Twenty-nine international academics, researchers, and independent scholars contribute 30 chapters examining the structural effects of language contact on a wide variety of languages from around the world. Following an introductory overview, a review of Matras and Sakel's concepts of matter and pattern in linguistic borrowing, and a discussion of the borrowability of structural categories, each of the remaining 27 chapters focuses on the diachronic impact that language contact has had on the structure of a particular language. Accompanying these descriptions are comments on societal multilingualism, the roles that are assigned to various languages in the community, patterns of language mixing, and issues of language policy and language education. The purpose of the complication is to provide a comparison of the effects of different kinds of contact on different kinds of languages, and to contribute to an understanding of universal effects of language contact. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
The book contains 30 descriptive chapters dealing with a specific language contact situation. The chapters follow a uniform organisation format, being the narrative version of a standard comprehensive questionnaire previously distributed to all authors. The questionnaire targets systematically the possibility of contact influence / grammatical borrowing in a full range of categories. The uniform structure facilitates a comparison among the chapters and the languages covered. The introduction describes the setup of the questionnaire and the methodology of the approach, along with a survey of the difficulties of sampling in contact linguistics. Two evaluative chapters, each authored by one of the co-editors, draws general conclusions from the volume as a whole (one in relation to borrowed grammatical categories and meaningful hierarchies, the other in relation to the distribution of Matter and Pattern replication).
Biežāk uzdotie jautājumi par e-grāmatām