Language contact and grammatical change (review)

The last few decades have seen an upsurge of interest in grammaticalization theory concerned with how and why grammatical structures develop historically. Language contact and how it affects linguistic structures is another popular topic. This book is the first systematic compendium marrying the two, that is, extending grammaticalization theory to include, and explain, contact-induced grammatical change.

This book is already a bestseller, and rightly so. The notions associated with grammaticalization and the insights emanating from grammaticalization theory—as developed by Bernd Heine, one of the major theoreticians of our time—have never before been systematically applied to studies of language contact.

The major objective of the book is to investigate how grammatical patterns and meanings—but not so much forms—get transfered from one language to another, and how this transfer essentially accords with the general principles and mechanisms of grammaticalization, a process ‘leading from lexical to grammatical and from grammatical to more grammatical forms’ (14). Types of ‘linguistic transfer’ (a well-argued for and well-chosen alternative term to a plethora of other terms, such as grammatical borrowing, copying, interference, calquing, indirect diffusion, and the like) are introduced at the very beginning. The kinds of linguistic transfer defined at the very start cover ‘form (that is, sounds, or combinations of sounds)’, ‘meanings (including grammatical meanings or functions) or combinations of meanings’, ‘form-meaning units or combinations of form-meaning units’, ‘syntactic relations, that is, the order of meaningful elements’, plus ‘any combination’ of the above (2). Each of these is deliberately vague. And this is an advantage: a far-from-specific definition allows the authors to be all-embracing in their approach. As a result, no stone is left unturned. The language-contact situations and areas discussed cover the whole world, from northwest Amazonia to the more familiar Indo-European domain. This adds to the appeal of this book for wide audiences of those interested in how language evolves.

The result of transfer from what can be seen as a ‘model’ language to a ‘replica’ language is termed Grammatical Replication, another convenient ‘umbrella’ label, which subsumes many others (including convergence, isomorphism, and more).

But how to recognize the effects of language contact? One of the hardest problems in comparative linguistics is teasing apart similarities due to genetic inheritance and those due to borrowing of varied kinds (cf. the classic controversy between Boas and Sapir). Ideally, if two languages descend from the same ancestor, the forms and their meanings should be easily relatable. This is what Heine and Kuteva call Genetic Patterning (§1.4.1, 23–24). In addition, genetically related languages tend to develop similar structures. Using Edward Sapir’s words, related languages ‘will pass through the same or strikingly similar phases’: this ‘parallelism in drift’ often accounts for additional similarities between related languages, even for those ‘long disconnected’ (Sapir 1921:171–72), and, according to H&K (who call this simply ‘drift’), accounts for one of the ‘constraints’ on grammatical replication (236).

If one language is significantly different from its proven genetic relatives, language contact is considered the ‘usual suspect’. And if two languages are (or have been) in contact and share certain features we immediately suspect that these features have been transfered from one to the other. Our suspicion will be strengthened if the two languages are genetically unrelated, and the features they share are typical of the family to which one of them belongs but not the other, no matter how widespread the features are outside the area. In many cases this can be demonstrated. For instance, many features of the Austronesian languages of the Siasi subgroup spoken in the interior of West New Britain that differentiate them from other Siasi languages are plainly due to diffusion from Anêm, a non-Austronesian language spoken in the area (see Thurston 1987).

A situation may be more complex. The geh- future in Pennsylvania German—in constant...