A pragmatic perspective on contact-induced language change

Since the 1970's, the study of contact-induced language change has been given new impulses by scholars who feel the need for a theoretical synthesis of the available data. The earlier lack of a systematization of the wide range of types and degrees of linguistic interference revealed in the large number of case studies, had led to several unwarranted generalizations on language changer geoetic affiliation and the impact of contact. In these generalizations, the assumption persisted that language contact is a rather exceptional phenomenon, or that in cases where it does occur it cannot have a really significant influence.2 While being based on too little evidence, this idea also follows from a standard structuralist belief in the stability and imperviousness of specific language systems. Thomason & Kaufman's Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics (1988) is without doubt one of the most valuable efforts to meet the mentioned need for an encompassing reconsideration of the data on language contact. In about the same period, but in a different corner of linguistics, a comparable kind of discomfort was felt. Mainly in the wake of the linguistic-philosophical tradition of speech act theory, linguists had turned to the study of language use, moving away from the dominant concentration on language as a structural system. The discipline they established was called 'pragmatics'. But 'pragmaticians' came to realize that pragmatics had developed into an extremely diversified tield of study, with a galaxy of phenomena within its scope. Indeed, pragmatics was expected to host all linguistic issues that could not be handled by tiaditional disciplines such as syntax and semantics. This wide diversity of phenomena to be covered inevitably went along with a high variety of methodological and terminological angles, with incomparability of the findings as