The VP in language contact: on creation event lexicalization in Canadian French

1 Introduction

In research on language contact, properties belonging to the domain of verbs have received comparatively little attention (cf. Matras 2007: 44), and it is only recently that an explicit interest in verbal event and argument structure can be observed (cf. e.g. Grossman and Witzlack-Makarevich 2019; Trips and Stein 2019; cf. also Meinschaefer, this issue). The VP appears highly interesting as its investigation can contribute to answering the question of which factors favor or inhibit the transfer of syntactic structures and semantic concepts from one language to another. This study investigates to what extent different VPs that denote creation events are acceptable in CaFr. Following Talmy (cf. i.a. 1985, 2000), the starting point is the well-known observation that French is a canonical verb-framed (V-framed) language, in which the result of a complex event is typically encoded within the verb and manner expressed by an adjunct, if at all, (1). English, on the other hand, is a typical satellite-framed (S-framed) language, which tends to lexicalize the result outside the verb root and manner within the verb, cf. (2).^[1]

Talmy’s typological distinction is known to reflect only the prototypical behavior of the respective language (family) and the terms S-framed and V-framed are usually employed to refer to both languages and certain configurations of the VP, which can be regarded as S-framed or V-framed (cf. Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2019: 405). S-framed languages are known to allow for V-framed event lexicalization quite freely. (3), for instance, is stylistically marked, but not unacceptable. S-framed event lexicalization in V-framed languages, on the other hand, is far more restricted. In (4), for example, the adjective propre cannot be interpreted as a secondary resultative predicate, cf. (4a), but only as a nominal modifier, cf. (4b).

A much-discussed question is thus under which conditions V-framed languages such as French also allow for S-framed event lexicalization. This study addresses this issue by examining CaFr as a variety that is in close long-term contact with English. It aims to investigate whether and, if so, how language contact contributes to loosening constraints typical of the French VP and, more generally, in changing the preferences for certain lexicalization patterns. Creation events are considered a suitable test ground for investigating these questions as they obligatorily involve a result component and possibly a manner component. Moreover, they appear to be significantly less studied than motion events.^[2] This study focuses on the (in)compatibility of different verbs with an effected object in the sense of Fillmore (1968), whose referent comes into being as the result of the event denoted by the verb (cf. Jezek [2014] for a taxonomy of creation verbs). It is well known that a number of manner verbs that can occur in creation readings and select an effected object in English, do not do so canonically in HFr, cf. (5a) versus (5b).

In corpora, there are sporadic examples of S-framed creation event lexicalization, and it appears as striking that some of them seem to have originated in CaFr. In (6), the verb rouler is used in a creation reading, which is not among its canonical denotations. In (7), un chemin is an effected object not selected by the verb pelleter (see Section 3 for details on examples such as [5], [6] and [7]).^[3]

This contribution draws on data from an acceptability judgment task (AJT) in order to ascertain how certain ways of creation event lexicalization are judged by speakers with different (bilingual) language profiles. Thus, it is examined in terms of perceived acceptability which factors determine the possibility of transferring event-structural properties without any formal substance being transferred. Judgment data from bilingual speakers of CaFr are compared against data from speakers of HFr, who can be considered monolingual in comparison (see Section 5.3 for details on the speakers’ profiles).^[4] The study also includes the question of how individual and social language dominance might affect speaker judgments as this variable is discussed as relevant in numerous studies on contact-induced change (cf. i.a. Van Coetsem 2000; Johanson 2002; Thomason 2001).

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 gives a brief overview of the present-day language contact situation concerning French and English in Canada. Section 3 introduces the verb classes on which the AJT is based. Section 4 outlines Johanson’s (2002) code-copying model and Van Coetsem’s (2000) agentivity model as the classificatory frameworks in which the data are analyzed with respect to possible influence of English. The AJT as well as methodological considerations regarding acceptability, processing and coercion are presented in Section 5. The results and open questions are discussed in Section 6.

