Language Contact Around the Globe

Koll-Stobbe, Amei; Knospe, Sebastian

Language Contact Around the Globe

Proceedings of the LCTG3 Conference

by Amei Koll-Stobbe (Volume editor) Sebastian Knospe (Volume editor)

Linguistics

Series: Sprachkönnen und Sprachbewusstheit in Europa / Language Competence and Language Awareness in Europe, Volume 5

Summary

The fifth volume in the series Language Competence and Language Awareness in Europe unites a collection of peer-reviewed papers delivered at the Third Conference on Language Contact in Times of Globalization (LCTG3) at the University of Greifswald in 2011. The papers are arranged in five thematic sections: Part I studies lexical and grammatical borrowing and pseudo-loans. Part II looks at code-switching and language intertwining in different contexts, while Part III is concerned with the power, political backup and use of different languages in multilingual settings. This is followed by Part IV which comprises three articles on the Linguistic Landscapes of different urban areas. Finally, Part V focuses on language choices in literature and institutional settings.

Excerpt

Cover
Title
Copyright
About the author(s)/editor(s)
About the book
This eBook can be cited
Contents
Amei Koll-Stobbe: Series editor’s introduction
Amei Koll-Stobbe and Sebastian Knospe: Language Contact Around the Globe
References
Part I: Contact-induced change. Linguistic borrowing and pseudo-borrowing
Donald Winford (Ohio State University): Toward an integrated model of contact-induced change
1 Introduction
2 Frameworks for contact-induced change
2.1 Van Coetsem’s framework
2.2 Problems with other frameworks
3 Toward a unified classification of contact phenomena
3.1 Contact phenomena due to borrowing
3.2 Contact phenomena due to imposition
3.2.1 Imposition from L1 to L2
3.2.2 Imposition from L2 to L1
4 A model of language production
4.1 A model of bilingual language production
5 Contact-induced change and bilingual language production
5.1 Borrowing and bilingual language production
5.2 Imposition and bilingual language production
6 Conclusion
References
Sylwester Jaworski (University of Szczecin): Contact-induced changes in Polish morphology
1 Introduction
2 Poland’s language policy
3 Phonological constraints on borrowing into fusional languages
4 Morphological constraints on borrowing into fusional languages
5 Word-formation processes in English and Polish
5.1 Clipping and backformation
5.2 Blending
5.3 Compounding
6 Conclusion
References
Cristiano Furiassi (University of Turin): False Italianisms in English dictionaries and corpora
1 Introduction
2 A definition of false Italianisms
3 A typology of false Italianisms
3.1 Autonomous compounds (AC)
3.2 Compound ellipses (CE)
3.3 Clippings (C)
3.4 Semantic shifts (SS)
3.5 Toponyms (T)
4 False Italianisms in English dictionaries
5 The reborrowing of English false Italianisms in Italian
6 False Italianisms in English corpora
6.1 The prototypicality of false Italianisms in English
6.2 The frequency of false Italianisms in English
7 Conclusion
References
Branka Drljača Margić (University of Rijeka): Contemporary English influence on Croatian: a university students’ perspective
1 Introduction
2 Previous research (in other European communities)
3 The present study
3.1 Participants
3.2 Aims
3.3 Methods
3.4 Results and discussion
4 Conclusion
References
Appendix: Questionnaire on attitudes toward contemporary English influence on Croatian
Questionnaire
Laura Zieseler and Amei Koll-Stobbe (University of Greifswald): At sea with standards? The pluricentric nature of English and its impact on non-native speakers’ attitudes and language use
1 The Situation in Europe: EFL, ELF and “Euro-English”
2 Mid-Atlantic English (MAE)
3 The study: At sea with standards? Or: torn between the norms
3.1 Design and implementation
3.2 Qualitative analysis: findings and analytical close-ups
3.2.1 Translation task
3.2.2 Reading task
Rhoticity (see Collins & Mees 2005)
Velar [ɫ]
Intervocalic flap [ɾ]
Vowel qualities
[ɒ] vs. [ɑ:]
[ɑ:] vs. [æ]
Intra-lexemic mixing
“Hard words”
3.3 Questionnaire
Variety taught
Stays: Anglophone cultures
Variety preferred
Attitudes
Interrelations
4 Conclusion and outlook
References
Esme Winter-Froemel (University of Tübingen), Alexander Onysko (European Academy of Bozen / University of Klagenfurt) and Andreea Calude (University of Waikato): Why some non-catachrestic borrowings are most successful than others: a case study of English loans in German
1 Introduction
