Language Contact and Grammatical Change

The phenomenon of language contact, and how it affects the structure of languages, has been of great interest to linguists in recent years. This pioneering new study looks at how grammatical forms and structures evolve when speakers of two languages come into contact, and offers insight into the mechanism that induces people to transfer grammatical structures from one language to another. The book will be of great interest to all working in grammaticalization, language contact, and language change.

Offers an interesting insight into how language contact affects grammatical forms and structures.

Bernd Heine is Professor of African Studies in the Institute for African Studies, University of Cologne.

Tania Kuteva is Professor of English Linguistics at the Institute for English and American Studies, University of Düsseldorf.