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English as a Contact Language: Typology and Comparison

  • Theo Vennemann
Published/Copyright: December 1, 2011
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Anglia
From the journal Volume 129 Issue 3-4

Abstract

This article places English language contacts in a typological and comparative perspective. It begins with a review of the essentials of language contact terminology: concepts such as substrate, superstrate, and the various kinds of adstrate, as well as borrowing, importation, language shift, and interlanguage are defined and illustrated. Two sections describe substratal and superstratal contact influence in the history of English: language shift from Celtic to English and borrowing from Norman French into English. A process of the former kind, substratal language shifting toward English, is further described in a separate section with a recent and continuing parallel: the shifting in the direction of Standard Australian English by speakers of Aboriginal Australian languages, who have thereby created a widely used interlanguage, Aboriginal English. Next, change of language type by language contact is illustrated with word order transformations from VSO to SOV and conversely, and it is argued that English too has undergone its own and unique type change from the Germanic Verb-second/Verb-late type to the SVO type as a consequence of language contact. The final section (before the conclusion) addresses the question of how the non-Indo-European features which Celtic passed on to English arose in the Isles in the first place. The more than a century old theory that they developed on a pre-Indo-European substrate is paralleled by a reconstruction of the passing-on of SOV order in three linguistic layers at the Horn of Africa, namely from Nilo-Saharan to (originally VSO) Cushitic and further to (originally VSO) Amharic. The Concluding Remarks emphasize the singular importance of English for the developing general theory of language contact and the promise this theory holds for a better understanding of the history of this language.

Published Online: 2011-December
Published in Print: 2011-December

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  2. English as a Contact Language: Typology and Comparison
  3. Indian English An Emerging Epicentre? A Pilot Study on Light Verbs in Web-derived Corpora of South Asian Englishes
  4. New Light on Literacy in Eighth-Century East Anglia: A Runic Inscription from Baconsthorpe, Norfolk
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  7. Culture as Continuum: Walter Pater's Dionysus in Exile and the Power of Ekphrasis
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https://doi.org/10.1515/angl.2011.084

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Vorbemerkung der Herausgeber
  2. English as a Contact Language: Typology and Comparison
  3. Indian English An Emerging Epicentre? A Pilot Study on Light Verbs in Web-derived Corpora of South Asian Englishes
  4. New Light on Literacy in Eighth-Century East Anglia: A Runic Inscription from Baconsthorpe, Norfolk
  5. The Old English Orosius and its Sources
  6. Erinnerungen an die Anglistin Helene Richter anlsslich der Wiederkehr ihres 150. Geburtstages 2011
  7. Culture as Continuum: Walter Pater's Dionysus in Exile and the Power of Ekphrasis
  8. Early Modern Prose Fiction and the Place of Poetics
  9. Platonische Liebe in Shakespeares Sonett 116
  10. Herodian Love: Sex and Desire in Richardson's Clarissa
  11. Wer ist ein Patriot? Der Kampf um die Bedeutung dieses Wortes in England in der Zeit der franzsischen Revolution
  12. On the Road to Tragedy: George Milton's Agon in Of Mice and Men
  13. Born and bred, almost Mimicry as a Humorous Strategy in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia
  14. English Historical Linguistics 2008: Selected papers from the fifteenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 15), Munich 2430 August 2008. Vol. I: The history of English verbal and nominal constructions, ed. Ursula Lenker, Judith Huber & Robert Mailhammer
  15. The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts, ed. Richard Ingham
  16. Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change, ed. Raymond Hickey
  17. Rene R. Trilling, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse
  18. Hugh Magennis, Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse
  19. Claudia Di Sciacca, Finding the Right Words: Isidore's Synonyma in Anglo-Saxon England
  20. The Cambridge Companion to Bede, ed. Scott DeGregorio; George Hardin Brown, A Companion to Bede
  21. A Companion to lfric, ed. Hugh Magennis & Mary Swan
  22. lfric's De Temporibus Anni, ed. Martin Blake
  23. The Index of Middle English Prose, General Editor A. S. G. Edwards: Kari Anne Rand, Handlist XVIII: Manuscripts in the Library of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and the Fitzwilliam Museum; Margaret Connolly, Handlist XIX: Manuscripts in the University Library, Cambridge (DdOo); Kari Anne Rand, Handlist XX: Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
  24. Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends
  25. Poetry of Charles d'Orlans and His Circle: A Critical Edition of BnF MS fr. 25458, ed. John Fox & Mary-Jo Arn
  26. The Middle English Text of Caxton's Ovid. Book I, Edited from Cambridge, Magdalene College, Old Library, MS F.4.34, with a Parallel Text of The Ovide moralis en prose II, Edited from Paris, Bibliothque Nationale, MS fonds franais 137, ed. Diana Rumrich
  27. Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion, c. 14001700, ed. E. A. Jones & Alexandra Walsham
  28. The Cambridge Companion to the Epic, ed. Catherine Bates
  29. A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, ed. Garry L. Hagberg & Walter Jost
  30. Jrgen Meyer, Textvarianz und Schriftkritik: Dialogische Schreib- und Lesekultur bei Thomas More, George Gascoigne & John Lyly
  31. Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England, ed. Ute Berns
  32. Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, Transparency and Dissimulation: Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early Modern English Literature
  33. John Milton: LifeWritingReputation, ed. Paul Hammond & Blair Worden
  34. Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women's Writing in Britain 16001789
  35. The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s, ed. Pamela Clemit
  36. Alexander Regier, Fracture and Fragmentation in British Romanticism
  37. A Descent into Edgar Allan Poe and His Works: The Bicentennial, ed. Beatriz Gonzales Moreno & Margarita Rigal Aragon; Douglas Anderson, Pictures of Ascent in the Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe
  38. Josephine M. Guy & Ian Small, The Routledge Concise History of Nineteenth-Century Literature
  39. Timo Mller, The Self as Object in Modernist Fiction: James, Joyce, Hemingway
  40. Rachel Farebrother, The Collage Aesthetic in the Harlem Renaissance
  41. Raj Chandarlapaty, The Beat Generation and Counter Culture: Paul Bowels, William S. Borroughs, Jack Kerouac
  42. Marc Robinson, The American Play 17872000
  43. Representation and Decoration in a Postmodern Age, ed. Alfred Hornung & Rdiger Kunow
  44. Randy Laist, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels
  45. Auto/Biography and Mediation, ed. Alfred Hornung
  46. The Sea is History: Exploring the Atlantic, ed. Carmen Birkle & Nicole Waller
  47. Ludwig K. Pfeiffer, Von der Materialitt der Kommunikation zur Medienanthropologie: Aufstze zur Methodologie der Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften 19772009. Ed. Ingo Berensmeyer & Nicola Glaubitz, unter Mitarbeit von Martin Spies
  48. Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives, ed. Ansgar Nnning, Vera Nnning & Birgit Neumann
  49. State(s) of the Art: Considering Poetry Today, ed. Klaus Martens
  50. Michael Onyebuchi Eze, Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa
  51. Carlyle van Thompson, Black Outlaws: Race, Law, and Male Subjectivity in African American Literature and Culture
  52. Ira Sadoff, History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American Culture
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  54. Eingegangene Schriften
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