Studying Contact without Detailed Studies of the Languages Involved: A Non-Philological Approach to Language Contact

Abstract

Studies of contact have revealed that all kinds of language material can, in the right circumstances, be borrowed from one language to another. Detecting, describing, and analyzing such situations typically involve the detailed study of at least two languages. An alternative involves detecting contact situations through database analysis. This cannot supplant the detailed work that requires detailed descriptive work in particular fields, but can allow us to examine large enough samples of languages that we can start to better understand, through calibration against known histories and other non-linguistic data types, likelihoods of different 'social contact' scenarios resulting in different kinds of linguistic traces, and also allow for the more targeted investigation of specific areas and language-to-language interactions. I shall describe the method, and illustrate its application in a number of case studies in regions for which we have good samples of language data.

A typological investigation of Nepalese languages

“…Further work will involve the comparison of phonological features, as well as morphosyntactic ones, to determine whether or not, and to what extent, these different datasets result in different clusters amongst the languages compared (see Donohue 2014). It has been suggested (McConvell 2002(McConvell , 2008 that nominal morphosyntax and verbal morphosyntax show different patterns of diffusion, and reflect different kinds of contact scenarios, so a separation of nominal and verbal traits would both allow for a test on this hypothesis, and potentially greater insights into recent and ancient language contact scenarios in Nepal.…”