2 Non-catachrestic loans and the question of the success of borrowings
2.1 Catachrestic and non-catachrestic loans
2.2 Investigating the success of loanwords
3 Measuring success and its reasons
3.1 Selecting non-catachrestic test items and establishing their relative success rates
3.2 The statistical model
4 Results
5 Discussion
6 Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References
Part II: From code-switching to language intertwining
Sebastian Knospe (University of Greifswald): Written code-switching in the German news magazine Der Spiegel
1 Introduction
2 Particularities of written code-switching
3 Functions of code alternations in Der Spiegel
3.1 Reproduction of speech styles – journalistic characterisation of protagonists and situations
3.2 English slogans, mottos and proverbs for emphasis and comments
3.3 Code alternations with ludic qualities
4 Conclusion
References
Gerald Stell (Free University of Brussels / Research Foundation Flanders / University of Pretoria): Language alternation and ethnicity in a post-colonial context: code-switching as a ‘non-White’ register in South Africa
1 Introduction
2 Ethnicity, language and the South African context
3 Corpus and methodology
4 General characteristics of CS in the data
5 Grammatical characteristics of CS
5.1 Insertions
5.2 Alternations
5.3 Congruent lexicalisation
6 Discussion
7 Conclusion
References
Marisa Patuto, Laia Arnaus Gil, Nadine Eichler, Veronika Jansen, Anika Schmeißer and Natascha Müller (University of Wuppertal): Child-external and -internal factors in bilingual code-switching: Spanish, Italian, French and German
1 Introduction
2 Theoretical background
3 Data
3.1 The longitudinal data
3.2 The cross-sectional data
4 Results
4.1 Language dominance
4.2 Language of the community
4.3 Setting
4.4 Strategy of bilingual education
5 Discussion
References
Edward Gillian (Panstowa Wysza Szkola Zawodowa, Gorzow Wielkopolski): Light Warlpiri: an examination of some of the linguistic and non-linguistic developmental influences on this language
1 Introduction
2 Brief historical background
3 Base languages of Light Warlpiri
3.1 Warlpiri
3.1.1 Verbal semantic-syntactic relationships
3.1.2 Auxiliary word and agreement suffixes
3.1.3 Prefixes (Preverbs)
3.1.4 Phonological system
3.1.5 Other phonological processes in Warlpiri
(a) Final vowel deletion
(b) Cluster modification
3.2 Kriol and Aboriginal English (AE)
3.2.1 Background
3.2.2 Verbal syntactic-semantic relationships
3.2.3 Phonology
3.3 English
3.3.1 Phonology
3.3.2 Syntactic-semantic relationships - verbs
4 Use of Light Warlpiri in the community
5 Specific differences between Light Warlpiri, traditional Warlpiri, and Aboriginal English (Kriol)
5.1 Verb - syntactic - semantic relationships
5.2 Light Warlpiri phonotactics
5.2.1 Use of voicing contrasts
5.2.2 Use of fricatives
5.2.3 Consonant cluster processes
6 Non-linguistic influences and impact on the development of Light Warlpiri as a language
6.1 New media
6.2 Otitis Media (OM)
6.3 Bilingual education policy
7 Conclusions
References
Part III: Language attitudes and linguistic power. Non-native/substandard varieties and minority languages
Dennis R. Preston (Oklahoma State University): DAMNED IF YOU DO, AND DAMNED IF YOU DON’T: the perception of languages and language varieties in a globalizing world
1 Introduction
2 The populations under consideration: Who are the folk?
3 What is Folk Linguistics worth?
4 The cognitive situating and operating of language regard
5 The influence of language regard on language production, perception, and comprehension
5.1 Language regard and comprehension
5.2 Language regard and classification
5.3 Language regard and discrimination
6 Conclusions
References
Martin Schweinberger (University of Greifswald*): Frequency, dispersion and register variation of selected discourse-pragmatic particles in Singapore English
1 Introduction
1.1 Singapore English and its linguistic ecology
1.2 (Standard) Singapore English and Colloquial Singapore English
1.3 Schneider’s dynamic model and endonormative stabilization
1.4 The discourse particles
2 Data and methodology
3 Results
3.1 The frequency of discourse-pragmatic particles in Singapore English
3.2 The distribution of discourse-pragmatic particles in Singapore English
4 Discussion of the findings
References
Heiko F. Marten (University of Tallinn): The 3-Circle-Model of English world-wide: Can it contribute to understanding the global position of German?
1 Introduction: the global position of German today
