32.1730, Review: Linguistic Theories; Sociolinguistics: Grant (2019)

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Subject: 32.1730, Review: Linguistic Theories; Sociolinguistics: Grant (2019)

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Date: Tue, 18 May 2021 16:09:45
From: Natalie Operstein [natacha at ucla.edu]
Subject: The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-3593.html

EDITOR: Anthony P. Grant
TITLE: The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Handbooks
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Natalie Operstein,  

SUMMARY

''The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact'', edited by Anthony P. Grant,
consists of a theoretical part (''Language Contact and Linguistic Theory'')
and an illustrative one (''Language Contact in Several Languages''), the whole
divided into thirty-three chapters. 

In Chapter 1 (“Contact-Induced Linguistic Change: An Introduction”, 1-47),
Anthony P. Grant introduces the volume and presents a wide-ranging conceptual
history of the field by surveying its major problems and findings and
highlighting recurrent themes and some of the key terms and explicatory
frameworks. This introductory chapter covers various aspects of
contact-induced linguistic change (''CILC''), placing particular emphasis on
external contacts. The topics discussed include motivations, processes and
outcomes of CILC, borrowability of different structural domains, and the
effects upon CILC of typological similarity between the linguistic systems in
contact. The discussion is enlivened by examples drawn from a variety of
contact situations. 

In Chapter 2 (''Theories of Language Contact'', 51-74) Donald Winford stresses
the need for integrating linguistic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic
aspects of contact-induced change in order to achieve a unified theory of
language contact. The chapter surveys a number of theoretical proposals (e.g.,
Thomason & Kaufman 1988, Johanson 2002), giving particular prominence to the
cognitive approach developed by Van Coetsem (1988, 2000) which conceives of
two broad types of contact phenomena distinguished by whether the agents of
transfer are linguistically dominant in the source language (''imposition'')
or the recipient language (''borrowing''). Phenomena under the rubric of
imposition affect the recipient language's grammatical structure and include
second-language acquisition, creole formation and language attrition.
Phenomena under the rubric of borrowing have less of an impact upon the
grammatical structure of the recipient language and include lexical borrowing,
code-switching, relexification and mixed-language formation.  

In Chapter 3 (“Contact-Induced Change and Phonology”, 75-95), Anthony P.
Grant, Thomas B. Klein and E-Ching Ng survey the impact of language contact on
the affected languages’ phonological systems. The issues surveyed range from
phonemicization of allophones to addition of new phonemes and to
reorganization of phonotactic constraints and prosodic systems, with each
process illustrated through carefully selected examples from a variety of
languages. The chapter also includes two slightly more detailed case studies,
one of which examines phonological adaptation of Spanish loanwords in Chamorro
and the other provides a brief overview of multilayered contact-induced
phonological changes in Tsat.

In Chapter 4 (“Morphology and Contact-Induced Language Change”, 96-122),
Francesco Gardani highlights the gradient nature of morphological integration
of loanwords to the inflectional systems of the recipient languages, from full
to partial integration and to complete non-integration. The issues discussed
include the distinction between the borrowing of morphemes and that of
morphological patterns, comparative borrowability of different morphological
domains -- derivation, inherent inflection, contextual inflection (Booij 1994,
1996) -- as well as the factors that favor morphological borrowing, such as
the structural congruence between the source and recipient languages and
extra-linguistic factors like the length of the contact and the relative
socioeconomic status of the groups in contact.  

In Chapter 5 (“Syntax and Contact-Induced Language Change”, 123-154), Malcolm
Ross introduces a typology of contact-induced changes in the syntactic
constructions of a copying (recipient) language: an increase in the frequency
of use, a use for a new function, a formal modification (constructional
calquing) and a structural alteration to match the corresponding construction
in the model (source) language (metatypy) (125). These change types are
illustrated with examples drawn from Colloquial Upper Sorbian (used as an
illustration of bilingually-induced change) and rural Irish English (used as
an illustration of shift-induced change). The chapter closes with a brief
discussion of the similarities and differences between bilingually- and
shift-induced changes in syntactic constructions. 

