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An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Donald Winford. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. xvii + 416 pp.
It is no small feat to write an academically rigorous textbook that is also an interesting and entertaining read, but Winford has accomplished just that The book does a very good job of presenting not just data and analyses, but also explaining the ongoing debates and conflicting points of view within the field. Eminent creolist Donald Winford has woven together theories and analyses from diverse avenues of study, carefully building towards the final chapter on creole formation. He includes hundreds of references spanning the entire history of the discipline of linguistics, explaining not only the relevant content but also how each source fits into the ongoing discourse. He makes concise, even-handed explanations of how the same phenomena appear differently and lead to different conclusions when viewed through distinct disciplinary lenses. Without making any epistemological fuss about it Winford draws on the body of second language acquisition literature, utterly disregarding theoretical linguistics' customary snub of the applied side. He also never permits the formal linguistic arguments to overshadow the social component of the linguistic data being analyzed; community culture, social dynamics, and history are never absent from the picture. In situations of language contact as he emphasizes repeatedly, "it is the people speaking the respective languages who have contact with each other and who resort to varying forms of mixture of elements from the languages involved" (p. 2). He deftly moves between considerations of language as individual knowledge and community knowledge, smoothly connecting the two vantages. Concepts that are emerging in linguistic anthropology, however, such as distributed cognition, could have enriched the discussion.
The book seems to be a very teachable textbook for an upper-level undergraduate class or as a basis for a graduate seminar; it does presume a great deal of linguistic knowledge on the part of its readers. The exercises, while not always plentiful, are placed with their corresponding content throughout rather than lumped together at the ends of the chapters, thus providing landmarks for breaking the book up into session-sized chunks. The tone is appropriate neither pedantic nor arcane, and the writing is crisp and clear. The book's index is ample and useful; in the next edition, if...