The handbook of language contact (review)

Raymond Hickey assembled an impressive team of forty globally renowned experts to provide a comprehensive survey of the field of language contact. Virtually all areas of language contact are covered in this volume; much of what is known about the field through its rich literature is acknowledged in each chapter’s copious references, and many new bold proposals appear here for the first time.

Sarah Thomason’s contribution, ‘Contact explanations in linguistics’, opens Part 1 of the volume (‘Contact and linguistics’) with a much needed theoretical paper, which provides a background to the whole field of contact linguistics viewed as a subdiscipline of sociolinguistics. Acknowledging that we can never hope to achieve ‘deterministic predictions’ in this area, our goal should be ‘a deeper understanding’ of linguistic change. This has always been a goal of historical linguistics, and diachronic and diatopic dimensions (‘language in time and space’) are present in all of the papers in this collection. Thomason advocates balancing the dichotomy of internal and external causation when discussing a particular change, and provides a framework for contact explanations under the two headings of social and linguistic predictors. The former include the presence/absence of imperfect learning, intensity of contact, and speakers’ attitudes; under linguistic predictors are typological distance, universal markedness, and degree of integration within a linguistic system. The effect of typological distance is reflected in various borrowing scales, but they may often be overridden by social factors; the third linguistic factor predicts that the transfer of inflectional morphology is the least likely to occur.

The other theoretically oriented papers exploring the place of contact studies within linguistics address the issues of genetic classification (Michael Noonan), convergence and typology (Yaron Matras), grammaticalization (Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva), grammatical theory (Karen P. Corrigan), and computational models (April McMahon). Long-lasting situations of cultural pressure exerted by a politically and numerically dominant group on a subordinate population living within its sphere translates into heavy structural borrowing that may entail significant typological change labeled ‘pattern replication’: for example, the adopting of the Turkish agglutinative arrangement of case markers by several (Greek) Cappadocian dialects from central Anatolia; the borrowing by European Romani dialects spoken in Slavic countries of Aktionsart prefix systems from their Slavic models; and some other not so common examples that have so far received little scholarly attention. Heine and Kuteva argue that the elusive constraints on contact-induced grammatical change are shaped by universal principles of grammaticalization. For example, in a new future-tense category speakers draw typically on verbs for ‘go to’ or ‘want’, and it is unlikely that a future-tense marker will develop into a verb for ‘go’ or ‘want’. That is, grammatical change in language contact situations is essentially unidirectional.

The six chapters in Part 2, ‘Contact and change’, assess the value of contact studies for research into language change in terms of language shift (Raymond Hickey), borrowing (Donald Winford), code-switching (Penelope Gardner-Chloros), dialectology (David Britain), the rise of new varieties (Paul Kerswill), and pidginization and creolization (John Holm). Hickey analyzes one of the cardinal issues of historical linguistics by means of data on the language shift that occurred in Ireland (between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries). He shows how syntactic material can be transferred, distinguishing carefully between category and its exponence in Irish and Irish English (this transfer is favored if the target language has a formal means of expressing this category and if there is little variation in its expression, among other factors). One of his salient examples is the ‘immediate perfective’ as in They are after doing the work (i.e. ‘They have completed the work’), modeled on Tá siad tar éis an obair dhéanamh, where the Irish constructed an equivalent to the output structure using English morphosyntactic means: tar éis was translated as...