In Chapter 6 (“Semantic Borrowing in Language Contact”, 155-172), Brian Mott
and Natalia J. Laso focus on transfer of meaning in language-contact
situations. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to a typology of lexical and
semantic borrowings, with each type illustrated with a variety of examples.
Other issues addressed include the causes and triggers of semantic borrowing,
semantic transfer from L1 onto L2 in second-language acquisition, the
influence of standard languages on the lexis and semantics of the dialects,
and borrowing of discourse and pragmatic features. 

In Chapter 7 (“Sociolinguistic, Sociological, and Sociocultural Approaches to
Contact-Induced Language Change: Identifying Chamic Child Bilingualism in
Contact-Based Language Change”, 173-192), Graham Thurgood explores the
hypothesis that the extensive contact-induced restructuring in several Chamic
languages (a subgroup of Austronesian) is due to early childhood bilingualism
of the speakers. The hypothesis is based on the assumption that “child
bilinguals often incorporate material from one of their languages into
another”, doing so with greater faithfulness than adults (174), and derives
support from historical and population genetics research. The chapter focuses
on the linguistic evidence, namely complexification of phonology, extensive
borrowing of basic vocabulary and grammatical restructuring together with
borrowing of morphological markers.     

In Chapter 8 (“Code-Switching as a Reflection of Contact-Induced Change”,
193-214), Ad Backus argues that in order to develop a general theory of
contact-induced change it is necessary to integrate the predominantly
synchronic and lexicon-based approach to the study of code-switching with the
predominantly diachronic and grammar-based approach to the study of
contact-induced change, with the whole grafted onto a usage-based model. The
dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony is recast in terms of an interplay
between synchronic variation and diachronic change (202), and the one between
lexicon and syntax is resolved in favor of a continuum going from prototypical
lexical items (words) to multiword lexical expressions to prototypical
syntactic items such as “the word order pattern of a pragmatically neutral
declarative transitive clause” (204). Within this framework, the
much-theorized distinction between code-switching and lexical borrowing is
conceptualized as different ways – synchronic or diachronic – of looking at
what is “essentially the same thing” (206), while the one between matter
borrowing and pattern borrowing is approached from the perspective of the
lexicon/syntax continuum. 

In Chapter 9 (“First- and Second-Language Acquisition and CILC”, 215-240),
Gabriel Ozón and Eva Duran Eppler scrutinize what is known and what has been
theorized about the possible contributions of different language-acquisition
scenarios to contact-induced change. Monolingual first-language acquisition,
bilingual first-language acquisition and second-language acquisition are each
discussed in turn as potential loci of language change, with separate sections
of the chapter devoted to the propagation of innovations and the relative
roles of adults and children in contact-induced change. The discussion is
presented against the backdrop of the conceptual divide between the generative
and non-generative research programs in linguistics, with the differences in
the associated theoretical positions highlighted at different points
throughout the chapter.    

Chapter 10 (“Language Contact and Endangered Languages”, 241-260), by
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, is a treasure trove of carefully selected
illustrations of the kinds of phenomena that accompany language obsolescence,
contact situations in which a minority language is replaced by a dominant one.
Among these we find extensions based on phonetic similarity (e.g., the
possession marker -pal in Pipil acquiring the semantics and functionality of
Spanish para “for, in order to”) and structural convergence with the dominant
language through the complementary action of reinforcement of shared patterns
and loss of non-shared ones (compare the maintenance of gender agreement in
Paumarí in contact with Portuguese, which has a similar pattern, with
simplification of the noun class system of Dyirbal to match the he/she/it
distinction in English). At various junctures, the chapter stresses that
linguistic changes in language obsolescence differ from changes taking place
in other contact situations not so much in their quality as in their sheer
bulk and fast pace (244, 251, 253). 

The last three chapters in the theoretical part of the volume are devoted to
“younger languages”, languages whose “creation has been claimed to have taken
place fairly abruptly at some moment in the ‘historical’ past” (27, 303):
pidgins, creoles and mixed languages. Chapter 11 (“Pidgins”, 261-281), by
Mikael Parkvall, summarizes known cross-linguistic properties of pidgins,
including their lexicons, phonologies, morphologies and syntactic
characteristics; provides a brief outline of the processes underlying
pidginization, including the sources of pidgin lexicons and the developmental
stages of pidgins; and addresses the difficulty of defining the pidgin
language type in a satisfactory way. The corresponding difficulty of defining
creole language is addressed in Chapter 12 (“Creoles”, 282-302), by John
McWhorter, whose principal focus is on the long-standing debate over the
processes that underlie creole genesis, with a crisp and lucid summary of each
theoretical position enhanced with references to the work of its proponents.
The main focus of Chapter 13 (“Mixed Languages, Younger Languages, and
Contact-Induced Linguistic Change”, 303-327), by Norval Smith and Anthony P.
Grant, are bilingual mixed languages. The description is framed by a
sociolinguistic typology in which mixed languages that have replaced their
unmixed parents are distinguished from those that continue to coexist with one
or both of the parent tongues. 

