One way or another, loan words have to be grammatically integrated in the grammar of their recipient language. For verbs, Wohlgemuth (2009) finds that direct insertion, where native inflections are added directly onto the borrowed stem, is cross‐linguistically the most frequent accommodation strategy. He concludes from this that the borrowing of loan verbs is not constrained by inflection. Based on a two‐fold corpus study on the integration of English loan verbs in Present‐day Dutch and French loan verbs in Late Middle English, we propose a correction to Wohlgemuth's (2009) argument. Even under direct insertion, loan verbs are subject to constraints, as they enter some usage categories more readily than others. More specifically, we find evidence for loan verbs being avoided in finite forms and in morphologically marked forms. We refer to these joint tendencies as accommodation biases. The specific nature of accommodation biases in loan verbs suggests that loan verbs are underrepresented in those categories where they carry a dense functional load as markers of both lexical and grammatical information.

Previous research on loan word accommodation has shown that English‑origin verbs in Present‑day Dutch and French‑origin verbs in Late Middle English are subject to usage biases. In both language‑contact settings, loan verbs are disproportionally frequent in non‑finite and morphologically unmarked forms as compared to native verbs. The present study demonstrates that accommodation biases are also found in loan adjectives. Concretely, loan adjectives are more prevalent in predicative than in attributive syntactic position as compared to native adjectives (predicative bias), and they are more prevalent in uninflected than in inflected forms (markedness bias). The predicative bias is found to rank stronger than the markedness bias, which is consistent with the findings for verbs. Additionally, biases are more pronounced in the French‑Middle English than in the English‑Dutch contact setting. The findings indicate that direct insertion of loan-words, despite being the cross-linguistically most frequent strategy for loan word integration, is not free of obstacles, possibly due to processing costs specifically associated with loan words.