Cognitive Contact Linguistics: Placing Usage, Meaning and Mind at the Core of Contact-induced Variation and Change (Cognitive Linguistics Research)

This volume serves to illustrate the promising insights to be gained when cross-fertilizing Cognitive Linguistics and contact linguistics, which each hold crucial ingredients to an encompassing study of contact-induced variation and change. Combining the study of the individual mind with the study of shared context, bridging research on experience and perspective with research on variation and change, and tackling the methodological complexities that this empirical approach to mental categorization entails, help us determine how the meaningful units that make up language are categorized and structured in the bi- and multilingual mind and, by extension, in any human mind. Together, the ten papers in this volume reveal the complexities of the interaction between usage, meaning and mind in contact-induced variation and change, which we hope will inspire future research exploring the possibilities of the cross-fertilization we have labeled Cognitive Contact Linguistics. "This volume makes a case for Cognitive Contact Linguistics as a framework excellently suited to the integration of psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic inquiry of the bi- and multilingual mind. Oriented more towards exploration than towards specialization, the volume presents ten papers that together illustrate the wide range of research that can ensur from the interaction of Contact Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics"--Back cover