Romanicisation world-wide: The impact of French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish on the autochthonous languages of Africa, the Americas, Asia and Austronesia (with special focus on Hispanicisation)

Sociolinguistics and language contact studies have been since the work of Labov and Bickerton, to name just two major theoretical figures in the two fields, in search for adequate theoretical models. Due to the dominance of Chomskian linguistics in the 70s and 80s both made compromises with the logical machinery underlying Chomsky’s proposals: Labov designed since 1969 grammars with variable rules more or less adapted to current generative models (e.g., the standard model of Chomsky, 1965). This led to major difficulties. First the probabilistic format responding to the application of statistics in sociolinguistics contradicted major postulates (in Chomsky programmatic booklet: Syntactic Structures), secondly the sociological claims and hypotheses of Labov’s sociolinguistics were quickly overridden by the consideration of inner linguistic complexities (e.g., phonological and morphological contexts of rule application). This was partially due to the fore-grounding of grammatical rules and grammar in sociolinguistic studies. In his later work Labov gave up the issue of a sociolect-(variation-) grammar and returned to more classical issues of urban dialectology and language change. More mathematically minded sociolinguists like David Sankoff pursued the issue but had little impact on the further development (cf. my own publications on variable rules and linguistic variation in Wildgen, 1977a, b; 1994b). Bickerton started from analyses in Creole linguistics (cf. Bickerton 1975) and formulated his bioprogram hypothesis as an explanation of universal features of Atlantic and Pacific Creoles. In analogy to Chomsky’s UG (Universal Grammar) he postulated a universal species-specific capacity to create new grammars in situations of language loss or in case