Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The most cursory glance at linguistic publications in the past few decades reveals a wealth of literature on language contact: articles, monographs, edited volumes, special issues of journals (see the references in the literature section to this chapter). It is perhaps true to say that one of the major impulses for research in the past two decades must surely have been the publication of Sandra Thomason and Terrence Kaufman's large-scale study of various contact scenarios with many generalizations about the nature of contact and the range of its possible effects ( Thomason & Kaufman 1988 ). Due to the carefully mounted cases and several stringent analyses, this study led to the re-invigorization of language contact studies and the re-valorization of language contact as a research area. As well as highlighting the field of language contact within linguistics, the study also allowed for virtually any type of change as a result of language contact, given appropriate circumstances to trigger this. Contact studies from the 1960s and 1970s are not anything like as copious as in the ensuing decades. There are reasons for this. While the classic study of language contact by Uriel Weinreich was published in 1953, the following two decades were years which saw not just the heyday of early generative linguistics but also the rise of sociolinguistics, and it was those two directions in ... log in or subscribe to read full text