Contact Linguistics

Carol Myers-Scotton is a Carolina Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of South Carolina. She is a specialist in sociolinguistics and language contact phenomena with a special interest in East and Southern African linguistics. In 1993, she published two volumes on codeswitching, Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa, and Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching (both OUP). She has also edited a volume of essays on language and literature (OUP 1998) and has published a number of articles in her areas of interest.

The research program pioneered by Carol Myers-Scotton plays an exceptionally important role in current linguistic scholarship... In sum, this book is not only a solid contribution to the exegesis of the Myers-Scotton research program as applied to language contact phenomena; its relevance to current work in a diversity of areas makes it highly recommended reading for anyone seriously interested in linguistics.

• 1. Introduction ; 2. The Roots of Language Contact ; 3. CS Models and New Developments ; 4. Considering Problematic CS Data and Other Approaches ; 5. Convergence and Attrition ; 6. Lexical Borrowing, Mixed (Split) Languages, and Creole Formation ; 7. Concluding Remarks: The Out of Sight in Contact Linguistics