Structural priming, levels of awareness, and agency in contact-induced language change

Abstract

This paper focuses on structural priming, levels of awareness, and agency in contact-induced language change, bringing insights from historical and anthropological linguistics together with psycholinguistic, processing-based approaches. We begin with a discussion of the relation between levels of awareness and agency in the linguistic literature, focusing on the work of Von Humboldt, Silverstein, Van Coetsem, and Trudgill. Then we turn to the psycholinguistic notion of structural priming, aiming to show that cross-linguistic structural priming is a plausible mechanism driving contact-induced language change, and explore the properties of priming and its relation to the levels of awareness discussion in the linguistic literature. We end with suggestions for future research to further elucidate the relation between structural priming, levels of awareness, and agency in contact-induced language change.