2 French in Canada and contact to English

French in Canada comes in a number of varieties spoken in communities that exhibit varying levels of contact to English. Depending on the exact setting, both French and English can be found as both the sole language, the majority, or the minority language (cf. Mougeon et al. 2005: 103). The two main varieties are Laurentian French and Acadian French. Laurentian French is employed as a cover term (probably more in North American than in European contexts) for all French varieties spoken in the province of Quebec and genetically related varieties that have spread more westwards, in particular to Ontario (cf. Martineau 2009). The Laurentian variety with the most speakers (appr. 6 Mil.) is known to be Quebec French. Quebec is the only predominantly French-speaking province of Canada and the only province where French is the sole official language. According to the 2021 Canadian census, French L1 speakers represent about 82 % of the provincial population and only about 46 % of the Quebec residents can hold a conversation in both French and English.^[5] Bilingualism rates vary, of course, depending on a number of factors such as speakers’ age and municipality. The Montreal region shows a comparatively high proportion of bilingual speakers and a significant presence of English (as well as other languages) in the public sphere (e.g. Leimgruber 2020). With respect to linguistic phenomena resulting from contact with English, two opposing tendencies can be observed. On the one hand, there are loans from English that are absent, for instance, in HFr. On the other hand, a strong tendency towards French language purism is known to exist. On the societal level, Quebec French is significantly less exposed to English than French in the provinces further west and can be found in rather monolingual settings (cf. Mercier et al. 2017). West of Quebec, English is the only official language on the provincial level. The province with the highest percentage of L1 French speakers outside of Quebec is Ontario, with about 500,000 speakers who, however, make up only about 5 % of the provincial population (cf. e.g. Remysen 2019). Administrative services are offered in French only in counties, districts or cities that count more than 5,000 Francophones or in which Francophones constitute more than 10 % of the population.^[6] Bilingualism is asymmetrical to the effect that French L1 speakers are overwhelmingly bilingual, whereas there are only few bilinguals among English L1 speakers. Shift towards English is under way in many Franco-Ontarian communities (cf. Nadasdi 2005; Tennant 2017 for overviews). French has, thus, the status of a majority language and is not necessarily in close contact to English in Quebec and it is a minority language and heavily exposed to influence from English in all other provinces west of Quebec, with a few exceptions in certain parts of Eastern Ontario (cf. Pöll ² 2017: 101). This study draws on data from speakers of both settings to include the question of how the social status of CaFr might affect speaker judgments. Only Laurentian varieties of CaFr are referred to under this term in the following.

3 Relevant verb classes

In order to first clarify the question of which manner verbs can select an effected object in HFr, this study draws on the resources Verb∋Net (cf. Pradet and Danlos 2012) and Les Verbes Français [LVF] (cf. Dubois and Dubois-Charlier 1997). Verb∋Net is an adaption of the English verb lexicon VerbNet (cf. Kipper-Schuler 2005) to French. In both VerbNet and Verb∋Net, verbs are organized into classes based on their semantics and syntactic behavior following Levin’s (1993) seminal verb classification. Each verb class is described in terms of its subcategorization frame, thematic roles and selectional restrictions. Furthermore, the description of each verb class includes a decompositional semantic representation. Syntactic configurations that are available or unavailable in French (in comparison to English) are also listed. The Levin-classes that are part of Verb∋Net and relevant to this study are ‘creation and transformation verbs’ (class 26, e.g., sculpter ‘to carve’ or tisser ‘to weave’) as well as ‘verbs of combining and attaching’ (class 22, e.g., lier ‘to tie’ or mélanger ‘to mix’). Verb∋Net is informed by and linked to LVF (cf. François et al. 2007), where the relevant verbs belong to class R (réalisation/mise en état). Members of this class that can select effected objects are identifiable via the column opérateur in which they carry the label fab[riquer].^[7]

These verb lexica will be used for comparing HFr and English verbs in terms of their compatibility with effected objects. For clarity, and following Jezek (2014), the event structures of the verbs in question will be represented as predicate decompositions based on those proposed by Rappaport Hovav and Levin (1998) and much subsequent work. The verbs at issue here all denote activities or changes of state [COS], cf. (8a) and (8b), but only some of them additionally allow for a creation reading, whose event structure can be represented as in (9).

Two relevant verb classes can be identified with respect to this question. First, the verbal inventories of both HFr and English include a number of transitive manner verbs that are available in both activity or COS readings and in creation readings when combined with a direct object. Henceforth, these verbs will be called ‘flexible’ verbs. In (10a) and (11a), the referent of the direct object exists prior to the event, in (10b) and (11b) it comes into existence as the result of the event and is, thus, an effected object. French verbs that show this type of flexible behavior are also exemplified in (12).

