3 Towards a Usage-Based Account of Language Change: Implications of Contact Linguistics for Linguistic Theory

Abstract

This chapter attempts to shed some new light on how and why language change, and examines what the implications are of adopting a usage based approach to language contact data. For many linguists the goal of linguistic theory is to characterize the nature of human linguistic knowledge. There is much less agreement, however, about the best way to describe this nature, about what constitutes evidence, and about how best to investigate the issue. The last few decades, however, usage-based linguistics has introduced a rival approach which suggests that the question has to be pushed further back, as it were. It urges us to look not for a purely linguistic basis of linguistic knowledge, but for the ways in which linguistic knowledge reflects the interaction between linguistic experience and innate cognitive skills that are not language-specific but 'domain-general'. Keywords: cognitive skills; language change; language contact data; linguistic theory; usage-based approach

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