27.2702, Review: History of Ling; Socioling: Nicolaï (2014)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-2702. Wed Jun 22 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.2702, Review: History of Ling; Socioling: Nicolaï (2014)

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Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2016 13:01:33
From: Martina Häcker [martina.haecker at uni-siegen.de]
Subject: Questioning Language Contact

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-3480.html

EDITOR: Robert  Nicolaï
TITLE: Questioning Language Contact
SUBTITLE: Limits of Contact, Contact at its Limits
SERIES TITLE: Robert Nicolaï
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Martina Häcker, Universität Siegen

Reviews Editor: Robert A. Cote

SUMMARY

The book “Questioning Language Contact” by Robert Nicolaï is the first to
appear in the new series Brill’s Studies in Language Contact and Dynamics of
Language. It is divided into three parts: Part I “Questioning Language Contact
as ‘Concept’” (Chapters1-5, Part 2 “Questioning Language Contact as
‘Phenomenon’” (Chapters  6-9), and Part 3 “Questioning Language Contact as
‘Construction’” (Chapter 10). The main text is preceded by the editor’s
introduction and then followed by the “Index of Authors”, “Index of
Languages”, and the “Index of Concepts and Notions”. As Nicolaï is not only
the editor of this book but also the series editor, he aims to set the scene
for the series with this book, whose focus is described as “the study of
language contact, language use and language change” with a double focus on
“empirical data” and “theoretical  elaboration” and a broad range of
methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks (p. 1).  The book is
clearly aimed at a scholarly audience. Its purpose is not to give an overview
of different current approaches to language contact. Nicolaï explicitly states
(p. 1) that it “is not a handbook”. Rather, its aim is to present innovative
theoretical approaches and “well documented case studies” (p. 3) that differ
from mainstream approaches to language contact. The word “limit” that features
twice in the subtitle is programmatic. The objective of the book is to test
the limits of theoretical concepts, as well as the limits with respect of the
range of data and phenomena that can be studied. 

Chapter 1 by Robert Nicolaï, “Contact des langues et constraintes de la
description: réflexions épistémologiques sur les ‘limites’, à partir du
songhay septentrional”, gives an overview of earlier research on language
contact (section 2), with a major focus on the distinction between the terms
“contact” and “mélange” (that is, “mixing”), beginning with Denina (1785),
moving to the axioms of Müller and Whitney and the differences between them,
and finally Schuchardt’s view that all languages are mixed. In section 3,
Nicolaï introduces his main topic, “le songhay septentrional” that is four
Berber dialects spoken in the Sahel, in an area between Mali and Niger. He
states that in this area, Arabic functions as the prestigious superstrate
language and points out the interrelation between social and the linguistic
situations, namely the breaking with the songhay tradition and resulting
language change and the formation of new languages, with different tribes
adopting different Tuareg features, some phonological ones and others
morphosyntactic ones. He states the need to relate the linguistic outcomes of
language contact to the conditions that determine it, thus integrating
structural, social, cognitive and psycho-physiological factors into one
theory.  Section 4 illustrates this on the basis of the Tadaksahak vowel
system, while section 5 explains it in terms of categorisation. The final
section points out the impact of different perspectives on the analysis, that
of language mixing and language contact, and the need for critical reflexion
in order to avoid biases.

Chapter 2, by Georges Lüdi, “Le ‘parler plurilingue’ comme lieu d’émergence de
variétés de contact”, discusses in section 1 the notion of language and the
problem of relating language communities to political communities, outlining
Saussure’s and Chomsky’s theories before turning to the ideologies of “one
country – one language” in eighteenth-century France and Germany, which then
are contrasted with the concept of language mixture and its low status. He
concludes this section with the views of those who see languages as
communities of speakers and distinguish linguistic borders from political
ones. Section 2 deals with language contact and language mixing and focuses on
multilingualism and the concepts of borrowing and code switching. Section 3
focuses on multilingual competence and its creative potential, which is
followed by the introduction of “emergent grammar” (section 4) and sections on
language acquisition (section 5). Grammaticalisation and sedimentation
(section 6) are next followed by a preliminary conclusion (section 7), in
which he proposes to avoid the term “language contact” in synchronic research
and replace it by “multilingual discourse”.

