Ross (1999: 7, 1) gives the following definition: [Metatypy is a] change in morphosyntactic type and grammatical organisation [and also semantic patterns] which a language undergoes as a result of its speakers’ bilingualism in another language.
This change is driven by grammatical calquing, i.e. the copying of constructional meanings from the modified language and the innovation of new structures using inherited material to express them.
Speakers of the modified language form a sufficiently tightknit community to be well aware of their separate identity and of their language as a marker of that identity, but some bilingual speakers, at least, use the inter-community language so extensively that they are more at home in it than in the emblematic language of the community.Ross (2002) identifies the following metatypic changes: Ross finds that semantic reorganization occurs before syntactic restructuring.
The syntactic changes occur in the order of (i) sentence/clause, (ii) phrase, and (iii) words.
The end result of the metatypic change leaves Takia usually having a word-for-word Waskia translation such as the following: The pairing of syntactic and semantic structures makes this word-for-word translation possible.