[This review replaces the review in issue 12-2413, adding the author's biographical statement, and correcting some errors. --Eds.]
Gilbers, Dicky, John Nerbonne, and Jos Schaeken, ed. (2000) Languages in Contact. Rodopi, hardback ISBN 90-420-1322-2, viii+339pp, $64.00, Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics 28.
Lotfi Sayahi, University at Albany, State University of New York
Languages in Contact is a collection of thirty articles presented at a conference bearing the same title which was held in 1999 at the University of Groningen. It celebrated the awarding of a honorary doctorate by the University of St. Petersburg to Tjeerd De Graaf (Professor of phonetics at the University of Groningen and author of a large body of publications on phonetic aspects of bilingualism and language contact). In addition to these numerous contributions, the editors include an introduction that outlines the major topics exposed.
The volume under review is not divided into sections or chapters. However, in the introduction, the editors attempted to group the articles according to the linguistic area they study. A wide range of coverage is dedicated to Eurasia, with a special attention to Russian in contact with several languages of the ex URSS, the Balkan Sprachbund (one of the best known and studied linguistic areas), the Scandinavian languages and dialects, and the Dutch/ German dialectal contact. Another group of articles deals with the Pacific area studying the language contact in New Guinea. The third group studies two linguistic areas referred to by the editors as "The New World": the Pacific Northwest, and the Andean Amazonian area.
It would be too space consuming to review every single contribution made to this encompassing volume. Therefore, I will limit my review to a few articles that I find theoretically stimulating in order to discuss the main foci and the future directions of Sprachbund studies without going into too much specific structural detail which would be inevitable when reviewing case studies.
The first article, entitled "Linguistic areas and language history", is written by Sarah G. Thomason, who previously co- authored with T. Kaufman (1988) a classic reference book on language contact. Her article exposes the state of the art in language contact studies by defining the object of this sub- discipline and surveying the main Sprachb�nde studied. By definition and according to Thomason, "a linguistic area is a geographical region containing a group of three or more languages that share some structural features as a result of contact rather than as a result of accident or inheritance from common ancestor." (p. 311). The fact that more than two languages are needed in order to speak of a Sprachbund as such is a way to distinguish areal linguistics from the studies that cover the very frequent bilingual contact situations. In addition, the focus on "structural features" is to avoid the inclusion, in a certain Sprachbund, of all the languages that may have borrowed lexical items from languages belonging to the area in question without undertaking a close direct contact. The stress on contact as the catalyst for structural convergence in areal linguistics is the very raison d'�tre of this field since many cross- linguistic features may be shared among languages, which may not be in direct contact nor linked genetically, either by conforming to some Universal Grammar principles or simply by accident.
Thomason proceeds to survey the most controversial issues involving areal linguistics studies and she formulates some conclusions that could be summarized as follows:
1. Not all the members of a determined Sprachbund are necessarily structurally related between themselves.
2. More than one structural feature should be shared as evidence for a Sprachbund.
3. The shared structural features are not required to be present in all the member languages.
4. The distinguishing shared features may not be exclusive to the determined Sprachbund and may exist in other linguistic areas as well.
5. Several social and cultural factors condition the emergence of a Sprachbund out of close contact between more than two languages for a long time.
Thomason then attempts to answer two important questions central to the study of language contact: "How do linguistic areas arise? And how are their linguistic features to be interpreted historically?" (p. 315). She underscores the social and cultural specificity of each case both for the arising of a Sprachbund and for the adequate historical interpretation of its shared features. In order to illustrate these assumptions, she surveys five well-known Sprachb�nde: The Balkan Sprachbund, the Sepik River Basin, the Pacific Northwest, the Ethiopian Highlands, and South Asia.
The fact that a lot has still to be done in areal linguistics makes the answer to where the areal features come from not an easy one, since it is not obvious in all the cases what the original source language was and how the processes of contact and change took place.
The second article that I find of special interest and complimentary to the article by Thomason is the one by Pieter Muysken: "From linguistic areas to areal linguistics". While Thomason's article reviews and consolidates the foundations and the theoretical framework in the present areal linguistics research showing where we presently stand, Muysken aims at the future and the upcoming areal linguistic research by suggesting possible directions of study. He maintains the need to combine the efforts of genetic, areal, and typological linguistics for a better understanding of linguistic areas.
In addition to the possible scenarios for the formation of linguistic areas presented by Thomason and Kaufman (maintenance and borrowing/ shift and transfer) which lead to "outer form shared features" (p. 267). Muysken proposes two additional scenarios: surface convergence (for example convergence at the word order level) and relexification "the word for word and even morpheme for morpheme modeling of one language upon another, so that roughly the structure comes from the one and at least the content lexicon from the other language" (p. 266). These types of scenarios lead to "inner form syntactic and discourse features" (267). Both inner form and outer form shared features may be present when we have convergence and coexistence. In the light of these interpretations, Muysken discusses the areal features in the Andean/Amazon transition area. He argues that unlike the Balkan linguistic area, there exist two main language groups with the Quechua-Aymara group on the one side and the Western Amazonian languages at the other. Ongoing detailed research in the area is expected to shed more light on the relationship between both groups and the type of shared features. The general claim of the article is the "[^�] shift from linguistic areas as fixed entities to areal linguistics, the study of the distribution of linguistic features in space and time" (p. 274).