The second verb class relevant to this study involves manner verbs that are restricted to activity or COS readings when combining with only a direct object in HFr (‘inflexible’ verbs), cf. (13a) versus (13b) and the corresponding paraphrases. Importantly, the English equivalent is available in activity/COS as well as in creation readings and, thus, a flexible verb, cf. (14a) and (14b). Other manner verbs that do not allow for an effected object in French canonically but do so in English (under certain conditions) are exemplified in (15).

In addition, in S-framed languages such as English, certain manner verbs can receive a creation reading when combined with an effected object and a locative PP as in (16). Here, the event structure of an activity verb is augmented by a cause subevent involving a locative phrase as represented in (17). Event structure augmentations of this type often concern contact-by-impact verbs like bite or scratch (cf. Levin 1993: 148–153) but are, for instance, also possible with instrument verbs such as hammer or saw, cf. (18) for an exemplary list. Crucially, the effected object is an unselected object, i.e., it is not licensed by the verb but by the PP without which the VP’s acceptability is at least reduced. The ‘hole’ is the entity that emerges as the event result, but it is not the undergoer of the activity denoted by the verb.

In the literature on resultative constructions, VPs of this type are often called ‘strong’ resultatives (cf. Kaufmann and Wunderlich 1998) and it is well known that, in V-framed languages such as French, this type of structure is generally barred. The French counterpart of (16) is, thus, ungrammatical and a different verb such as faire has to be used instead, cf. (19).

For HFr, two types of restrictions can therefore be identified for creation event lexicalization. Manner verbs with effected objects are not in principle barred, but the inventory of flexible verbs appears to be smaller than in English.^[8] This raises the question of whether verbs that are inflexible in HFr can become available in creation readings under the influence of English. Event structure augmentations with non-selected objects are generally blocked, which constitutes not a lexical semantic, but a general restriction typical of V-framed languages. In this respect, the question arises whether also structural constraints of this type are violable in situations of intense language contact.

The restrictions that can be observed for manner verbs in HFr are also relevant with respect to manner salience. According to this concept, speakers acquire specific preferences for conceptualizing cognitive domains based on the linguistic input they can draw on (cf. Slobin 1996, 2006). English having a comparatively large inventory of manner verbs and few syntactic restrictions is considered high manner-salient, whereas French having a smaller inventory and limited possibilities of combining manner verbs with result expressions is typically viewed as low manner-salient. Thus, the question arises under which conditions French speakers prefer event descriptions with or without manner in the core VP and to what extent lexicalization patterns can change under the influence of English.

4 Code-copying and linguistic dominance

For analyzing the acceptability of certain lexicalization patterns in language contact, Section 4.1 outlines Johanson’s (2002) code-copying model, which is used for identifying the relevant subtypes of transfer of linguistic units from a source language [SL] to a recipient language [RL]. Section 4.2 then discusses the concept of linguistic dominance, considering aspects of both the code-copying model and Van Coetsem’s (2000) agentivity model. In addition, I will briefly introduce a standardized test that is employed for measuring the test subjects’ linguistic dominance in the experiment.

5 The acceptability judgment task

The experiment addresses the following question: (How) does the acceptability of certain instances of creation event lexicalization vary between test groups with different (bilingual) language profiles? Prior to presenting the study in detail, some general methodological considerations are laid out here.

