Research on the outcomes of language contact in time and space: an overview of selected issues

The paper discusses major theoretical, methodological and terminological developments in European and American studies on linguistic borrowing. Contact-induced innovations have been an object of linguistic inquiry since the late 18th century, which over a century later developed into contact linguistics, a fully-fledged subdiscipline of linguistic research. The paper reports on the turn-of-the-21st-century shift from traditionally structuralist, word-oriented description of contact-induced phenomena, aimed mainly at their lexicographic treatment, towards a concept-oriented cognitive-onomasiological viewing of the borrowing process and its outcomes, which followed on research developments in general linguistics. Latest loan research methodologies exploit corpus linguistics tools and the sociolinguistically and pragmatically oriented usage-based approach as well as experimental set-ups.