Conceptual Metaphors of Language and Language Contact in Linguistics
Theories relying on an understanding of language according to (a) are inspired by a sociolinguistic view which characterizes language as an abstract system uniting the sum of variation in a certain regionally and socially bound speaker community. As such, language is speaker externally bound to a community of language practice. By contrast, a linguistic understanding of language that is based on (b) emphasizes the containment of language in a speaker’s mind as the center of perceiving and producing speech. As an essentially cognitive conception of language, (b) has given rise to various mentalistic models of language such as Universal Grammar and its modifications, the Dual Mechanism Hypothesis (Pinker, 2001), Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), evolutional logic in language development (Ritt, 2004) and in language use (e.g., naturalness, economy, markedness, cf. Dressier, 1985).
Over the last few decades, (b) has also inspired the rapid growth and theory development in cognitive linguistics, e.g., conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003 [1980]; Koveczes, 2005), usage-based network MBT Chapa modelling of language (Bybee, 1985,2001), semantic frames (Fillmore, 1982), Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 1999, 2008), prototypes and categorization (Lakoff, 1987; Geeraerts, 2006), Construction Grammar, (Goldberg, 2006; Croft, 2001), conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002), to name the most prominent approaches. This division in two basic conceptualizations of language as a speaker-externally bound and a speaker-internally bound system is not to say that linguistic models follow an either/or choice in theory construction. It is in fact quite common that both domains are accounted for in one way or other. Among others, functional grammar, for example, consistently draws on both domains of boundedness of language (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Both from a speaker-external and from a speaker-internal perspective, linguistic reasoning is generally grounded on a conception of language as an open (unbounded) entity/system constantly subject to change and where a limited set of forms and combinational schemas allow for unlimited ways of expression. The basic vision of language as socially bound and as mentally bound is also reflected in the two general pathways of language change as happening internally to the system and as externally induced. As a synonym for externally induced language change, language contact is thus conceptualized as happening on the social pane of transmission of language elements from one language to another.
This metaphor is frequently invoked for characterizing the role of globalizing English when it is a socially distant source language donating anglicisms to various receptor languages (cf. Onysko, 2007). Coetsem’s (2000) theory of transmission in language contact most explicitly follows from this basic conceptualization of language contact. As a speaker-internal process, on the other hand, language contact is metaphorically depicted as involving the interaction of diverse language systems within a speaker’s mind. Models of language contact that mainly reflect this imagery relate to the fields of bi- and multilingual speech phenomena as researched in, for example, the works of Clyne (2003), Muysken (2000), Myers-Scotton (2002), and Paradis (2004), to name just a few major publications. Again, comprehensive MBT Lami models of language contact have to strive for combining insights based on both the social and the cognitive domain as has been stressed explicitly in Thomason & Kaufmann (1988) and Thomason (2001). In this way, more isolated attempts of describing language contact as the interaction of abstract language systems removed from both social and cognitive grounds have to be grounded in a socio-cognitive context of a specific language contact scenario.
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