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This paper explores the process of "negotiation", whereby speakers of two or more languages converge on a partially or entirely shared linguistic system. This process is surely unconscious in many or most instances, but sometimes speakers are aware of what they are doing as they "negotiate" the linguistic outcome of language contact. I provide evidence for the latter assertion, and discuss the difficulties inherent in any attempt to generalize about conscious vs. unconscious negotiation. I also contrast the process of negotiation with some other views of linguistic convergence. Finally, summarizing previous results, I argue that the existence of deliberate contact-induced (and other) linguistic change vitiates all efforts to achieve a deterministic predictive theory of contact-induced language change.

Language contact has been invoked with increasing frequency over the past two or three decades as a, or the, cause of a wide range of linguistic changes. Historical linguists have (of course) mainly addressed these changes from a diachronic perspective -that is, analyzing ways in which language contact has influenced lexical and/or structural developments over time. But sociolinguists, and many or most of the scholars who would characterize their specialty as contact linguistics, have focused on processes involving contact in analyzing synchronic variation. A few scholars have even argued that contact is the sole source of language variation and change; this extreme position is a neat counterpoint to an older position in historical linguistics, namely, that language contact is responsible only for lexical changes and quite minor structural changes. In this chapter I will argue that neither extreme position is viable. This argument will be developed through a survey of general types of contact explanations, especially explanations for changes over time, juxtaposed with a comparative survey of major causal factors in internally-motivated language change. My goal is to show that both internal and external motivations are needed in any full account of language history and, by implication, of synchronic variation. Progress in contact linguistics depends, in my opinion, on recognizing the complexity of change processes -on resisting the urge to offer a single simple explanation for all types of structural change.The structure of the chapter is as follows. Section 1 provides some background concepts and definitions, and §2 and §3 compare and contrast contact explanations with internal explanations of change. Section 4 is a brief conclusion that includes a warning about the need to be cautious in making claims about the causes of change -both because in most

Two claims made by Thomason & Kaufman (1988) have elicited particularly strong reactions from specialists in language contact: first, that there are no absolute linguistic constraints on the kinds or numbers of features that can be transferred from one language to another; and second, that when social factors and linguistic factors might be expected to push in opposite directions in a language contact situation, the social factors will be the primary determinants of the linguistic outcome. Both claims have frequently been challenged in recent years, for instance by Gillian Sankoff, Ruth King, and Carol Myers-Scotton. To some extent the challenges are based on a misunderstanding of our arguments; most seriously, some critics argue that we dismiss linguistic predictors as entirely irrelevant to an analysis of contact-induced change. Since we discussed linguistic as well as social predictors of contactinduced change, it isn't true that, as King 2002 puts it, we claimed that 'linguistic factors… play no role' in determining the outcome of language contact (and Sankoff 2001 has a similar statement). In part, however, the objections to our position are based on genuine theoretical and/or empirical disagreements between Thomason & Kaufman and their critics. This paper explores these disagreements in an effort to arrive at a better understanding of the relative importance of social and linguistic predictors in language contact situations. My main conclusions are these: although critics have made impressive contributions toward specifying linguistic predictors, there is still no good reason to abandon the Thomason & Kaufman position (mainly because it was much less extreme than some readers have assumed); and much more work needs to be done to make even rough predictions about the relative impact of particular social and linguistic factors, and their interactions, in particular contact situations.