7 - Conclusions

Summary

In the course of the preceding chapters a number of findings on the nature of grammatical replication were presented. First, the reader may be surprised that we have had fairly little to say about the sociolinguistic environment and its contribution to language change. Contact-related linguistic change is the result of interaction between people speaking different languages and, as has been demonstrated in much of the recent research, it tends to be shaped by the particular sociolinguistic situation in which it arose. One rather unexpected outcome of our work is, however, that grammatical replication is fairly independent of the particular sociolinguistic factors that may exist in a given situation of language contact. It occurs in all kinds of social, political, cultural, and demographical settings and the form it takes does not seem to be influenced dramatically by these factors.

This is suggested among other things by the fact that replication can be reciprocal. We had numerous examples where speakers replicated a grammatical category of their L2 in their L1, or of a dominant/majority language in a minority language; but there were also many examples exhibiting an opposite directionality, that is, where a category of an L1, or of a minority language, was replicated in an L2, or a dominant language, respectively. We found examples where a given language can at the same time replicate grammatical structures and provide a model for replication.