Miriam Bouzouita (editor) - Convergence and divergence in Ibero-Romance across contact situations and beyond

As is the case with any other natural language, the Ibero-Romance languages have entered in contact with diverse languages, through particular historical, geographical and political situations. The colonialist and commercial endeavours that were undertaken in previous centuries, for example, have contributed to the emergence of various language contact situations over different continents, which have left their marks on the Ibero-Romance languages at different moments in their histories, and at different linguistic levels. Consequently, these contact situations have been an inexhaustible source for the emergence of interesting language phenomena that have caught linguists attention. The resulting diversification is apparent at the intercontinental, international, national, and local level. Therefore, the Ibero-Romance languages, specifically as languages in contact and contrast with other languages, can be studied from various perspectives and within different approaches. In particular, this book focuses on convergence, divergence and related phenomena (e.g. linguistic stability) observed (i) in different languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, and (ii) across different varieties of one particular language outside Europe. The latter needs to be understood in a broad sense, as we also include languages with non-official status, as seen in the contact of English with different Spanish varieties in the United States and its resultant Spanglish.

It should be pointed out that in this volume the notions of convergence and divergence refer both to a process and a result, which can, but need not, be the outcome of a language or dialect contact situation. On the one hand, for more details on other non-convergence cases).

This book aims to provide a better understanding of the concepts of convergence and non-convergence cases, such as divergence, from different theoretical perspectives and unites contributions from different fields, such as contact linguistics and variational linguistics, which tend to rarely interact. Firstly, it sheds light on the different types of consequences and mechanisms involved in language contact within the Ibero-Romance world, a geographical space characterised by a high rate of multilingual speakers and settings. Concretely, while most studies on language contact focus solely on phenomena of convergence between languages and varieties, as this has long been assumed to be the default outcome of contact situations, much less attention has been paid to divergence as a possible outcome of linguistic contact, a phenomenon that has even been characterised as a rare element (this volume). Various theoretical aspects of convergence and divergence phenomena are also highlighted and explored in detail. Further, this volume covers (i) a wide range of phenomena from different linguistic levels, ranging from morpho-syntactic (e.g., Camus Bergareche/Gmez Seibane in this volume; Schulte in this volume), to discourse-pragmatic features (Gras/Sansiena in this volume), and includes linguistic perceptions and language attitude (e.g., Wolf in this volume), as well as (ii) a wide range of European and non-European contact languages (e.g., Basque, Catalan, Portuguese, English, Tetun Deli, etc.).

The first part of the volume contains a number of empirical case studies that highlight possible outcomes as a result of different contact situations within the Iberian Peninsula. This part zooms in on convergence and divergence between the various main Ibero-Romance languages, i.e. Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan, as well as their non-Indo-European adstrate/substrate Basque. These papers point out that both convergence and divergence occur quite regularly in contact situations, as a direct or an indirect outcome. The second part of the volume mainly looks into phenomena of convergent and divergent variation between standard and non-standard language varieties of Spanish and Portuguese outside of the Iberian Peninsula.

The first set of articles in this book, described in this section, deals with (non-)convergence and divergence as observed in language contact settings in the Iberian Peninsula. The first paper, which is written by Camus Bergareche and Gmez Seibane, deals with a classic theme within Hispanic Linguistics, namely lesmo, i.e. the use of a dative clitic, le or les, instead of an accusative one, such as lo/los/la/las, for the direct object function. The originality of this paper lies in the fact that it focuses on feminine lesmo, i.e. the use of a dative clitic for a direct object with a feminine referent, a phenomenon which has received considerably less attention in the literature, presumably due to its more restricted use in comparison to its masculine counterpart (cf. ; see also Gmez Seibane in this volume). This contribution provides an empirically rich account for the contact-induced explanation of feminine lesmo in Basque Spanish, which draws on a variety of sources, such as oral databases, like the Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Espaol Rural (Audible Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish, COSER), linguistic atlases, and historical corpora.

After giving a synchronic overview of the various types of lesmo found in northern Peninsular Spanish, the authors briefly sketch the historical presence of lesmo in Basque Spanish texts, where they observe, to a greater or lesser extent, increasing frequencies of use from the 16th to the 19th century (for a detailed historical account of this phenomenon in Basque Spanish in 18th and 19th century bilinguals, see Gmez Seibanes contribution in this volume). The authors further provide a synchronic sociolinguistic, geographic and semantic-syntactic characterisation of feminine lesmo.

As concerns the sociolinguistic use of feminine lesmo, it is a linguistic feature that is observed nowadays in the speech of a whole range of socio-economic groups, such as rural, uneducated speakers, but also semi-urban, highly educated ones. Interestingly, as concerns the urban and semi-urban areas, it is not only restricted to bilingual individuals, but also appears in monolingual speakers utterances. Notwithstanding this, as the latter group employs this phenomenon less, Camus Bergareche and Gmez Seibane conclude that there are diastratic differences. As such, a positive correlation seems to exist between the use of feminine lesmo and the knowledge an informant possesses about the Basque language.

As for its geographic distribution, feminine lesmo is attested in the three Basque Country provinces, namely inland Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa and the northern part of Araba, as well as in the northwest of Navarre. Strictly speaking, its diatopic spread extends thus beyond the political boundaries of the Basque Country, although it coincides with areas with a historical strong contact between Basque and Spanish.