of borrowings. The email corpus is the discourse of a French-English immigrant population which does not belong to a single geographical or social community, but rather forms a low-density network (Milroy 1987).;The analysis of the corpus revealed evidence of the spontaneous reproduction of similar borrowing patterns among bilingual emailers who do not know one another (Hypothesis 1), demonstrated the existence of inflectional rules that govern attested English words in France French and attested and unattested English words in a bilingual setting (Hypothesis 2), and showed the influence of the email mode on the borrowing process (Hypothesis 3).;The research provides new data and analyses that relate to several issues of traditional and current interest: the distinction between borrowing and code-switching, the criteria used to identify the morphology of integration of borrowed forms in both French-English bilingual discourse and France French, the features of borrowing in email language, and the spontaneous reproduction of borrowing patterns outside of community norms and standards.