The Interplay of Variation and Change in Contact Settings: (12 Studies in Language Variation)

This volume is at the cross-roads between two research traditions dealing with language change: contact linguistics and language variation and change. It starts out from the notion that linguistic variation is still a little researched area in most contact-induced language change studies. Intending to fill this gap, it offers a rich panorama of case studies and approaches dealing with linguistic variation in contact settings. It concentrates both on monolingual data, tracing variation and contact beneath surface homogeneity, and on bilingual data such as code-switching and other forms of variation, to trace their underlying regularities. It investigates the relationship between variation and change in language contact settings. The book will be relevant for students and researchers in contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, language variation and change, sociology of language, descriptive linguistics and linguistic typology.

Table of Contents:
1. Acknowledgements; 2. Variation and change in contact settings (by Leglise, Isabelle); 3. PART I. Types and outcomes of variation in multilingual settings; 4. Syntactic variation and change: The variationist framework and language contact (by Meyerhoff, Miriam); 5. Advancing the change?: Contact-induced influences and inherent tendencies in variation among pronouns with indefinite reference in Quebec French (by Blondeau, Helene); 6. Morphosyntactic contact-induced language change among young speakers of Estonian Russian (by Zabrodskaja, Anastassia); 7. Intermingling speech groups: Morpho-syntactic outcomes of language contact in a linguistic area in Burkina Faso, West Africa (by Beyer, Klaus); 8. PART II. The role of ongoing variation in contact-induced change; 9. The interplay of inherent tendencies and language contact on French object clitics: An example of variation in a French Guianese contact setting* (by Leglise, Isabelle); 10. Contact-induced change and internal evolution: Spanish in contact with Amerindian languages* (by Alcaine, Azucena Palacios); 11. The interplay of language-internal variation and contact influence in language change (by Pakendorf, Brigitte); 12. Change and variation in a trilingual setting: Evidentiality in Pomak (Slavic, Greece) (by Adamou, Evangelia); 13. Afterword (by Winford, Donald); 14. Index

Review :
The papers collected in this volume fulfill the promise of the outstanding workshop from which they emerged, justifying the excitement generated by the workshop. Integrating the study of linguistic variation with the study of contact-induced language change is an ambitious goal, but it is one that these authors address vigorously, with excellent results. The volume therefore advances the field of contact linguistics significantly. The book as a whole provides an extremely thought-provoking account of the role of contact and variation in language change; it makes its own theoretical and methodological contribution to the advancement of both contact linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics, and does succeed in integrating these two traditionally independent fields. The foundation for a promising line of research has hence been laid.