Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. Scott Jarvis and Aneta Pavlenko (2008) New York and London: Routledge. Pp 287. ISBN 0805838856

Abstract

Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. Scott Jarvis and Aneta Pavlenko (2008) New York and London: Routledge. Pp 287. ISBN 0805838856Reviewed by Anastassia ZabrodskajaToday monolingualism is often perceived as an unmarked phenomenon that does not require any explanations (see the famous example by Romaine [1995] 2000:1 that a book entitled Monolingualism would appear extremely strange). Continuing the analogy, one can say that approaches to language that ignore language contacts are also viewed as natural and do not require any theoreti- cal or methodological explanations (hence 'contactlessness' of a language is unmarked and contacts are not). Indeed, most linguistic theory presents languages as homogenous and clear-cut entities. However, there is no language that is not affected by contacts, be it to a smaller or greater extent.The expression 'language contact' is somewhat imprecise because it is speakers of different varieties who communicate and not merely language systems. In this respect, Weinreich ([1953] 1966:71) was right in his claim that the bilingual brain is the locus of language contact. By saying this he stressed the cognitive dimension of bilingualism and language contact. Still, despite this early remark, the monolingual native speaker is a default yardstick in many theories and contact-induced language change is considered to be less relevant. From the contact linguistics point of view, however, the sameness of linguistic systems in all speakers in a given speech community is an illusion. As soon as we deal with a multilingual speaker, it is not clear what is the mother tongue (see Skutnabb Kangas, 1988:18, 91; 2000:106, 573). Bilingual speakers' cognition and linguistic intuition (i.e., judgement on what is acceptable/unacceptable) are different from those of a monolingual speaker.The question of the relevance of contact-induced language change is not new. In the second half of the nineteenth century in the so-called Schuchardt-Muller controversy Hugo Schuchardt was ahead of his time, claiming 'Es gibt keine vollig ungemischte Sprache', 'There is no completely unmixed language' (1884, quoted from Thomason and Kaufman, [1988] 1991:1). Some scholars discarded this idea altogether, while some believed that no language has been influenced by another language to such an extent that this would make genetic classification difficult (or even impossible). Yet some went further and claimed that all languages are creoles. While this claim is not true in its absolute form, certain languages exist that cannot be traced back to a single proto-language because their grammatical systems and their lexicons originate from genetically different sources.To a great extent, Schuchardt was right. Contact-induced language change is as important as internal change. What is more, in some situations it is difficult to distinguish between the two (multiple causation). According to Croft (2000:8), there is no fundamental difference between internally and externally caused changes. We have no reasons to believe that this was different in the past.Another debate concerns the relevance of structural and typological factors on the one hand and of sociolinguistic factors on the other. Based on empirical data, various predictions about borrowability have been made and constraints on contact-induced language change formulated. However, in the light of abundant counterevidence the universality of constraints should be doubted (Clyne, 1987).A look at the history of studies on contact-induced language change so far makes clear that to date researchers use notions such as 'interference' (Weinreich, [1953] 1966), 'code-copying' (Johanson, 2002), 'cross-linguistic influence' (Jarvis, 2002), 'transfer' (Heine and Kuteva, 2005) and 'convergence' (Auer, Hinskens and Kerswill, 2005), but still talk about more or less the same topic - how morphosyntactic similarities between the two language systems increase. …