This book is dedicated to Anna Siewierska, who died, far too young, in 2011. It contains 15 contributions by 20 linguists who may be counted among the foremost scholars in the field of linguistic typology. All of these articles discuss a topic that is prominent in Anna's work, whose journal articles and monographs on the passive, on word order, and on the category of person are standard literature in these respective fields. Mindful of Anna's last monograph, Person, the majority of the contributions in this volume discuss free and bound person forms, argument indexing, reference tracking systems, impersonals, and related issues, such as suppletion and incompleteness in person paradigms, the origin of referential systems, dependent versus independent marking, and referential hierarchies. Other topics are grammatical alignment, grammatical voice, ditransitives, and word order. Most of the contributions take a broad, typological perspective. Others give a more in depth treatment, based on data from a specific language, notably Spanish, Russian, Mandinka, and Mohawk. The book contains a complete bibliography of Anna Siewierska's linguistic production.

This edited volume brings together fourteen original contributions to the on-going debate about what is possible in contact-induced language change. The authors present a number of new vistas on language contact which represent new developments in the field. In the first part of the volume, the focus is on methodology and theory. Thomas Stolz defines the study of Romancisation processes as a very promising laboratory for language-contact oriented research and theoretical work based thereon. The reader is informed about the large scale projects on loanword typology in the contribution by Martin Haspelmath and on contact-induced grammatical change conducted by Jeanette Sakel and Yaron Matras. Christel Stolz reviews processes of gender-assignment to loan nouns in German and German-based varieties. The typology of loan verbs is the topic of the contribution by Soren Wichmann and Jan Wohlgemuth. In the articles by Wolfgang Wildgen and Klaus Zimmermann, two radically new approaches to the theory of language contact are put forward: a dynamic model and a constructivism-based theory, respectively. The second part of the volume is dedicated to more empirically oriented studies which look into language-contact constellations with a Romance donor language and a non-European recipient language. Spanish-Amerindian (Guarani, Otomi, Quichua) contacts are investigated in the comparative study by Dik Bakker, Jorge Gomez-Rendon and Ewald Hekking. Peter Bakker and Robert A. Papen discuss the influence exerted by French on the indigenous languages ofCanada. The extent of the Portuguese impact on the Amazonian language Kulina is studied by Stefan Dienst. John Holm looks at the validity of the hypothesis that bound morphology normally falls victim to Creolization processes and draws his evidence mainly from Portuguese-based Creoles. For Austronesia, borrowings and calques from French still are an understudied phenomenon. Claire Moyse-Faurie's contribution to this topic is thus a pioneer's work. Similarly, Francoise Rose and Odile Renault-Lescure provide us with fresh data on language contact in French Guiana. The final article of this collection by Mauro Tosco demonstrates that the Italianization of languages of the former Italian colonies in East Africa is only weak. This volume provides the reader with new insights on all levels of language-contact related studies. The volume addresses especially a readership that has a strong interest in language contact in general and its repercussions on the phonology, grammar and lexicon of the recipient languages. Experts of Romance language contact, and specialists of Amerindian languages, Afro-Asiatic languages, Austronesian languages and Pidgins and Creoles will find the volume highly valuable.

Literally hundreds of languages world-wide have experienced direct or indirect Hispanisation during the heyday of the Spanish colonial empire. The number of languages which continue to borrow from Spanish on a daily basis is considerable especially in Latin America. This volume gives the reader a better idea of the range of contact constellations in which Spanish functions as the donor language. Moreover, the contributions to this collection of articles demonstrate that it is not only possible to compare the contact-induced processes in the (Hispanised) languages of Austronesia and the Americas. It is emphasized that one can draw far-reaching conclusions from the presented borrowing facts for the theory of language contact in general. The volume is divided into two sections according to geographical principles: section I is devoted to contacts of Spanish in Latin America. Two contributions look at the Hispanisation of varieties of Nahuatl (Classical Nahuatl studied by Anne Jensen and modern varieties studied by Jose Antonio Flores Farfan). Martina Schrader-Kniffki discusses Spanish-Zapotec contacts and their relations to language mixing and purism. Luciano Giannelli and Raoul Zamponi address the issue of Hispanisms in Kuna, a language from Panama. For South America, Jorge Gomez-Rendon discusses whether or not there are constraints on lexical borrowing from Spanish into Imbabura Quichua. Suzanne Dikker studies the intertwined language Media Lengua in her attempt at redefining the notion of relexification. Section II focuses on the impact of Spanish on the languages of Austronesia and South-East Asia. Steven Roger Fischer shows that the heavy Hispanisation of Rapanui is currently being reverted. Steve Pagel compares Hispanisation processes and their results in the Mariana Islands and on Rapa Nui. The second comparative study is by Patrick O. Steinkruger who reviews a variety of Philippinian languages and their degrees of Hispanisation. The attitudes of native speakers of Chamorro as to Hispanisms is the topic of the study by Rosa Salas Palomo and Thomas Stolz. The volume is especially interesting for students of language contact. But also scholars with a background in Romance linguistics or Hispanic philology will find the assembled articles very useful, as well as Austronesianists and Amerindianists.