The second, illustrative, part of the volume comprises twenty chapters:

Raymond Hickey, ''Language Contact in Celtic and Early Irish'' (331-349)
Clive G. Grey, ''English and Welsh in Contact'' (350-373)
Joan C. Beal and Mark Faulkner, ''Language Contact in the History of English''
(374-387)
Miriam Bouzouita, ''Contact-Induced Language Change in Spanish'' (388-409)
Carlos M. Benítez-Torres, ''Language Contact in Tagdal, a Northern Songhay
Language of Niger'' (410-430)
Birgit Hellwig, ''Language Contact in the West Chadic Language Goemai''
(431-448)
Lameen Souag, ''Language Contact in Berber'' (449-466)
Oleg Belyaev, ''Contact Influences on Ossetic'' (467-493)
Eleanor Goghill, ''Northeastern Neo-Aramaic and Language Contact'' (494-518)
P. Sreekumar, ''Contact and the Development of Malayalam'' (519-539)
Ho-min Song, ''Language Contact in Korean'' (540-555)
John Haiman, ''Language Contact in Khmer'' (556-585)
Carmel O'Shannessy, ''Language Contct in Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri''
(586-605)
Adam A.H. Blaxter Paliwala, ''Language Contact and Tok Pisin'' (606-626)
Åshild Næss, ''Bidirectional Borrowing of Structure and Lexicon: The Case of
the Reef Islands'' (627-642)
Anna Berge, ''Language Contact in Unangam Tunuu (Aleut)'' (643-659)
David Kaufman, ''The Lower Mississippi Valley as a Linguistic Area'' (660-678)
David Quinto-Pozos and Robert Adam, ''Language Contact Considering Sign
Language'' (679-693)
Jorge Gómez-Rendón, ''Language Contact in Paraguayan Guaraní'' (694-712)
Marlyse Baptista, Manuel Veiga, Sérgio Soares da Costa, and Lígia Maria
Herbert Duarte Lopes Robalo, ''Language Contact in Cape Verdean Creole: A
Study of Bidirectional Influences in Two Contact Settings'' (713-739)

The chapters differ in their focus, depth and type of coverage, reflecting the
length of the recorded history of the language surveyed and the amount of
research on its contact relationships. A number of the chapters take the
historical approach, covering the whole known history of the language in
question, in some cases reconstructed from prehistoric contacts. The chapter
on Spanish ranges over two millennia of external contacts, beginning with
spoken Latin in contact with pre-Roman languages of the Iberian Peninsula and
ending with the most recent Anglicisms like página web “webpage”, the chapter
on the contact history of Berber stretches from Egyptian loans in proto-Berber
all the way to post-1830 contact with French, and the chapter on Korean
emphasizes influences from Chinese, Japanese and English.
Historically-oriented coverage also dominates the chapters on English,
Malayalam, Aleut, Warlpiri, Celtic and early Irish. The chapter on
Northeastern Neo-Aramaic identifies contact influences from several regional
languages including Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, Azeri and Arabic. Within the
individual chapters, the exposition is guided by the amount of contact
influence from a particular language; thus, the Berber chapter devotes the
greatest amount of space to contact with Arabic and the Malayalam chapter
emphasizes contact with Sanskrit.

Contact situations involving two languages form the focus of the discussion in
the chapters on Welsh (in contact with English), Cape Verdean Creole (in
contact with Portuguese), Paraguayan Guaraní (in contact with Spanish), Tagdal
(in contact with Berber), Tok Pisin (in contact with English) and Reef Islands
languages. Some of these discuss the influence of one language on the other
while others consider their mutual influence; for instance, the chapter on
Reef Islands languages examines bidirectional influence between two
Austronesian languages, Äiwoo and Vaeakau-Taumako. 