2 Criteria for classifying speech communities in the 3-Circle-Model
3 German in its three Circles
3.1 The Outer Circle of German
3.2 The Extended Circle of German
4 Conclusion
References
Birte Arendt (University of Greifswald): Language ideology of the European Union under a critical perspective: the example of the Regional Language Low German
1 The Charter as a phenomenon of globalization
2 Theoretical framework
3 Method
4 Results
4.1 Lexical layer: culture
4.2 Metaphors: danger of language death
4.3 Topoi of the Charter
4.4 Syntactic structure: indefiniteness and monolingual habitus
4.5 Consequences in education
4.6 Attitudes of linguistic laymen
5 Conclusion
References
László Marácz (University of Amsterdam): Resiliencing Hungarian minority languages in the New Europe
1 Hungarian minority languages: policies and practices
1.1 Hungarian in the Carpathian Macroregion
1.2 Multilingual regions with Hungarian minorities
1.3 Multilingual and transnational communication in regions with Hungarian minorities
1.4 Language policies
2 Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe
2.1 Legal position
2.2 Widening the European communicative space
2.3 Hungarian as a transnational regional language
3 Conclusions
References
Part IV: Linguistic landscapes. Multilingualism in public space
Svitlana Shakh (University of Hamburg): The linguistic landscapes of Ukraine at the crossroads of nationalism and regionalism
1 Introduction
2 An ideological approach to linguistic landscape
3 Nation-building, language legislation and language ideological debates
4 Data and methods
4.1 Data collection
4.2 Classification of LL signs
4.2.1 Commemorative plaques
4.2.2 Building labels
4.2.3 Road signs
4.2.4 Street name signs
5 Analysis and results
5.1 Road signs
5.2 Street name signs
5.3 Building labels
5.4 Commemorative plaques
6 Summary and conclusion
References
Phattharathanit Srichomthong (Maejo University): Language globalization in Northern Thailand
1 Northern Thailand
2 Signage in public space of Northern Thailand
3 Patterns of linguistic repertoire in signage
3.1 Four repertoires in signage
3.2 Patterns of language mixing
3.3 The six most frequently used patterns of language mixing
3.3.1 English and Thai
3.3.2 Mueang and other languages
3.3.3 Thai and Chinese
3.3.4 English and Japanese
3.3.5 Thai and Japanese
3.3.6 English and French
3.4 The most frequently used English words in the mixed use of English and Thai
4 Globalization effects in signs
4.1 Globalization effects on northern Thai society
4.2 English as the language of globalization
4.3 Multilingualism
4.4 Reinvigoration of local identity
5 Conclusion
References
Books and articles in Thai
Books and articles in English
Websites
Yael Guilat (Oranim Academic College) and Shoshi Waksman (Levinsky College of Education, Tel Aviv): The linguistic landscape of Israel’s military cemeteries as a field of symbolic contestation
1 Introduction
2 Military cemeteries, nationhood, and the Cult of the Fallen
3 The Israeli Military Cemetery
4 The public space and the spatial construction of meaning
4.1 Public space and practices
4.2 Semiotic landscape and multimodal construction of meaning
5 Research questions and methodology
6 Data and results: Visible characteristics of burial plots in MCs
6.1 Design and languages of scripts
6.2 Multimodal construction of meaning
7 Discussion
References
Part V: Transcultural literacy. Language choice in literature and institutional settings
Karin Ebeling (University of Magdeburg): The Calibans write in English: an investigation of language in postcolonial and transcultural contexts
1 Introduction
2 Appropriation and the reflection of postcolonial and trans-cultural contexts
3 Discourse strategies in postcolonial literary fiction in English
References
Antonia Unger (Viadrina University Frankfurt/Oder) and Jekaterina Nikitin (University of Jena): Crisis communication: an analysis of English originals and German translations of BP’s corporate communication during the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
1 Introduction
2 Background
3 Methodological approach
4 Corpus
5 Discussion of the findings
5.1 Crisis intervention: Military intervention vs. crisis management
5.2 BP’s role in the crisis intervention
5.2.1 BP as a lone fighter vs. BP as a team player
5.2.2 BP as an active agent vs. BP as a more passive participant
5.3 Options for actions: Actual crisis intervention vs. potential crisis intervention
6 Conclusions
References
Contributing authors
Series index

