Language Contact and Grammatical Change

Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact

by Bernd Heine, Tania Kuteva

The phenomenon of language contact, and how it affects the structure of languages, has been of great interest to linguists in recent years. This pioneering new study looks at how grammatical forms and structures evolve when speakers of two languages come into contact, and offers insight into the mechanism that induces people to transfer grammatical structures from one language to another. The book will be of great interest to all working in grammaticalization, language contact, and language change.

328 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005