Several of the chapters adopt an areal perspective. The chapter on Ossetic
situates this Iranian language in relation to its neighbors in the Caucasian
Sprachbund. The chapter on Khmer surveys features that Khmer shares with its
neighbors in the Southeast Asian linguistic area, while also looking at
borrowings from Sanskrit and Pali and reciprocal borrowings between Thai and
Khmer. The chapter on Goemai examines the structural convergence of this
Chadic language with other languages in the Jos Plateau Sprachbund, as well as
its later contact with Hausa, the region's lingua franca. David Kaufman's
chapter abstracts away from individual languages in the Lower Mississippi
Valley area to consider the totality of their shared features.  

The chapter on sign languages describes the types of phenomena observed in
contact between sign languages (unimodal contact) and between sign languages
on the one hand and the spoken and written languages of the ambient
communities on the other (multimodal contact).   

EVALUATION

''The Oxford Handbook of Language Contact'' reflects the state of the art in
several important areas of contact-induced language change and provides an
excellent source of open problems, unsolved theoretical issues and interesting
cross-linguistic data for researchers and graduate students of linguistics. 

The theoretical part of the volume strikes a fine balance between chapters
that address the impact of CILC on different structural domains (Chapters 3-6)
and those that explore theoretical approaches to CILC (Chapters 2, 8),
including the input of language acquisition (Chapters 7, 9) and processes
underlying language obsolescence and the formation of ''younger languages''
(Chapters 11-13). Some of the issues, approaches and theoretical distinctions
introduced in the earlier chapters underlie much of the discussion in the
later ones. Thus, the distinction between the transfer of pattern and the
transfer of matter (or fabric) (Grant 2002) is addressed in the chapters on
phonology (77), morphology (104), code-switching (205) and Neo-Aramaic (501).
Van Coetsem’s (1988, 2000) distinction between borrowing and imposition is
addressed in the chapters on morphological (111) and semantic borrowing (166f)
and is implicitly present in the distinction between bilingually-induced and
shift-induced change in the chapter on syntax. Its explanatory potential is
further explored in the chapter on the Reef Islands languages Äiwoo and
Vaeakau-Taumako in which the borrowing of lexicon and that of structural
features appears to have flowed in opposite directions (638). Structural
similarity/ typological distance between the languages in contact as a factor
in CILC is brought up in the chapters on morphology (113f), syntax (145) and
language obsolescence (251ff). The chapter devoted to syntax also addresses
the regularizing role of pre-adolescent children in CILC (147). 

Through the illustrative chapters in the second part of the volume the reader
is exposed to a variety of less common or otherwise noteworthy contact
phenomena and corresponding theoretical issues. For example, in the area of
borrowability of grammatical categories we come across the borrowing of
definiteness markers (definite articles in Paraguayan Guaraní, 703ff;
definiteness-marking suffix in Neo-Aramaic, 510), of reciprocal pronouns and
body-part terms (in Malayalam, 523, 535), of body-part and kinship terms (in
Neo-Aramaic, 502f), of verbal inflections (in Berber, 458), of both
derivational and inflectional morphology (in Neo-Aramaic, 508ff). In the area
of phonological CILC we find such phenomena as a sharp contact-induced
increase in the number of consonants (in Malayalam, 532ff) and penetration of
borrowed phonemes into inherited vocabulary (in Berber, 455; Ossetic, 472;
Neo-Aramaic, 508). In the domain of areal phenomena, we read about
areally-shared grammaticalization of positional verbs into continuative aspect
markers (669ff). In the area of loanword marking (Operstein 2019), especially
interesting is the overt marker of Polynesian borrowings in Äiwoo (632). 

Also worthy of note are various aspects of interaction between native and
borrowed vocabulary. These are addressed in the chapters on Korean (the
division of labor between native and borrowed synonyms, 544), Khmer
(''decorative'' symmetrical compounds as a channel for introduction of
loanwords, 558f, 580ff), Tagdal (discourse-influenced choice between native
and borrowed nouns, 419f; verb suppletion with borrowed verb forms, 423), sign
languages (''reiterative code-switching'', 687), Welsh (register differences
between native and borrowed doublets, 355; ''innovatory'' versus
''lexicalized'' loans, 354) and English (stylistic stratification of the
vocabulary, 378; borrowing of idioms, 381f). 

