On the importance of spontaneous speech innovations in language contact situations

This paper builds on previous research by offering new perspectives on the importance of spontaneous speech innovation in linguistic, social, and cultural processes of language contact and change in Spanish-speaking communities of Spain and America. The author reconsiders existing data concerning such innovation and synthesizes previous independent findings in a novel, unified approach that relates previously unrelated but functionally similar linguistic phenomena. With the purpose of moving toward a more comprehensive and verifiable model of language contact and change, the paper underlines some complex linguistic and extralinguistic functions associated with spontaneous speech innovations in contact varieties and outlines a coordinated program of interdisciplinary sociolinguistic research to establish appropriate archival tools for documenting corpus-based spontaneous speech innovations for posterior analysis.