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Part of
Historical Linguistics 2015: Selected papers from the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples, 27-31 July 2015
Edited by Michela Cennamo and Claudia Fabrizio
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 348] 2019
► pp. 563–592

Chapter 26
Linguistic divergence under contact

The normal result of language contact is widely assumed to be convergence, as manifested in classic Sprachbünde and caused through metatypy, cognitive economy, shared norms of conversational practice, etc. Yet at the same time there is growing evidence that contact can also produce divergence, originating with Larsen’s idea of ‘neighbour opposition’) and developed through Thurston’s work on eseterogeny (elaboration of difference and impenetrability) to account for the apparently deliberate cultivation of language difference found in many parts of Melanesia.

I argue that contact-induced divergence is more prevalent than previously thought, drawing on case studies from New Guinea and Northern Australia. Crucial ingredients are mechanisms for generating divergent structures (psycholinguistic, systemic), social settings favouring the linguistic signalling of group-membership distinctions, and social processes of linguistic ideology and praxis selecting for distinct structural options as social signalling devices.

Keywords: complexification, correspondence mimicry, doppel avoidance, language contact, language convergence, language divergence, metalinguistic awareness, metatypy, multilingualism, naboopposition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Contact and convergence as a default assumption in historical linguistics
  • 3.Discovering divergence: Some case studies
    • 3.1Contact-triggered divergence: A partial pedigree
    • 3.2Lexicon
    • 3.3Phonological divergence
    • 3.4Morphological divergence
    • 3.5Morphosyntactic divergence
  • 4.Divergence under contact: Towards a general model
    • 4.1Mechanisms for generating diverse structures
      • 4.1.1Metalinguistic awareness of correspondences
      • 4.1.2Doppel avoidance
      • 4.1.3Summative complexification
    • 4.2Social settings favouring linguistic elaboration of group-membership distinctions
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 10 September 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.348.26eva
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