Language Contact: A Blind Spot in 'Things Linguistic'

What is it about?

There come times when the place of fact in a descriptive configuration changes, when new topics become relevant, when all phenomena can no longer be easily accounted for, when explanatory principles lose their absolute validity. A change of perspective upsets the descriptive framework and diverts attention to new problems which presage conceptual renewal and theoretical reconstruction founded on a changed understanding of the reality to be described. The subject of language contact is currently undergoing a process of this kind. The subject is not new, but its place in the domain of linguistic research has changed: the study of contact-induced change of whatever kind is no longer of secondary importance. It has moved from side to center stage. Why has this subject been minimized till now? Could it be simply that the notion of “contact” suggests a particular category of metaphors and entails preconceived kinds of ideas, phenomena, and objects: ones which can “come into contact” with one another? And that this presupposes the existence of prime entities which chance and contingency cause to “collide”, which undergo the consequences of this collision, apparently withstanding it fairly well and retaining more or less their original forms and features? Clearly, immersed in such a system of predictive and retrodictive inferences, we find ourselves caught up by a common-sense logic and an argumentation which constantly feeds on both our ideological and philosophical constructs (such as the nature of language) and our theoretical and empirical constructs (such as the structure and features of language) within an apodictic mirage.

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