Language contact and grammatical change
By: Bernd Heine, Tania Kuteva.
Contributors: Kuteva, Tania, 1958-
Series: Cambridge approaches to language contact
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 308
Subjects: Languages in contact.; Linguistic change.; Grammar, Comparative and general -- Grammaticalization.; Typology (Linguistics); Areal linguistics.
Description: "The phenomenon of language contact, and how it affects the structure of languages, has been of great interest to linguists in recent years. This new study looks at how grammatical forms and structures evolve when speakers of two languages come into contact, and offers new insight into the mechanism that induces people to transfer grammatical structures from one language to another. Drawing on findings from languages all over the world, Language Contact and Grammatical Change shows that the transfer of linguistic material across languages is quite regular and follows universal patterns of grammaticalization.

Engaging and informative, this book will be of great interest to sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, and all those working on grammaticalization, language contact, and language change."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 278-299) and indexes.