Table Of ContentThe Interplay of Variation and Change in Contact Settings
Studies in Language Variation
The series aims to include empirical studies of linguistic variation as well as its description,
explanation and interpretation in structural, social and cognitive terms. The series will
cover any relevant subdiscipline: sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, dialectology, historical
linguistics, anthropology/anthropological linguistics. The emphasis will be on linguistic
aspects and on the interaction between linguistic and extralinguistic aspects — not on
extralinguistic aspects (including language ideology, policy etc.) as such.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/silv
Editors
Peter Auer Frans Hinskens Paul Kerswill
Universität Freiburg Meertens Instituut & Lancaster University
Vrije Universiteit,
Amsterdam
Editorial Board
Jannis K. Androutsopoulos Peter Gilles K. K. Luke
University of Hamburg University of Luxembourg The University of Hong Kong
Arto Anttila Barbara Horvath Rajend Mesthrie
Stanford University University of Sydney University of Cape Town
Gaetano Berruto Brian Joseph Pieter Muysken
L’Università di Torino The Ohio State University Radboud University Nijmegen
Paul Boersma Johannes Kabatek Marc van Oostendorp
University of Amsterdam Eberhard Karls Universität Meertens Institute & Leiden
Tübingen University
Jenny Cheshire
University of London Juhani Klemola Sali Tagliamonte
University of Tampere University of Toronto
Gerard Docherty
Newcastle University Miklós Kontra Johan Taeldeman
University of Szeged University of Gent
Penny Eckert
Stanford University Bernard Laks Øystein Vangsnes
CNRS-Université Paris X University of Tromsø
William Foley
Nanterre
University of Sydney Juan Villena Ponsoda
Maria-Rosa Lloret Universidad de Málaga
Universitat de Barcelona
Volume 12
The Interplay of Variation and Change in Contact Settings
Edited by Isabelle Léglise and Claudine Chamoreau
The Interplay of Variation
and Change in Contact Settings
Edited by
Isabelle Léglise
Claudine Chamoreau
CNRS SEDYL-CELIA
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Interplay of Variation and Change in Contact Settings / Edited by Isabelle Léglise,
Claudine Chamoreau.
p. cm. (Studies in Language Variation, issn 1872-9592 ; v. 12)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Languages in contact. 2. Language and languages--Variation. 3. Grammar,
Comparative and general--Morphosyntax. 4. Sociolinguistics. I. Léglise,
Isabelle, editor of compilation.
P40.5.L38I587 2013
306.44--dc23 2012043846
isbn 978 90 272 3492 6 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7248 5 (Eb)
© 2013 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Acknowledgements vii
Variation and change in contact settings 1
Isabelle Léglise & Claudine Chamoreau
part i. Types and outcomes of variation in multilingual settings
Syntactic variation and change: The variationist framework
and language contact 23
Miriam Meyerhoff
Advancing the change? Contact-induced influences and inherent tendencies
in variation among pronouns with indefinite reference in Quebec French 53
Hélène Blondeau
Morphosyntactic contact-induced language change among young speakers
of Estonian Russian 77
Anastassia Zabrodskaja
Intermingling speech groups: Morpho-syntactic outcomes of language
contact in a linguistic area in Burkina Faso, West Africa 107
Klaus Beyer & Henning Schreiber
part ii. The role of ongoing variation in contact-induced change
The interplay of inherent tendencies and language contact on French object
clitics: An example of variation in a French Guianese contact setting 137
Isabelle Léglise
Contact-induced change and internal evolution: Spanish in contact with
Amerindian languages 165
Azucena Palacios Alcaine
The interplay of language-internal variation and contact influence
in language change 199
Brigitte Pakendorf
vi Table of contents
Change and variation in a trilingual setting: Evidentiality in Pomak
(Slavic, Greece) 229
Evangelia Adamou
Afterword 253
Donald Winford
Index 261
Acknowledgements
This book project would not have seen the day of light without the help of many
people and institutions.
We particularly wish to thank the authors of the papers that appear in this
volume for their patient collaboration. We also want to gratefully acknowledge the
various kinds of support that we received from the following people: Ad Backus,
Mark Janse, Paul Kerswill, Dominique Lagorgette, Gudrun Ledegen, Bettina
Migge, Jeanett Reynoso, Nick Thieberger, Sarah Thomason, Sophie Vassilaki,
Søren Wichmann, and Klaus Zimmermann.
We would like to thank the Fédération CNRS TUL (Typologie et Universaux
Linguistiques) for making it possible to organize a workshop on Variation and
Change in Contact Settings in Paris within the scope of the 7th International
Conference of the ALT (Association of Linguistic Typology).
Last, but not least, we also wish to gratefully acknowledge the human
and financial support from our research institutions CNRS, IRD, INALCO and
from our Labs CELIA (Centre d’Etudes des Langues Indigènes d’Amérique) and
then SEDYL (Structure et Dynamique des Langues) that made the following
collaborations possible: Duna Troiani (CNRS) did a first formating for the book,
and Linda Gardiner checked language-related issues throughout the book. We are
particularly endepted to them.
Variation and change in contact settings
Isabelle Léglise & Claudine Chamoreau
CNRS, SEDYL-CELIA, Paris, France
This paper introduces two linguistic fields dealing with language change:
contact linguistics and sociolinguistic research on variation. It argues that
although there is no language change without variation, linguistic variation is
still an opaque area, a blind spot, for most contact-induced language change
studies. The role of variation in changes occurring in multilingual settings has
not been much discussed in the literature and the exact role and interplay of the
notions of ‘variation’, ‘change’ and ‘contact’ have not yet been fully explored. This
paper proposes to examine more precisely the relationship between variation and
change in language contact settings.
Keywords: ongoing variation; contact-induced change; contact settings
Contact linguistics (Thomason & Kaufman 1988; Thomason 2001a; Winford
2003; Heine & Kuteva 2005), like historical linguistics, has a tradition of exploring
stable contact settings. From its beginnings (Weinreich 1953), stable and diglossic
settings have been the subject of study. The literature focuses either on the dia-
chronic changes that have appeared in some historical settings or on the completed
changes that gave rise to current situations and linguistic forms. For example, in
their collection of articles on the structural effects of language contact, Matras and
Sakel (2007: 1) explicitly note that they asked each contributor “to focus on the
diachronic impact that language contact has had on the structure of a particular
language.” Since not much social data – or different types of data – for these his-
torical settings are usually available, studies in contact linguistics have generally
focused on diachronic linguistic results1 at the expense of exploring either social
1. This does not mean ignoring social data. Historical linguistics and contact linguistics both
add some contextualization to their data, but it is not their main focus. For example, in the
Matras and Sakel collection cited, the introductory sections of each chapter were required
to include “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.”
