Grammatical restructuring in contact situations is
customarily analyzed under the lens of either language
contact or dialect contact. In this study we argue that both
processes may operate jointly in social settings where dialectal
accommodation and adult L2 learning favor the same linguistic
outcomes. From an evolutionary perspective, this overlap between
both forms of contact may be conceptualized as a function of a
common underlying process, with speakers selecting features of
heterogeneous provenance, acquired at various life stages. We
exemplify this joint effect by focusing on two changes in the
history of Spanish: the rearrangement of the 3rd person object
clitic system in medieval southern Iberian Castilian and the merging
of the medieval sibilants in early colonial Spanish.
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