Other theoretical and practical issues in the study of CILC addressed in this
part of the volume include grammatical (''pattern'') borrowing without lexical
(''matter'') borrowing (Ossetic, 487; Goemai 439, 442, 445), situations in
which the direction of the borrowing is impossible to establish on structural
grounds (Khmer/Thai, 568ff; in an areal context, 432, 445), separating
language-contact effects from genetic inheritance (Warlpiri, 587ff), conscious
manipulation of contact phenomena to express identity (Welsh, 355),
generational differences in the use of borrowed forms (Goemai, 443), the role
of shared discourse patterns for identifying linguistic areas (Lower
Mississipi Valley, 663), assignment of grammatical gender to loan nouns and
adaptation strategies for loan verbs (Welsh 360, 363ff), different integration
mechanisms for borrowed material (Neo-Aramaic, 503ff), suppletion for verbal
number as evidence of language contact (Goemai, 437f; Lower Mississipi Valley,
672f), CILC through the medium of literary translation (English, 382),
retention in the recipient language of features long lost in the donor
language (Welsh, 364f), conditions under which L2 features may take hold in
the speech of monolingual L1 speakers (Reef Islands languages, 639). In
passing, the reader is also reminded of a more light-hearted aspect of CILC:
humor arising from code-switching (Welsh, 354). 

Methodological issues in the study of CILC are addressed in the volume at
various points and include dating a loanword's first appearance (Welsh, 353),
the difficulty of dating linguistic changes due to a conservative orthography
(English, 374), the need to consider the social context of language contact
for understanding its outcomes (Neo-Aramaic, 499; Reef Islands languages) and
the methods of studying changes in language obsolescence (242). The sad fact
of a lack of cooperation between the academic fields of diachronic linguistics
and creole studies also receives a passing mention (298). Many of the chapters
provide a thoughtful bibliographical orientation; e.g., the chapters on
language acquisition, Malayalam and Tok Pisin offer rich arrays of references,
and the introductory chapter presents a particularly useful historical
overview of milestone publications on CILC. 

In short, this excellent and well-organized volume is expected to serve as an
orientation and source-book for research on contact-induced language change
for years to come. 

REFERENCES

Booij, Geert. 1994. Against split morphology. In Yearbook of Morphology 1993,
Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 27-49. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 

Booij, Geert. 1996. Inherent versus contextual inflection and the split
morphology hypothesis. In Yearbook of Morphology 1995, Geert Booij & Jaap van
Marle (eds), 1-16. Dordrecht: Kluwer. 

Grant, Anthony. 2002. Fabric, pattern, shift and diffusion: what change in
Oregon Penutian languages can tell historical linguists. In Proceedings of the
Meeting of the Hokan-Penutian Workshop, June 17-18, 2000, University of
California at Berkeley. Report 11, Survey of California and Other Indian
Languages, Laura Buszard-Welcher (ed), 33-56. Berkeley: Department of
Linguistics, University of California at Berkeley.  

Johanson, Lars. 2002. Contact-induced change in a code-copying framework. In
Language Change: The Interplay of Internal, External and Extra-Linguistic
Factors, Mari C. Jones & Edith Esch (eds), 285-313. Berlin & New York: Mouton
de Gruyter. 

Operstein, Natalie. 2019. Loanword marking as a mechanism of structural
change. Italian Journal of Linguistics 31(1): 149-192.  

Thomason, Sarah J. & Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization,
and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California
Press.

Van Coetsem, Frans. 1988. Loan Phonology and the Two Transfer Types in
Language Contact. Dordrecht: Foris.

Van Coetsem, Frans. 2000. A General and Unified Theory of the Transmission
Process in Language Contact. Heidelberg: Winter.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Natalie Operstein's research interests center on language change, phonology
and language contact. Her publications include ''Consonant Structure and
Prevocalization'' (John Benjamins, 2010), ''Zaniza Zapotec'' (Lincom Europa,
2015), ''Valence Changes in Zapotec: Synchrony, Diachrony, Typology'', ed.
with Aaron Huey Sonnenschein (2015) and ''Language Contact and Change in
Mesoamerica and Beyond'', ed. with Karen Dakin and Claudia Parodi (2017).





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