http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 04 Feb 2016 IP address: 137.122.176.168 Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 15 (2), 2012, 247–254 C  Cambridge University Press 2011 doi:10.1017/S1366728911000502 AUTHORS’ RESPONSE What counts as (contact-induced) change SHANA POPLACK University of Ottawa LAUREN ZENTZ University of Arizona NATHALIE DION University of Ottawa We are most grateful to our commentators for their careful reading of our Keynote Article (henceforth KA) and their incisive observations on contact-induced change, and for the many challenging and thought-provoking issues they raise. We welcome the opportunity to respond to (some of) them, especially since, perhaps not surprisingly, these are symptomatic of the very issues in the field of contact lin- guistics that prompted us to write this KA in the first place. In this response paper, the following abbreviations are used to refer to the commentary authors: GAK = Georg A. Kaiser, ME = Martin Elsig, PM = Pieter Muysken, RO = Ricardo Otheguy, RTC = Rena Torres Cacoullos, YR = Yves Roberge. Full bibliographic details for the commentaries and the keynote article will be found in references at the end of this paper. Issues of method We are delighted with the commentators’ evaluation of our methodology as “masterly” (RO), a “milestone” (RTC), “outstanding” (GAK), of “tremendous usefulness” (YR), and displaying “extraordinary empirical accountability” (ME). All of them profess acceptance of our conclusion that convergence had not taken place, calling it “strongly warranted” (RO; ME; GAK), and based on “convincing evidence” (RO; GAK). But despite acknowledging the validity of our analysis, by way of rebuttal, several of them (i) offer examples of convergence occurring elsewhere, in the same construction (YR) or in the same relative clause context (PM), (ii) hypothesize that convergence COULD HAVE occurred here (PM, RO, YR), and (iii) theorize as to why it DID NOT (YR, PM). These observations betray the persuasion that conver- gence is such a foregone conclusion of language contact that its very absence requires explanation (theorizing, experimentation). The point of this KA was to try to undermine that preconceived notion by bringing objective measures to bear on the assessment. In the absence of such measures, the provenance of linguistic features in languages in contact must remain a matter of opinion, or, as RO puts it, conviction. We reiterate, along with GAK, Address for correspondence: Shana Poplack, 70 Laurier East, Suite 422, Ottawa, ON, Canada K1N 6N5 spoplack@uottawa.ca ME, RTC and Poplack and Levey (2010), that given the availability of synchronic data and accountable method- ology, the burden of proof rests with those who claim that convergence did occur. As we explain below, we see no sign of such proof in those commentaries on the KA. Convergence occurred elsewhere Characterizing relative clauses as a “vulnerable area for language contact”, PM lists four cases (in addition to the one we discuss in the KA) in which contact has been claimed to have an effect on some element within them. The subtext here is that if contact-induced change had occurred in Konkani, Turkish, and Southern Peruvian Quechua relative clauses, it should also have occurred in their Quebec French (QF) counterparts. But this does not follow. At the current state of our knowledge, we are very far from being able to identify a linguistic feature that can be predicted to change in all situations, contact or other, regardless of language pair, intensity of contact, socio-cultural situation, bilingual proficiency, and a host of other intervening variables. On the contrary, it is far more likely that change in one bilingual community will have no influence on another. Why should it? In fact, PM himself proceeds to express reservations about the evidence brought to bear on three of the four changes he discusses (echoing, apparently, the authors themselves). He concludes from the five examples that “the strength of the evidence for contact-induced language change in relative clauses varies”. It has been accepted in Konkani, according to him, but not (as a sole explanation) in the case of other languages. What makes the Konkani case admissible, and the others questionable? There is no difference in the QUALITY of the evidence, as far as we can tell. Absent the requisite demonstrations and proofs, in such cases, the reader is left to decide on faith alone whether or not convergence has occurred. While also accepting our analysis of the QF bare prepositions studied in the KA, YR maintains that convergence involving this same structure is “not only hypothetically possible but also attested” in other