Contact Talk: The discursive organization of contact and boundaries

This is an edited volume that I am co-editing with my colleagues Zane Goebel and Howard Manns in Australia. Together, we are writing two introductory chapters, and I also have a research chapter in the book. We have signed a contract with Routledge for delivery of final manuscript in April 2019.

This book documents and analyzes contact talk and the social processes to which it is linked. Within the reality of language mixing and communication across named languages (a reality that sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists are now firmly convinced is the usual state of affairs), the chapters in this book chronicle the variety of semiotic repertoires that speakers make use of to enregister the linguistic and social boundaries that form the necessary conditions for contact phenomena to come into focus. Taking a discursive semiotic approach, these studies then move beyond the discursive organization of social and linguistic boundaries to show how contact talk enables the reconfiguration of the semiotic features of identity talk and in some cases facilitates the emergence of new semiotic repertoires. This focus on the discursive organization of contact talk also makes possible a reflexive examination of our own scholarly discourse and of how we as linguists and anthropologists talk about the contact and boundary phenomena we seek to understand.