Guest
Contact-induced language change and the ‘borrowing’ of structural categories in particular has commonly been linked to perceived structural ‘gaps’ and the ‘prestige’ of the donor or model language. Modern attempts to theorise the process of structural borrowing have addressed such aspects as the degree of intensity of cultural contacts (Thomason & Kaufman 1988), the pre-determined hierarchical relationship between the languages involved and its impact on the combination of categories and their position in the bilingual speech production process (Myers-Scotton 2002), and contact as a trigger of universal process of grammaticalisation (Heine & Kuteva 2005), among others. In Matras (2009/2020) I introduced a pragmatic-functional model of language contact that places the emphasis on the goal-oriented management of the multilingual repertoire in communicative interaction, and the re-configuration of routines, perceived analytically from a ‘system’ point of vies as language change. Pivotal for such repertoi
