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.