| vii →

Series editor’s introduction

Amei Koll-Stobbe

Language use as social practice depicts a plethora of contact phenomena and fundamental changes triggered through colonisation, post-colonisation and economic globalisation. Greifswald, a small university town in its 555^th year of existence in 2011 is located in rural North-Eastern Germany at the borders of old and new Europe and arises as a fruitful place to experience and explore the complexity of contact phenomena within and across languages. Contact linguistics marks one of the research fields shared by the language philologies represented at the University of Greifswald. Interdisciplinary lecture series on aspects of language transfer and interference, vitality and endangerment have been documented by the first two volumes in the present book series (cf. Koll-Stobbe 2009a, 2009b).

This edited volume of peer-reviewed conference proceedings is the fifth in the series Language Competence and Language Awareness in Europe. Its main title Language Contact Around the Globe reflects the fluidity of the conceptual borders of Europe in a multilingual world, where languages of old European powers continue to symbolise the heritage of communities of practice world-wide that are torn between the norms of old and transported codified national languages, new emerging varieties and vernacular variability. Consequences of cross-linguistic cum cross-cultural contact as well as contact-induced language change constitute the topic range of the papers that were presented and discussed at the Third Conference on Language Contact in Times of Globalisation (LCTG3). The international conference with the globally acknowledged keynote speakers Durk Gorter, Mark Sebba, Dennis Preston and Donald Winford was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The event was hosted by the Chair of English Linguistics and took place from June 30 to July 2, 2011, continuing a series of conferences which was established at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands).

Greifswald, March 2014

| ix →

Language Contact Around the Globe

Amei Koll-Stobbe and Sebastian Knospe

Evidence of language and culture contact as well as of bi- or multilingual practices can be found in virtually all epochs of human history. Yet, due to factors such as worldwide economic co-operation, mass mobility and new communication technologies, the manifold consequences which are connected to the exchange between different languages and cultures have become all the more conspicuous since the second half of the 20^th century. As a result, linguistic studies specialised on this topic area have been promoted in virtually all philologies.

Against this background, the University of Greifswald initiated the Third Conference on Language Contact in Times of Globalization (LCTG3) which was open to linguists of all disciplines. For a conference of this format, the University of Greifswald provided a suitable location – not least in light of its own history: Indeed, Greifswald made part of the pan-European Hanseatic League for centuries and was Swedish between 1631 and 1815, before becoming German again. Thus, the town can look back on a history full of change. Apart from that, it is situated in the Baltic Sea Area, which is a linguistic contact zone itself that has regained importance after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Continuing our attempts to deepen international research contacts, we were happy that our call for papers for LCTG3 evoked high resonance: On the one hand, we were able to win four internationally renowned keynote speakers: Donald Winford (Ohio University), Dennis R. Preston (Oklahoma State University), Durk Gorter (Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science) and Mark Sebba (Lancaster University). On the other hand, we attracted 70 other scholars (both junior and senior ones) from various European countries, Canada, the US as well as from Nigeria and Thailand, involved in English linguistics, Finno-Ugric, German, Romance and Slavic studies or working on African and Asian languages.

