| Abstrakt: |
AbstractIn the absence of empirical facts and of a framework within which these facts may be treated in a comparable way, credos tend to prevail. This has long been the case with the views of historical linguists on matters of language contact. Thomason and Kaufman's book is a welcome contribution to the restoration of sense in this area. It is a major platform of nearly four decades of increase in the research on language contact. It synthesizes efforts in pidgin and Creole linguistics (since the first international conference in 1959 a rapidly expanding field), sociolinguistic speech-community studies, and discusses the various proposals on language contact coming from traditional historical linguistics, including structuralist theories of interference. |
