In:The Interplay of Variation and Change in Contact Settings
Edited by Isabelle Léglise and Claudine Chamoreau
[Studies in Language Variation 12] 2013
► pp. 23–52
Syntactic variation and change
The variationist framework and language contact
Published online: 12 March 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.12.02mey
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.12.02mey
This chapter introduces linguistic variation, specifically contact-induced language variation, from a variationist point of view. It shows that a focus on social and linguistic constraints on variation using statistical tools provides clues for distinguishing different processes of transfer. Taking examples of subject and object expression in Bislama, an English-lexified Creole, and Tamambo, a conservative Eastern Oceanic language, it illustrates weak and strong transfers and calque/calquing.
Keywords: Bislama, calque, contact-induced variation, Tamambo, transfer, variationist perspective
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2017. Sociolinguistic variation at the grammatical/discourse level. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 22:3 ► pp. 429 ff.
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Mansfield, John
2015. Morphotactic variation, prosodic domains and the changing structure of the Murrinhpatha verb. Asia-Pacific Language Variation 1:2 ► pp. 163 ff.
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