The fifth volume of the book series Language Competence and Language Awareness in Europe shows this thematic breadth by uniting a collection of peer-reviewed papers which were presented on this occasion. They are arranged in five thematic sections with an interest in the structural, socio- and/or psycholinguistic sides of language contact. Because of the different philologies represented in this volume, the papers reflect some of the divergences found in their general approach to the field as well in the terminologies employed. Considering the fact that participants of the conference came from Europe and overseas, the editors also tolerated both British and American orthography, while other conventions (e.g. the style of the quotations and references) were homogenised.

Part I of the volume concentrates on the effects of language contact that lead to changes in the lexicon and/or in the grammatical structure of the languages concerned. The section is opened by a paper written by Donald Winford who ← ix | x → proposes a unified framework for the study of contact-induced change based on the two mechanisms of borrowing and imposition. The papers ensuing all deal with scenarios of borrowing and related processes of transfer which show the nature of languages as open, adaptive codes (cf. Koll-Stobbe 2010). What is in the centre of interest here is the forms of present contact with English, which throughout its history has adopted material from various languages itself. To begin with, Sylwester Jaworksi, incorporating data from different sources, investigates recent changes in Polish morphology as a result of English influence. Cristiano Furiassi, in turn, using corpus tools, looks at a specific lexical phenomenon: Italian pseudo-loans that have made their way into the English language. The article thus contributes to the investigation of the nativization of foreign language material in the absorbing languages. However, pseudo-loans are an outcome of language contact which needs to be separated from cases where borrowing proper takes place. This situation is dealt with in the following papers: Whereas Branka Drljača Margić discusses the attitudes of Croatian university students towards anglicisms. Amei Koll-Stobbe and Laura Zieseler address this issue with regard to English language awareness in German Anglistik students. At the same time, they qualitatively analyse patterns of an emerging hybridisation with a focus on norm shifting and levelling processes characteristic of institutional (and educational) English variability developing in the Expanding Circle of World Englishes. By studying the lexical competition between anglicisms and semantically closely related German expressions, Esme Winter-Froemel, Alexander Onysko and Andreea Calude move the readers’ attention to the level of the language system again. They seek to find out whether the English word or the German quasi-equivalent(s) is/are preferred and in how far this depends on parameters like length and age of the loan.

Part II focuses on two other results of language contact: first, on codeswitching as an ephemeral speech phenomenon and second on mixed languages as a consequence of systematic switching and shifting. While code-switching¹ is typically considered a characteristic of oral communication, Sebastian Knospe discusses instances of written code-switching into English in the German print media, most notably in the news magazine Der Spiegel (for a more broadly oriented study see Knospe, forthcoming). In doing so, the author attempts a functional categorization. Gerald Stell’s paper is devoted to code-switching in conversations of non-whites in South Africa, paying attention to its structural variation as well as identity aspects linked to this. Marisa Patuto, Malin Hager et al. work out the internal and external parameters that determine the frequency of code-switching of bilingually raised children. As suggested before, intensive language mixing and code-switching may also result in the creation of new language. ← x | xi → (Winford 2003: 168) – a process called language intertwining by Bakker and Muysken (1995). An intriguing case of a mixed language in Australia is Light Warlpiri which is analyzed in Edward Gillian’s article. Light Warlpiri is based on three source languages: Warlpiri, Kriol and Standard Australian English.

