Workshop on

Languages and Cultures in Contact

 

18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL18)

Seoul, July 2008

 

 

Conveners:

Prof. Dr habil. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk

Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics

University of  Lodz, Kosciuszki 65, 90 514  Lodz, Poland

Tel. 0048-42-6655221

Fax: 0048-42-6655220

[email protected]

 

Dr Thekla Wiebusch

Centre de Recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale (CNRS-EHESS)
54 Bd. Raspail
, F-75006 Paris, France
Tel. 0033-1-4954-2403 (secr.)
Fax: 0033-1-4954-2671
[email protected]

 

Description

 

Research on contact-induced change tends to concentrate on long term structural effects (phonology and syntax) arising under conditions of three kinds:

-           contact involving lexical borrowing and borrowing of grammatical morphemes

-           contact involving the transfer of structural features without grammatical morphemes

-           contact involving no interference e.g. some cases of language attrition and language death.

Semantics and pragmatics, while not entirely left out, are definitely given a short shrift.

 

Although mainstream work focuses on outcomes at the level of language, one basic assumption adopted is that the site of contact is the bilingual speaker as representing a bilingual speech community (e.g. Milroy 1992).

 

The role of external borrowing on language change has long been much debated. Only recently, attempts have been made at systematically comparing the borrowing behavior of typologically different languages with respect to lexical and grammatical borrowing (see Haspelmath 2003). Already first studies show the complexity of the factors involved, such as social contact situation, the typological features of the languages involved, attitudes of speakers towards borrowing, but also the previous history of language contact all contribute to the type and amount of material from the source language entering into the target language.

 

Another often neglected field is the fate of both the word and the related concept, entering the recipient language. In many cases, not only the borrowed word is subject to subsequent changes and the long-term result is the outcome of many competing renditions of the source word, but also the concept itself referred to by the loanword may undergo significant adaptation to the new cultural context (Lackner et al. 2001). The processes involved gain an additional dimension in the case of languages with non-alphabetic writing systems, where the characters nearly inevitably carry a semantic load, where, as in hieroglyphs, the new object can be depicted in the loanword, or graphic elements help attributing the new word to a specific semantic domain.

 

Globalization, mass-scale adoption of IT gadgetry, increasing reliance on languages of wider communication and the rise in the density, scope and speed of communication, all combine to make available large amounts of authentic language data that can be studied with respect i.a. to contact-related processes and outcomes in ways that were not available before (e.g. corpus linguistics tools) and that promise to provide deeper insight into the nature of those processes and outcomes.

 

Topics that deserve (fresh) consideration and will be the focus of the workshop include

-           the bilingual speaker/community as the locus of contact-induced change,

-           the relationship between internally versus externally motivated change,

-           text/discourse level effects,

-           the semantics and pragmatics of contact-induced change,

-           the differences between contact through written or spoken language and the influence of writing systems on types of borrowing,

-           the retention and loss of borrowed material,

-           the possibilities to distinguish between intensive borrowing and genetic relationship or to determine the direction of borrowing.

 

References

 

Aikhenvald, Alexandra & Dixon, R.M.W. (eds.) (2001). Areal diffusion and genetic

inheritance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Haspelmath, Martin (2003). Loanword Typology: Steps towards a systematic cross-linguistic

study of lexical borrowability. http://email.eva.mpg.de/~haspelmt/LWT-text.pdf

 

Lackner, Michael, Amelung, Iwo and Kurtz, Joachim (2001): New Terms for New Ideas –

Western Knowledge and Lexical Change in Late Empirical China. Leiden: Brill. 

http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/SubjectAreas/LinguisticsEnglishLanguage/Research/ConvergenceProject/1Database/

 

Milroy, James (1992). ¡°Toward a speaker-based account of language change¡±. In: Ernst

Håkon Jahr (1992 ed.) Language Contact. Theoretical and Empirical Studies. Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 21-35.

 

Thomason, Sarah G. (2001). Language contact. Washington, D.C.: GeorgetownUniversity

Press.

 

 

Important Dates:

 

¡Ü August  31, 2007: Deadline for submitting the abstract.

¡Ü November 30, 2007: Notification of acceptance.

 

Form and submission of abstracts:

 

An abstract(.pdf or .doc files) should be up to 3 pages long, including data and references.

The abstract should start with the title of the paper, followed by the text of the abstract.

Please do not include the author's name in the abstract. On a separate page, please give

the author's name, affiliation, e-mail address, telephone number, mailing address, the paper title and the session number(title).

 

Please send the abstract and the author's information to both [email protected] and to [email protected]

.