Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings

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Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings is written by Bertus van Rooy and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 9027246963 (ISBN 10) and 9789027246967 (ISBN 13).

Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings explores an innovative proposal: that linguistic similarities identified in different forms of contact-influenced varieties of language use (including translation, native and non-native varieties of English, and language use of bilinguals more generally) can be accounted for in a coherent framework grounded in the notion of ‘constrained communication’. These varieties have hitherto been studied in independent scholarly traditions, especially translation studies and world Englishes, leaving the potential underlying unity underexplored, both conceptually and empirically. The chapters collected in this volume aim to develop such a unified perspective by drawing on corpus data across a range of languages and language varieties, with a focus on written language, a neglected data source in research on multilingual contact settings. The findings point to shared general characteristics across individual contact settings, which result from (probabilistically conditioned) manifestations of the same deeper regularities – constraints – present in diverse language-contact settings.