While Parts I and II shed light on the structural outcomes of language contact in specific socio-cultural contexts, Part III of the volume is concerned with the power, political backup, public presence and use of different languages in multilingual settings. As this depends on the values assigned to them, Dennis R. Preston’s article delves into the perception of languages and linguistic choices, adopting the perspective of the speakers using them in the global arena. He discusses language variability within the frameworks of perceptual dialectology (see Preston and Long 2002) and folk linguistics (see Preston and Niedzielski 2003). Regarding the reactions provoked by different languages and varieties, English offers a particularly well-studied example since it has been transplanted into different parts of the world. Also, different non-native varieties of English are spoken in the urban agglomerations of the UK, America and beyond, where they may face stigmatization. Martin Schweinberger exemplifies this by looking at Singapore English and the use of non-native discourse-pragmatic markers, their frequency, dispersion and at their variation across registers. By contrast, Heiko F. Marten takes a macro-sociolinguistic point of view. Departing from the diversification of English, he poses the question of whether the famous Three-Circle Model devised by Kachru (1985, 1990) could also be applied to German. Indeed, German was once a colonial language, too and has meanwhile been reinvigorated as a foreign language and lingua franca especially in some East and South East European countries, where it partly has got the status of a minority language today. The topic of minority languages also shapes the articles of Birte Arendt and László Marácz. The former looks at Low German and the consequences the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages has had on its status in Germany, while the latter takes into consideration attempts of resiliencing Hungarian minority languages in present-day Europe.

Part IV of the volume contains three articles which are theoretically and methodologically situated in the sociolinguistic paradigm of Linguistic Landscape Studies. This research field is interested in multilingualism and the visibility of different languages in the public sphere, especially on signage, be it billboards, shop or road signs, graffiti or other types of publicly displayed written language. Here, two case studies on the situation in Ukraine (Svitlana Shakh) and in Northern Thailand (Phattharathanit Srichomthong) are documented. Additionally, Yael Guilat and Shoshi Waksman have contributed a paper which treats the signage in military cemeteries in Israel.

Part V focuses on transcultural literacy which is linked to the problem of translation, both in literature and institutional settings. Karin Ebeling traces ← xi | xii → signs of multilingualism in the oeuvres of post-colonial authors that are set in transcultural contexts. Finally, Antonia Unger and Jekaterina Nikitin analyze the differences between the English originals and the German versions of BP’s corporate communication during the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Through a contrastive analysis of the German and English texts, they show that even in times of globalization, which have led to convergences between various languages, certain differences, e.g. in terms of discourse strategies and routines, have not been wiped out.

It is hoped that the papers brought together in the present volume foreground the state-of-the-art of research on language contact from various methodological and theoretical frameworks as presented at our Greifswald conference. The organisation of the LCTG3 conference would not have been possible without the generous financial support which we gratefully received from the German Research Foundation (DFG). Apart from that, our thanks go to the University of Greifswald which provided us with technically well-equipped conference rooms and assisted us in various administrative respects. Moreover, we would like to thank the whole team of the Chair of English Linguistics that secured a smooth course of LCTG3. As to the preparation of the conference proceedings, we are highly indebted to the reviewers of the papers handed in to us, the publisher Peter Lang (most notably Richard Breitenbach) and, last but not least, our secretary Mathias Köhn who was responsible for the formatting of the manuscript.

References

Bakker, Peter & Pieter Muysken. 1995. Mixed languages and language intertwining. In: Jacques Arends, Pieter Muysken & Norval Smith, eds.: Pidgins and Creoles. An introduction. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 41-52.

Kachru, Braj B. 1985. Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: the English language in the outer circle. In: Randolph Quirk & Henry G. Widdowson, eds. English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 11-30.

Kachru, Braj B. 1990. The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions and Models of Non-native Englishes. Illinois: University of Illinois Press.

Knospe, Sebastian. forthcoming. Entlehnung oder Codeswitching? Sprachmischungen mit dem Englischen im deutschen Printjournalismus. Frankfurt: Lang.