It is well known that the (un-)acceptability of a linguistic utterance can arise from a number of sources, among which are grammaticality, semantic well-formedness, pragmatic plausibility, the frequency of the lexical items and syntactic structures involved as well as processing costs (cf. Cowart 1997; Schütze and Sprouse 2013). In our case, semantic well-formedness and processing costs are particularly relevant aspects. Let us first consider inflexible verbs of the type plier in HFr. When combined with an effected object, the respective VPs are semantically malformed as there is a mismatch between the verb and its complement. Speakers of HFr can, thus, only arrive at a felicitous event interpretation if they coerce the VP into a creation reading. Coercion is commonly understood as the repair of a mismatch between a selector and a selected element (cf. a.o. Lauwers and Willems 2011; Swart 2011) and can lead to increased effort in the processing of linguistic stimuli. A key feature of judgment data, however, is the fact that the dependent variable – acceptability – is measured offline, i.e., after language processing has been completed. Judgment data thus provide information about the interpretation of utterances in discourse but cannot provide direct information about language processing, unlike online methods such as self-paced reading or eye tracking (cf. e.g. Vorwerg 2012 for an overview). However, certain correlations between processing and acceptability have been observed, in particular in dual task designs. Processing difficulties, which become visible, for instance, by comparatively slow reading speed, have been shown to correlate with judgments of reduced acceptability (cf. i.a. Fanselow 2021; Fanselow and Frisch 2006; Sprouse 2008). Low acceptability values can thus be considered as indicative of increased processing effort, all other things kept constant. The relationship between acceptability and processing is relevant for this study as increased processing effort can result from coercion. Studies in complement coercion (e.g. Pustejovsky 2011; Zarcone et al. 2017) typically focus on the clash between the selectional restrictions of the verb and the semantic type of its direct object. This is the kind of constellation we are dealing with here as well. It has been observed that complement coercion can decrease, for instance, reading speed and lower acceptability when comparing VPs that involve a semantic mismatch to VPs in which no mismatch is at play. As for HFr, the AJT is based on the hypothesis that the success of coercion depends on whether we are dealing with manner verbs of the type plier as (13b) above, repeated as (20), or with VPs of the type mordre un trou dans la botte as in (19) above, repeated as (21).^[11]

In cases such as (20), a mismatch between a specific verb and its complement has to be resolved in order to obtain a creation reading. However, a creation reading requires no more than that the VP be given an interpretation that is in principle available for French manner verbs, as can be observed in flexible verbs such as sculpter. In cases such as (21), however, a lexeme-independent constraint has to be canceled in order to interpret the VP in a felicitous way. This difference affects the expectations regarding acceptability. The effort of coercing the unselected object in (21) into an effected object reading should decrease acceptability to a higher degree than in the case of (20). As for the data on HFr, the attested acceptability gradations are taken to reflect, at least to a certain degree, the processing effort that is involved in the repair of the mismatch between the verb and its complement (cf. Darby et al. [2021: 147] for a similar view on aspectual coercion).

For CaFr, the expectations about acceptability are somewhat different. Inflexible verbs of the plier-type as in (20) have English equivalents that allow for creation readings. There is, thus, the possibility of semantic copying in the sense of Johanson (2002: 292), which concerns the semantics of individual verb lexemes. If a part of the event structure that yields a creation reading for to fold is copied onto plier, the French verb is expected to become more acceptable in a context that calls for a creation reading. However, it cannot be clarified based on an AJT whether speakers coerce the respective VPs into a creation reading or whether coercion is not even at play. In other words, with bilingual test subjects, we cannot know for sure whether resorting to semantic copying facilitates coercion or whether the copy is part of the lexical entry of the respective verb. Notwithstanding this question, semantic copying is expected to improve the acceptability of plier-type verbs within the CaFr-group.

In the case of VPs such as mordre un trou dans la botte, the difference between the languages at stake does not concern individual verb lexemes, but the general ability of English to build strong resultative constructions. Thus, in order for VPs such as (21) above to be interpreted as creation events, more general combinatorial possibilities of English have to be copied onto the respective French VP. In the following, verbs like mordre are also referred to as inflexible, because they canonically disallow a creation reading and an effected object. However, it is not only the verb that blocks a creation reading in this constellation, but a lexeme-independent restriction of the French language. Combinatorial copying from English might, however, facilitate coercing the VPs in question into a creation reading and lead at least to (limited) acceptability.

Resorting to semantic and combinatorial copying from English is thus expected to improve the acceptability of French VPs, which canonically would not allow for creation readings, at least not in Hexagonal French. However, as already mentioned, an AJT does not allow us to fully verify or falsify these hypotheses as it is never entirely clear to what exactly a speaker’s judgment refers (cf. Fanselow 2007). Nevertheless, acceptability data can provide first insights with respect to the question of whether event- and argument-structural properties of verbs can change in settings that involve language contact and varying degrees of bilingualism.

