What contact did to Yoruba morphosyntax

Abstract In this article, I show that, due to the influence of English, major changes have occurred in Yoruba morphosyntax. The changes I identify include (i) the emergence of a transitive-marking Mid Tone Syllable (MTS) on loan verbs; (ii) the emergence of a pattern in which native verbs select accusative weak pronouns while loan verbs select genitive weak pronouns; (iii) changes in word order; (iv) syntactic doubling; and (v) category changes that apply only to loanwords. These changes have led to different forms of synchronic variation in the language. I show that the resulting variations fall into three major descriptive categories: free variation, lexicon-driven variation, and stratification-driven variation. Contact-induced stratification-driven variation exhibits two of the three patterns of the core-periphery structure of the lexicon (Brian Hsu and Karen Jesney, “Weighted scalar constraints capture the typology of loanword adaptation” [2018]), namely the “subset at periphery” and “superset at periphery” patterns. The Yoruba data exhibit an additional pattern that I describe as “complementary subsets”. Although the core-periphery structure of the lexicon (Junko Itô and Armin Mester, “The core-periphery structure of the lexicon and constraints on reranking” [1995] and “The phonological lexicon” [1999]) has been largely shown to have consequences for the module of phonology, the Yoruba data show that the core-periphery structure of the lexicon can be consequential for the syntactic module as well.