Morphology, particularly inflectional morphology, has sometimes been considered among the last features of language to be transferred under conditions of language contact. It has become clear, however, that numerous factors can affect the susceptibility of bound morphology to transfer. One of these involves typological similarities among the languages involved, similarities which might increase over long periods of contact and in turn set the stage for elaboration of particular domains. Here such effects are examined in what is commonly viewed as a prototypical kind of inflection: plural marking on nouns. The languages involved are indigenous to a well-known linguistic area in Northern California, but they represent three unrelated families: Pomoan, Yukian, and Wintun. While shared plural markers often ride into languages in contact on the backs of borrowed nouns, speakers of these languages have a history of avoiding much lexical borrowing. The shared markers apparently entered the languages via a more circuitous route. Throughout the area, inflectional number marking on nouns is rare, but related distinctions on verbs can be elaborate. It appears that what was transferred were verbal distributive and collective suffixes, which then evolved within the individual languages, to varying degrees, into number marking on nouns.

中文翻译：

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复制拐点？明显的借来复数后面的情节曲折

在语言接触的条件下，有时会考虑形态学，尤其是屈折形态，是语言的最后特征之一。然而，已经清楚的是，许多因素会影响结合形态转移的敏感性。其中之一涉及所涉及语言之间的类型学相似性，这些相似性可能会在长期的联系中不断增加，进而为阐述特定领域奠定了基础。在这里，以通常被认为是原型变形的一种形式来检查这种影响：名词上的复数标记。所涉及的语言是北加州一个著名的语言区域的土著语言，但它们代表了三个无关的家庭：波摩亚语，尤肯语和温顿语。虽然共享的复数标记通常会在借来的名词的背面与语言接触，但使用这些语言的人都有避免大量词汇借用的历史。共享标记显然是通过更多的circuit回路径输入语言的。在整个区域中，名词上的屈折数字标记很少见，但动词上的相关区分可能很详细。似乎转移的是语言的分配性和集体后缀，然后在各个语言中逐渐发展成名词上的数字标记。