5.5 Results

Prior to the analysis, the acceptability ratings of each test subject were transformed into z-scores in order to eliminate potential biases in how different test subjects used the 7-point scale (cf. Schütze and Sprouse 2013: 43). A total of 1,538 judgments was included in the analysis. First, we consider how the acceptability of the VPs under investigation differs between the HFr-group and the CaFr-group. To estimate the effects of the experimental manipulations, a Linear Mixed Model (LMM) with a Gaussian family distribution was performed using R (R Core Team 2021) and the package lme4 (Bates et al. 2015). Verb type (manner verb vs. faire), type of manner verb (flexible, inflexible [type plier], inflexible [type mordre]) and test group (HFr, CaFr) were therefore treated as fixed factors. The model included a by-item random intercept. p-values were obtained by pairwise comparisons of a model with an effect in question against the model without this effect using ANOVAs. Figure 1 shows the VPs’ acceptability with the three types of manner verbs in each test group. In the HFr-group, the expected gradations show up. VPs with flexible verbs are fully acceptable. VPs with inflexible verbs of the plier-type turn out to be less acceptable but can be successfully coerced into creation readings for the most part. Only for inflexible verbs (type mordre) with an unselected object do significant restrictions show up and part of the box falls into the negative number range.^[16] The findings on HFr, thus, corroborate the assumption that coercing a VP into a reading that involves a generally inadmissible event structure lowers acceptability more than coercing it into a reading that is structurally available and only in conflict with the selectional restrictions of a particular verb. In the CaFr-group, the ratings are significantly more widely spread than in the HFr-group. As expected, flexible verbs receive the highest acceptability scores. However, inflexible verbs are only slightly less acceptable. Moreover, there are no significant differences between inflexible verbs of the plier-type and those of the mordre-type. Thus, in the CaFr-group, unlike in the HFr-group, it does not make a big difference whether only a verb-specific or a general restriction is infringed. Somewhat surprisingly, inflexible verbs are not rated significantly worse in the HFr-group than in the CaFr-group. Thus, even without the possibility of semantic-combinatorial copying, it appears to be largely possible to coerce the VPs into a creation reading. The main difference between the test groups falls within the group of inflexible verbs.

Figure 1:

Acceptability of manner verbs with effected objects in the HFr-group (n = 300) and the CaFr-group (n = 469), (n for each condition [from left to right] = 150, 75, 75, 234, 117, 118).

The test groups are also compared with regard to the acceptability of VPs with faire, cf. Figure 2. In the HFr-group, all VPs with faire uniformly turn out to be very acceptable, regardless of whether or not a manner verb would also be available in the given context. In the CaFr-group, the data are again more broadly distributed and the ratings of VPs with faire are somewhat lower, especially in the group in which a manner verb like sculpter would be available canonically. The differences between the groups may have to do with the fact that manner has become a more salient linguistic component in CaFr than it is in HFr.

Figure 2:

Acceptability of faire with effected objects in the HFr-group (n = 300) and the CaFr-group (n = 469), (n for each condition [from left to right] = 150, 75, 75, 234, 118, 117).

In the final model, verb type, type of manner verb and test group survive as significant predictors of acceptability (χ² (1) = 33.68, p = 0). To focus on S-framed event lexicalization only and to exclude manner salience as a possible confounding factor, a model without the VPs containing faire was also fitted. Type of manner verb and test group survive as significant predictors (χ² (1) = 10.23, p < 0.01). Thus, the comparison of the groups shows the following: H1 was borne out, which could be attributed to different degrees of manner salience. H2 has not been confirmed because inflexible verbs of the type plier are not more acceptable in the CaFr-group than in the HFr-group. Creation readings are, thus, more or less acceptable in both groups as long as only the selectional restrictions of a particular verb are violated. H3 is confirmed insofar as VPs with mordre-type verbs and an unselected object scored higher in the CaFr-group than in the HFr-group, thus corroborating the assumption that a structure that is only available in English is copied onto the French verbs to obtain a creation reading.

Lastly, we address the question of how individual and social language dominance might have influenced the judgments within the CaFr-group. Figure 3 shows that the expected correlation between acceptability and individual language dominance cannot be confirmed (beyond doubt) and that there is no clear evidence in favor of SL agentivity. The acceptability of VPs with unselected objects (mordre-type verbs) does not rise with increasing dominance of English. The acceptability of VPs formed with faire, which could also be built with a manner verb, only slightly decreases with increasing dominance of English.^[17] H4 is thus not borne out, and in the case of H5, only a weak trend in the expected direction has been detected.

Figure 3:

Acceptability and individual language dominance: VPs with inflexible manner verbs (type mordre) in gray (n = 118), VPs with faire (equivalents to VPs with flexible manner verbs) in black (n = 234).

