We saw in the preceding chapter that what happens in situations of language contact is not coincidental: there are certain grammatical changes that can be expected to happen while others are unlikely to happen. Furthermore, there are changes that have a strong impact on the existing modes of categorization while others affect categorization only to a minor extent. For good reasons therefore, Aikhenvald (2003: 2) distinguishes between system-altering changes, which involve the introduction of new categories, and system-preserving changes, where no new categories arise. It would seem that any kind of grammatical replication leads to a modification of the existing system or grammatical structure. In the present chapter we wish to highlight what appear to be the most salient effects replication may have on the structure of the replica language, and we will look into the question of whether replication may lead to a change of what is widely referred to as the typological profile of a given language.

Each of the processes that we described in chapter 3 has specific implications for the structure of the languages concerned. By introducing new use patterns and new grammatical categories, the existing structures of arranging discourses and grammatical categories change in some way or other. The question that we are concerned with in the present chapter is what these changes mean with reference to the grammatical structure of the languages concerned. To this end, we will propose a taxonomy of the most common kinds of changes in section 4.1.