Linguistic areas

Description

What are linguistic areas? How do we identify them? Does the study of linguistic areas require particularly tailored methodologies, or are linguistic areas simply ordinary cases of contact-induced change, amplified through several sets of contact situations? These and other questions form the core of the discussion presented in this collection. The authors address issues of definition and theory of linguistic areas, analyse the process of convergence, and introduce methods to assess the impact of language contact across geographical zones. New cases studies are introduced which extend the corpus of areas described so far. They are accompanied by discussions that revisit some of the better-established linguistic areas.