To investigate how social language dominance may have affected acceptability, judgments of speakers from Quebec were contrasted with those of speakers from the English-dominant provinces. The data from four speakers from the Montreal region were excluded for this analysis (cf. Section 2). Figure 4 shows that VPs containing mordre-type verbs and unselected objects are judged as slightly more acceptable by speakers from the English-dominant provinces than by speakers from Quebec. Moreover, VPs with faire are unanimously rated highly by speakers from Quebec. The scores of speakers from the English-dominant provinces are somewhat lower and more scattered. Thus, social language dominance seems to influence slightly the extent to which S-framed event lexicalization of the type manner verb + unselected object or the omission of manner is accepted. Overall, however, the data from the CaFr-group do not yet appear to be sufficient to argue for robust findings, and due to the repeated measure design, I refrain from fitting a GLMM for only the CaFr-subset.

Figure 4:

Acceptability and social language dominance (Quebec [QC] vs. English-dominant provinces): VPs with inflexible manner verbs (type mordre) on the left, VPs with faire (equivalents to VPs with flexible manner verbs) on the right, (n for each condition [from left to right] = 35, 70, 70, 140).

6 Discussion

Based on an experimental approach, this study has explored to what degree bilingual speakers of CaFr accept different ways of creation event lexicalization in comparison to speakers of HFr. The CaFr-speakers did not generally rate instantiations of S-framed event lexicalization higher than the HFr-speakers, but they showed different judgment patterns under two conditions. First, they were more accepting of S-framed structures with unselected objects, which are only available in English. Coercion that requires overriding a structural constraint of French, thus, appears to be easier for bilingual speakers who can resort to combinatorial copying from the contact language. Second, speakers of CaFr were less inclined than speakers of HFr to accept VPs with faire in cases in which a flexible manner was available but not used. This difference could be attributed to influence from English as a high manner-salient language. While differences between the test groups are, thus, apparent, it is not yet entirely clear to what degree they are driven by language dominance. The data collected so far tentatively suggest that the status of French and English in the respective province or region might play a role. The acceptability of S-framing is slightly more reduced when French is socially dominant. Similarly, VPs in which manner is not lexicalized in the verb are somewhat less acceptable when English is the more dominant language. The extent to which English-type structures are tolerated or frowned upon could thus impact acceptability.

The conclusions that can be drawn from this study are subject to several limitations that give rise to desiderata for future work. Whether bilingual French speakers are more likely to accept English-type VPs in provinces in which English is the socially dominant language requires further investigation. A more fine-grained analysis on the interaction of individual and social language dominance could provide further insights into how SL agentivity in the sense of Van Coetsem (2000) and adoption in the sense of Johanson (2002) interact. Furthermore, it remains to be shown whether the gradient acceptability attested in this study is paralleled by processing effort in an online experiment such as a self-paced reading task. We have, for instance, seen that speakers from both CaFr and HFr accept canonically inflexible manner verbs of the type plier in creation readings. I tentatively attribute this finding to the fact that no general grammatical constraint has to be overridden in order to arrive at a creation reading. However, it still has to be clarified whether speakers face more processing difficulties if they cannot resort to semantic copying.

With regard to test subjects, it should not go unmentioned that no judgments from monolingual speakers of CaFr were included in the data set. Especially in Quebec, there are speakers, mainly from the older generation, who represent this profile. They are, however, difficult to find on crowdsourcing platforms. Data from this speaker type would prove useful in determining the degree to which phenomena initiated by bilingual speakers find their way into monolingual variants of the contact variety and lead to contact-induced change instead of only short-term effects. Combining canonically inflexible verbs (such as plier) with effected objects would represent a comparatively minor change, which qualifies as ‘system-preserving’ in the sense of Aikhenvald (2006). Relaxing a general constraint of the French VP, on the other hand, would have to be regarded as ‘system-altering’.

Finally, this study focused on the possibility of semantic-combinatorial copying without material copying. In order to expand the scope, it appears worthwhile to include material copying (cf. e.g. Trips and Stein [2019] for a combined approach), as ‘loan verbs’ can provide information on whether S-framing is facilitated when Germanic verb roots are involved. Manner verbs such as mix-er, scratch-er or jump-er can thus provide the basis for further pursuing the question of which factors favor or inhibit changes in the VP in language contact.