Koll-Stobbe, Amei. 2010 [2000]. Konkrete Lexikologie des Englischen: Entwurf einer Theorie des Sprachkönnens. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Preston, Dennis R. & Daniel Long, eds. 2002. Handbook of perceptual dialectology, Volume II. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Preston, Dennis R. & Nancy Niedzielski, eds. 2003. Folk linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Winford, Donald. 2003. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. ← xii | xiii →

1 In this volume, the hyphenated spelling code-switching is used unless authors or titles using different spellings (either as one or two orthographic words) are referred to. The same holds for the term code-mixing.

| 1 →

Part I: Contact-induced change. Linguistic borrowing and pseudo-borrowing

| 3 →

Toward an integrated model of contact-induced change

Donald Winford

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that van Coetsem’s (1988, 2000) framework offers the most comprehensive and unified model of contact-induced change, because it focuses on the cognitive processes involved in such change, and allows for links to be made between structural, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic approaches to language contact. His framework distinguishes between two transfer types, borrowing and imposition, which differ in terms of the dominance relationships between the languages in contact. This conception of borrowing and imposition is compatible with psycholinguistic models of language production and yields more promising insights into the processes and products of contact-induced change than other frameworks that have been proposed, such as Thomason & Kaufman’s (1988) socio-cultural framework, or Johanson’s (2002) code-copying framework. In short, van Coetsem’s framework offers a start toward an integrated model of language contact, which draws on linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches (without neglecting sociolinguistic approaches, which are not discussed here).

1 Introduction

The earliest conceptions of the field of Contact Linguistics envisioned it as a multi-disciplinary area of study, encompassing a broad range of language contact phenomena and issues, linguistic, sociolinguistic, sociological and psycholinguistic. Weinreich (1953) was the first to propose a systematized and integrated framework within which language contact could be investigated. His chief contribution was an attempt to integrate linguistic analysis with social and psychological explanations to account for the consequences of language contact. Weinreich consistently emphasized that

In linguistic interference, the problem of major interest is the interplay of structural and non-structural factors that promote or impede such interference. The structural factors are those which stem from the organization of linguistic forms into a definite system, different for every language and to a considerable degree independent of non-linguistic experience and behavior. The non-structural factors are derived from the contact of the system with the outer world, from given individuals’ familiarity with the system, and from the symbolic value which the system as a whole is capable of acquiring and the emotions it can evoke. (1953: 5)

Contact linguistics has tended to focus its attention far more on structural description of contact phenomena and their sources in the input languages, than on the “non-structural” factors that Weinreich placed equal emphasis on. In particular, he emphasizes that language contact can best be understood only “in a broad psychological and socio-cultural setting” (1953: 4). Weinreich also offered a detailed blueprint for the investigation of each of these aspects of language contact.← 3 | 4 → situations, identifying a broad range of factors that influence the outcomes of contact. Some of these relate to the individual speaker, for instance (Weinreich 1953: 3):

(a) The speaker’s facility of verbal expression in general and his ability to keep two languages apart.

(b) Relative proficiency in each language;

(d) Manner of learning each language;

(e) Attitudes toward each language, and whether idiosyncratic or stereotyped.

Other “non-structural” factors are characteristic of groups, for instance:

(f) Size of bilingual group and its socio-cultural homogeneity or differentiation; breakdown into sub-groups using one or the other language as their mother tongue; demographic facts; social and political relations between these subgroups.

(g) Prevalence of bilingual individuals with given characteristics of speech behavior (in terms of points a – e above) in the several sub-groups.

(h) Stereotyped attitudes toward each language (“prestige”); indigenous or immigrant status of the languages concerned.

Details

Pages: XII, 446
Year: 2014
ISBN (PDF): 9783653046335
ISBN (ePUB): 9783653998085
ISBN (MOBI): 9783653998078
ISBN (Hardcover): 9783631628898
DOI: 10.3726/978-3-653-04633-5
Language: English
Publication date: 2014 (July)
Keywords: Sprachkontakt Sprachwechsel Minderheitensprache Vielsprachigkeit
Published: Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2014. XII, 446 pp., 34 tables, 43 graphs

Biographical notes

Amei Koll-Stobbe (Volume editor) Sebastian Knospe (Volume editor)

Amei Koll-Stobbe holds the Chair in English Linguistics at the University of Greifswald (Germany). Sebastian Knospe is a lecturer and researcher at the Chair in English Linguistics at the University of Greifswald.

Language Contact Around the Globe

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