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date: 17 February 2020

Abstract and Keywords

The chapter examines contact-induced change in grammatical constructions. Scholars know of only a few cases where evidence is available of both (i) the social context of constructional change and (ii) the grammars of the copying language before and after change and the model language during the change. Most examples are drawn from two European languages which largely fulfil these conditions. Contact-induced constructional change occurs either through bilingualism or through rapid language shift. Bilingually induced change is exemplified by Colloquial Upper Sorbian, rapid language shift by rural Irish English. Four degrees of change are identified: increased frequency of use, change in function, constructional calquing and metatypy. The chapter then discusses the mechanisms and social contexts of constructional change and compares bilingually induced and shift-induced change, leading to the observation that metatypy is restricted to bilingually induced change. In other respects both kinds of change have similar effects. This means that contact-induced change in grammatical constructions serves to diagnose the difference between bilingually induced change and rapid language shift only in rather rare instances.

Keywords: syntax, constructions, bilingualism, language shift, Sorbian, Irish English

Malcolm Ross

Malcolm Ross is an Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University. He taught and researched at the ANU from 1986 to 2007. Before that he taught for ten years in Papua New Guinea. He has published a number of articles and chapters on contact-induced change, especially on its effects on morphosyntax. His areal interest is in languages of New Guinea and the Pacific, and he is a co-author of The Oceanic Languages (Curzon, 2002) and of The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic (Pacific Linguistics 1998, 2003, 2008, 2011). He has held visiting positions at Frankfurt and Oxford Universities, Academia Sinica (Taipei), Max Planck Institutes in Leipzig and Jena, and was Collitz Professor of Historical Linguistics at the Linguistic Society of America’s Summer Institute at University of California, Berkeley, in 2009.

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