Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 05 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter depicts major theories of language contact, including those relating to the outcomes of borrowing, creole formation and other bilingual mixtures, with special emphasis on the framework proposed by Frans van Coetsem. This framework is multi-disciplinary in nature, built around linguistic, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic approaches. I first discuss the contributions of sociolinguistic approaches to our understanding of the ways in which social contexts and social factors influence the outcomes of language contact. I then evaluate various linguistic frameworks that have been proposed for describing the linguistic outcomes of language contact, the mechanisms involved, and the classification of contact phenomena. I argue that van Coetsem’s (1988, 2000) model of language contact offers a more consistent, accurate and principled explanation of the processes of change associated with different types of contact. Following that, I show how a wide variety of contact phenomena can be accounted for in terms of just two universal mechanisms of change—borrowing and imposition. Finally, I discuss ways in which psycholinguistic models of language production can contribute to our understanding of these mechanisms of contact-induced change.

Keywords: borrowing, language, imposition, transfer, Sprachbund, creolistics, acquisition, constraint, calque relexification, pivot matching, grammaticalization, language production, forward and backward transfer

Donald Winford

Donald Winford received his undergraduate degree at King’s College, University of London in 1968, graduating with First Class Honors in English. He completed his D. Phil. (Linguistics) at the University of York, England, in 1972. He is currently Professor of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. His teaching and research interests are in creole linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, and African-American English, and he has published widely in those areas. He is the author of Predication in Caribbean English Creoles (1993), and An Introduction to Contact Linguistics (2003). He served as President of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics from 1998 to 2000, is currently President of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, and has been editor of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages since August 2001.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.