Carol Myers-Scotton, Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv, 342. Pb.

The scope of Myers-Scotton's new book is far wider than that of her earlier study (1993), which focused exclusively on code-switching. She has now applied her Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model to a much broader range of language contact phenomena, covering areas such as convergence (what others have termed “interference”), language attrition and shift, and creoles and mixed languages. There is no doubt that the model does offer many insights into the dynamics of various types of language contact, and while Myers-Scotton's remarks remain fairly tentative with regard to some of these fields, this book certainly opens up new avenues for exploration in each of them. However, the most substantial and possibly the most controversial part of the book is again that which presents the latest developments in her account of bilingual code-switching, which has already achieved worldwide renown, so for want of space we will focus only on this part of the book.