Chapter 3 by Ad Backus, “Towards a usage-based account of language change:
Implications of contact linguistics for linguistic theory”, introduces the
concept of a “usage based approach” as an alternative to generative
approaches. The chapter’s purpose is to review how usage-based accounts can
explain the diffusion of changes through the speech community and the methods
available to usage-based approaches. Section 2 discusses the process of
change, focusing on the concepts of instantiation and entrenchment in the
speech of individuals and the cumulative effect of such entrenchments across a
speech community, and the different structural levels of words, multiword
expressions and constructions.  Section 3 discusses problematic aspects
relating to the two levels introduced by him, the individual and cumulative
one, pointing out the interaction between psycholinguistic and social aspects,
while section 4 discusses problematic aspects on the methodological level,
namely the question of the representativeness of corpora and the relationship
between frequency and stimulus response in experimental settings as
reflections of entrenchment. Section 5 describes contact-induced effects on
languages, using the example of calquing Dutch construction in Turkish, while
section 6 outlines “Cognitive Contact Linguistics” and posits the need to
combine it with “Cognitive Sociolinguistics”, pointing out the relationship
between entrenchment and contexts of use. The remaining sections are dedicated
to a case study, with section 7 describing the methodology, and chapter 8 the
Dutch-Turkish Corpus data and its analysis, addressing the distinction between
loan translations and code switching, stressing that they are complementary
rather than competing processes. The next three sections deal with three
different methods, that of collostructional analysis in corpora (section 9),
potential follow up analyses, namely judgement tasks (section 10), and
experimental tasks (section 11), drawing conclusions from these for the
methodology and summing up the potential and challenges of these methods in
section 13. 

Chapter 4 by Juan Carlos Godenzzi, “Contact de langues et connectivité
écolinguistique”, presents a model of language contact based on the author’s
research on the contact between Spanish and several native Indian languages in
America. The term “ecolinguistic” is not only used on the level of
geographical space but also that of conceptual space and an analytical level
(section 1). Section 2 provides an overview of the literature and the aspects
investigated. Section 3 outlines a new concept of contact which contains as
its elements “transmission”, “connectivity”, and “agency”.  Section 4 relates
this concept to the theories of Humboldt and Schuchardt as well as that of
Coseriu. Section 5 describes ecolinguistic connections on the analytical,
structural, and socio-associative levels, which interact with each other. This
is followed by a brief summary in section 6.

Chapter 5 by Angelita Martínez and Adriana Speranza, “Linguistic variation,
cognitive processes and the influence of contact”, focuses on the contact
between Spanish and Quechuan. After a brief introduction in section 1, it
outlines what is referred to as the “ethno-pragmatic approach” in section 2.
Section 3 introduces the two phenomena studied by the authors, the “variable
use of clitics and verbs in utterances with the verb “decir” (say)”, followed
by hypotheses which explain them as transfers from Quechuan, and describes the
corpus, which is analyzed in section 4 and explained on the basis of several
cognitive processes. This is followed by another section 4 (“Conclusions”,
which should have been labelled as section 5) relating the cognitive processes
to communicative needs and setting up a correlation between the relative
frequency of phenomena and certain patterns in Quechuan, which can be
explained as transfer from Quechuan. This in turn is interpreted as an
ethno-pragmatic strategy. While the findings of the study are interesting, the
hypotheses set up on pages 156 and 157 are almost incomprehensible as a result
of what appears to be a literal translation from Spanish that does not take
conventions of English linguistic terminology into account.

Chapter 6 by Françoise Gadet and Philippe Hambye, “Contact and ethnicity in
‘youth language’ description: in search of specifity”, deals with the
phenomenon of “contemporary urban vernaculars” (CUVs) in France. In their
introduction, the authors present their research questions, namely whether
CUVs are contact varieties with specific features and whether they are the
result of language mixing. Section 2 discusses the way CUVs are referred to by
their own speakers and by those who do not speak them. Section 3 discusses the
use of the term “ethnolect”. Section 4 provides an overview of the
phonological, lexical, and grammatical features of French CUV based on earlier
studies by a range of authors and argues, in contrast to previous research,
that CUV cannot simply be explained as a contact variety because the limited
knowledge of Arabic of many speakers is incompatible with transfer as an
explanation. Section 5 discusses CUV in the context of sociolinguistic factors
such as identity and covert prestige. Section 6 relates CUV to what is termed
“posture and footing”, that is, an emphatic language that is in line with the
speakers’ self-perception and can be described as selective borrowing of
prestigious features. In their conclusion, the authors state that CUV can be
most adequately be described as a variety adopted by lower-class speakers from
ethnically mixed communities.

