Language Variation and Change, 2 (1990), 71-101. Printed in the U.S.A. © 1990 Cambridge University Press 0954-3945/90 $5.00 + .00 The case of the nonce loan in Tamil DAVID SANKOFF Universite de Montreal SHANA POPLACK AND SWATHI VANNIARAJAN University of Ottawa ABSTRACT Nonce borrowings in the speech of bilinguals differ from established loanwords in that they are not necessarily recurrent, widespread, or recognized by host language monolinguals. With established loanwords, however, they share the characteristics of morphological and syntactic integration into the host language and consist of single content words or compounds. Furthermore, both types of loanwords differ from intrasentential code-switching —alternate sentence fragments in the two languages, each of which is grammatical by monolingual standards from the standpoints of appropriate function words, morphology, and syntax. In a large corpus of Tamil-English bilingual speech, many words of English origin are found in objects governed by Tamil verbs and vice versa. The equivalence constraint on intrasentential code-switching predicts that no code-switch should occur between verb and object in an SOV/SVO bilingual situation, and hence that objects whose language differs from that of the verb must be borrowed, if only for the nonce. To verify this prediction, we com- pare quantitatively the distribution across various syntactic contexts of both native Tamil and English-origin complements of Tamil verbs, and find them to be parallel. But the strongest evidence in favor of the nonce borrowing hy- pothesis comes from an analysis of variable accusative and dative case mark- ing in these complements, in which the English-origin material is shown, morphologically and syntactically, to be virtually indistinguishable from Tamil (nonpronominal) nouns. In addition, we present supporting evidence from the genitive, locative, and other cases and from nonce borrowings from Tamil into these speakers' English. The mixing of two languages in bilingual discourse may take on different forms and may be the result of various processes. When fragments from both codes alternate within a single sentence, this is often called intrasentential code-switching, especially if each fragment consists of more than a single This work was supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant to David Sankoff. The interviews and the initial transcription and correction of the corpus were carried out by Meena Balasubramaniam. Construction and management of the computer data- base were the responsibility of Sali Tagliamonte. We thank Anthony Kroch, William Labov, Magnus Ljung, Gillian Sankoff, and Lisa Travis for discussions and suggestions. We also thank our anonymous informants. 71