R. Alexander investigates the word order within the Balkan linguistic area in order to prove whether it is of a convergent aspect or not. Complex as the Balkan linguistic area is, it is hard to distinguish between the features that have been contact- induced and those that have occurred out of internal structural change, even though the combination of both phenomena is quite frequent. Alexander stresses the important role that South Slavic languages (Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian) play as a good source for possible investigation of several features due to the fact that they contain both Balkan and non-Balkan features. While in non-Balkan Slavic the clitic is placed after the negated verb, Balkan south Slavic requires the clitic to be inserted between the negative particle and the negated verb which is similar to the order implanted in Balkan languages. The claim she makes is that the Balkan Slavic word order is innovative. Another innovation concerns the fact that in Balkan Slavic clitics are required to precede the verb even if this means that they have to occupy the first place in the word order which is not allowed in many other linguistic systems. Based on a comparison of Balkan south Slavic and non-Balkan South Slavic features and examination of early South Slavic manuscripts, Alexander reaches the conclusion that the clitic ordering in Balkan languages originated in Slavic and was borrowed by the rest of the Balkan languages suggesting that it is more probable to be a contact-induced feature rather than a convergent one. But she still draws our attention to the fact that the interpretation of the appearance of a certain shared structural feature may vary according to the point of view of each linguist. She makes a strong call to find a "correct balance" (p. 25) between both approximations: convergence and internal factors. A different point of view is expressed by Lindstedt who seems to be inclined towards the idea that the different areal Balkan features could not be a result of "internal drift" (p. 242), or at least not exclusively. They could be the result of "mutual reinforcement" (p. 242) meaning that the sin quo no of the linguistic balkanization is the contact situation which is after all the subject matter of Sprachbund studies in general.
Another interesting theoretical approach is developed by Comrie in his article "Language contact, lexical, borrowing, and semantic fields". He investigates whether the convergence in "semantic fields", not in syntactic structures as we have seen above, are the outcome of genetic relations or a close linguistic contact. Several structural similarities between Haruai and Aramo (a variety of Hagahai which is a Kalamic language), such as verb morphology, allow for genetic connections between Haruai and Hagahai that do not exist between Haruai and Kobon (a Kalamic language too). Comrie suggests that shared similarities between the last two are a result of borrowing "[...] from Kobon into Haruai, since the borrowed words are shared by Kobon and Haruai but not in general by Hagahai" (p. 79). This is caused partly by the need of Haruai to make up for the extensive gap left by the systematic word tabooing in this speech community (especially kinship words since every speaker may have some words that are taboo for him only such as the names of his in- laws (p. 80)); and also by the incorporation of words "relating to the outside world" (p. 83). The loans, therefore, are not really limited to determined semantic domains but functionally they go beyond that to cause permanent lexical changes in the language as stated by Comrie: "In general, in Haruai it is not possible to identify particular semantic domains that have been affected by borrowing from Kobon; such borrowing pervades the whole lexicon" (p. 84)
In general, the inclusion of so many articles with different scopes is very useful as it allows the reader to get a good grasp of the most up-to-date research in the field but still there is a risk of getting overwhelmed by so much information and so many case studies. Sometimes it may seem hard to come to grip with all the viewpoints especially since some articles are not elaborated enough (some are as brief as four pages) and the reader may lack the necessary information required to follow the arguments made. Another critical points, which does not relate to this volume only but to contact linguistics in general, is the need to decentralize the classical Eurasian Sprachb�nde and direct more extensive research into the other areas as well (only one article referred to Africa in the present volume).
A more active editorial effort was needed to make the general layout of the book clearly structured with, perhaps, the more general theoretical articles in the beginning (especially the article by Thomason which could have served as an introduction to the whole volume) and the articles classified in chapters according to their scope, the features studied (syntactic, morphological, lexical or phonetic), or the methodology implanted, etc. In this way, it would have been much more accessible as a reference book.
To sum up, Languages in Contact is a large encompassing collection of good scholarly contributions on Sprachbund studies with both theoretical articles offering the needed framework and well-documented case studies offering insight into original data. The contributors made it clear that there is still a lot to be done and almost every article promised or opened the door for more systematic future research.
Reference Thomason, Sarah Grey, and Terence Kaufman (1988). Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Lotfi Sayahi is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (the University at Albany, SUNY). His main research areas are: sociolinguistics, bilingualism, code-switching, and Spanish linguistics.
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