The phenomenon of language contact, and how it affects the structure of languages, has been of great interest to linguists. This study looks at how grammatical forms and structures evolve when speakers of two languages come into contact, and offers an interesting insight into the mechanism that induces people to transfer grammatical structures from one language to another. Drawing on findings from languages all over the world, Language Contact and Grammatical Change shows that the transfer of linguistic material across languages is quite regular and follows universal patterns of grammaticalization - contrary to previous claims that it is a fairly irregular process - and argues that internal and external explanations of language structure and change are in no way mutually exclusive. Engaging and informative, this book will be of great interest to sociolinguists, linguistic anthropologists, and all those working on grammaticalization, language contact, and language change.

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While the comparative method is concerned with regularities in phonological change, grammaticalization theory deals with regularities of grammatical change. In an A-Z format, this 2002 book summarizes the most salient generalizations that have been made on the unidirectional change of grammatical forms and constructions. The product of ten years of research, World Lexicon of Grammaticalization provides the reader with the tools to show how different grammatical meanings can be related to one another in a principled way, how to deal with issues such as polysemy and heterosemy, or why certain linguistic forms have simultaneous lexical and grammatical functions. It covers several hundred grammaticalization processes, in each case offering definitions of lexical concepts, suitable examples from a variety of languages, and references to the relevant research literature. Indices organized by source and target concepts allow for flexible use, and the findings delineated in the book are relevant to students of language across theoretical boundaries.

Discourse markers have been the subject of a considerable body of recent research. Most commonly, their genesis and development was described in terms of grammaticalization. But there were also alternative approaches to deal with their development, and the term pragmaticalization was proposed to account for features of discourse markers that pose a problem to grammaticalization theory.In the present paper it is argued that neither grammaticalization nor pragmaticalization are entirely satisfactory in the understanding of the nature of discourse markers. On the basis of recent work on Discourse Grammar (Kaltenböck et al. 2011; it is argued that the rise of discourse markers involves an operation called cooptation, whereby information units such as clauses, phrases, or words are transferred from the domain of sentence grammar to that of discourse organization.

Grammaticalization is based on universal strategies of conceptual transfer. Contact-induced language change on the other hand is an areally confined process resulting from specific historical events. What this suggests is that the two constitute quite divergent phenomena and, in fact, in the relevant literature they tend to be described as mutually exclusive processes. Accordingly, this literature abounds with discussions on whether some specific grammatical change is due to the former or the latter. The position taken in this paper is that the two are in no way mutually exclusive; rather, perhaps more often than not, they jointly conspire in triggering grammatical change.