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The role of language contact in semantic change: Ser and estar – a response to Geeslin and Guijarro-Fuentes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2008

CAROL A. KLEE*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, 9 Pleasant Street S.E., 51 Folwell Hall, Minneapolis, MN 55455, [email protected]

Extract

The role of language contact in linguistic change remains a polemic issue in the field of contact linguistics. Many researchers (Weinreich, 1953; Lefebvre, 1985; Prince, 1988; Silva-Corvalán, 1994; King, 2000; Sankoff, 2002; Labov, 2007) believe that there are limits on the types of linguistic patterns that can be transmitted across languages, while others (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988, p. 14) deem that “any linguistic feature can be transferred from any language to any other language”. Regardless of the differences of opinion on this issue, there is widespread recognition that the social context, including such features as the size and characteristics of the bilingual groups, the attitudes toward the languages spoken, and the intensity and duration of language contact, play an important role in determining the linguistic outcomes of language contact.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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