Chapter 7 by Alyson Sewell and Joseph Salmons, “How far-reaching are the
effects of contact? Parasitic gapping in Wisconsin German and English”,
investigates long-term effects of language contact. The introduction provides
an overview of theories on language contact and introduces the research
question whether the acceptability of sentences with parasitic gaps, as in
“Which book did you sell without reading”, is affected by the density of
historical German settlement in both the English and German of present-day
speakers. Section 2 provides the theoretical background on parasitic gaps as
well as information on the participants and the historical settlement of
Wisconsin, while section 3 describes the collection and analysis of the data
(discussed in section 4) which shows that English-German language contact has
an influence on the acceptability of parasitic gaps in that (i) parasitic gaps
in German are accepted by Wisconsin German speakers in cases where they are
not accepted by European German speakers, and (ii) that Wisconsin
German-English bilinguals accept fewer parasitic gaps than English
monolinguals. The findings are summarized in Section 5.

Chapter 8 by Janne Skaffari and Aleksi Mäkilähde, “Code-switching in
historical materials: research at the limits of contact linguistics”, looks at
historical contact linguistics and code switching. The introduction sketches
what can be subsumed under historical language contact, section 2 provides an
overview of previous research, section 3 tries to set up a taxonomy of types
of language contact, while section 4 provides examples of historical code
switching in English (with a major focus on “Ancrene Wisse”) and discusses
possible reasons for the respective switches. Section 5 summarizes the
results.

Chapter 9 by Inga Hennecke, “Contact-induced language change in bilingual
processing”, aims to introduce priming as an experimental technique to
investigate contact-induced language change. Sections 1 and 2 provide an
overview of types of contact-induced language change, including grammatical
replication and lexical borrowing. Section 3 compares two models of bilingual
language processing, de Groot’s 1992 Distributional Conceptual Feature Model
and the Sense Model (adapted from Finkbeiner et al., 2004), and section 4
describes Cross-Language Masked Semantic Priming as a cause for
contact-induced language change in Manitoba French pragmatic markers (based on
the author’s Ph.D thesis). Section 5 gives a short summary and suggestions for
further research.

Chapter 10 by Andrée Tabouret-Keller, “Limites objectives et limitations
subjectives des effets de contact entre parlers”, investigates the history of
language contact in Alsace between French and Alsatian German in relation to
Alsace’s political history. It sets out the geographical situation of Alsace
in section 1, its political and linguistic history in section 2, and the
linguistic history of the author’s family in section 3. In section 4, it
provides an analysis of boundaries in three senses, namely that of the
geographical boundaries of the Rhine and the Vosges, the linguistic boundaries
set by institutions, and the individual ones based on conditions of
acquisition and emotional experiences and the impact of these on identity and
language production. Section 5 reflects on the loss of language contact due to
the loss of Alsatian German in Alsace.

EVALUATION

The book largely fulfils what it promises in the introduction - relatively
innovative theoretical and methodological approaches and case studies. In
addition, it provides extensive histories of the field of language contact
studies in the chapters by Nicolaï and Lüdi and on methodology in the chapter
by Backus. While the individual chapters are mostly informative either from a
theoretical and methodological point of view or as case studies, some chapters
contain sections whose relevance to the main topic of the respective chapters
is unclear (e.g. Chapters 4 and 9). The first impression of the book is that
it is somewhat disjointed due to a lack of signposting both in chapter
headings and the introductory sections of some chapters (only three chapters
state in their headings which languages are investigated) and the fact that
the allocation of the chapters to the parts appears somewhat arbitrary. The
editor’s introduction, therefore, is not something the reader can skip.

The book is well-presented, with maps, tables and figures, and is immaculate
with respect to spelling and layout. What is perhaps its most striking feature
is its coverage in terms of geography, encompassing case studies of language
contact in Europe, Africa and America, and its diachronic spread, which ranges
from historical code switching to youth language. The volume is a very welcome
addition to the study of language contact, as is the series.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Martina Häcker is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the
University of Siegen, Germany. Her main research areas are language contact
and language change. She published Adverbial Clauses in Scots: A
Semantic-Syntactic Study with Mouton de Gruyer in 1998 (reprinted in 2010) and
articles on Scots, phonological change, grammaticalisation and contact-induced
change. Her latest research focuses on language contact and phrasal transfer
in Middle English and phonological transfer in the English of German native
speakers. She is currently working on a history of h-variation in English.





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