--- title: "Vernacular universals and language contacts: Evidence from" description: "This item is a book review, not an empirical study. 4 references. Among them: 187." authors: ["Walcir Cardoso"] year: 2009 venue: "Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 12" source: "https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/CJAL/article/view/19940" licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cardoso-2009-vernacular-universals-language-contacts-evidence/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cardoso-2009-vernacular-universals-language-contacts-evidence/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2009/) / Vernacular universals and language contacts: Evidence from varieties of English and beyond # Vernacular universals and language contacts: Evidence from varieties of English and beyond **Authors:** Walcir Cardoso · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** [Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 12](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/canadian-journal-of-applied-linguistics/) ([Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/canadian-journal-of-applied-linguistics/2009/)) · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/CJAL/article/view/19940) · [PDF](https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/CJAL/article/download/19940/21819) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1560767919) **Citations:** 187 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) ## Summary This item is a book review, not an empirical study. Walcir Cardoso evaluates an edited volume by Filppula, Klemola and Paulasto (Routledge, 2009), abbreviated VULC, which originated in a 2006 World Englishes symposium hosted by the University of Joensuu at its Mekrijärvi research station in Finland. The book asks two questions: how contact-induced change relates to vernacular universals (VUs), meaning features that recur across non-standard varieties, and whether the two can be told apart. Its fifteen chapters move from theory to case studies to methodological comparison. The contributors fall into three groups: - Some attribute shared non-standard features to universality (Chambers, Schreier, Tagliamonte). - Others stress cross-dialectal influence (Britain & Fox, Mufwene). - A third group doubts that the dichotomy holds at all (Trudgill, Thomason). Cardoso concludes that most chapters favour cross-dialectal influence combined with social and learnability factors. He singles out Thomason's diagnostic criteria for attributing a change to contact. He criticises the bias toward morphosyntax, the English-only scope and the messy references, but still recommends the book as the entry point to the topic. No dataset, model or treebank is involved. ## Key points - The review appeared in Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 12 (2009). The book has vi + 385 pages: an introduction plus fifteen chapters in four parts. - Only two chapters take a phonological perspective (Schreier; Britain & Fox). The rest focus mainly on morphosyntax. - Thomason (chapter 15) offers four criteria for estimating whether contact, rather than VUs, shaped a given change. She also argues that overlapping causes (VUs, cross-dialectal influence, ease of learning) make a strict split hard to establish empirically. - Other factors raised across chapters include high vs. low contact language status (Trudgill), productive and perceptual ease, gender and age. - The criticisms are that other languages appear only as illustrations (e.g., Thomason, Odlin), and that the per-chapter reference lists overlap heavily (Chambers 2004 appears almost everywhere) and are formatted inconsistently. The reviewer suggests one unified bibliography. ## Interesting ideas - An observed feature may come from several overlapping causes at once, so forcing a single explanation can be misleading. - Before claiming that a change has a particular source, apply an explicit checklist of evidential criteria, as in Thomason's chapter. - Features that recur across many non-standard varieties are systematic rather than random noise. - Check whether evidence is spread evenly across levels of grammar before generalising, since conclusions drawn mostly from morphosyntax may not carry over to phonology. - Merging scattered, duplicated reference lists into a single uniform store removes overlap and formatting drift. ## For Mova How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests: - **I1** (learn): when diagnosing disagreements between witness parsers or deriving repair rules, allow several co-occurring causes (dialect, tokenization, true ambiguity) instead of assigning one label per error. - **I2** (tree): during UD dialect conversion, require explicit tests before deciding whether a parse divergence reflects an annotation convention or a genuine parser mistake. - **I3** (tokens): let the tagger and lemmatizer treat recurring vernacular patterns as regular variants with their own analyses, rather than as errors to normalise away. - **I4** (answer): audit test suites for balanced coverage across phenomena so that a high score in one area is not read as general competence. - **I5** (world): compile knowledge from WordNet, FrameNet and Wikidata into one deduplicated, uniformly formatted layer instead of keeping per-source copies. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* ## Institutions - [Concordia University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/concordia-university/) — University, Montreal, Canada · 9 works · 673 citations 📚 Shelves (2): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 16,039 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 15,891 works 🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 2,263 works ## Cite Cite as: Walcir Cardoso. 2009. Vernacular universals and language contacts: Evidence from varieties of English and beyond. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 12. The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @article{cardoso2009vernacular, title = {{Vernacular universals and language contacts: Evidence from varieties of English and beyond}}, author = {Walcir Cardoso}, journal = {Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 12}, year = {2009}, url = {https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/CJAL/article/view/19940} } ``` - [← previous Discriminative Corpus Weight Estimation for Machine Translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/matsoukas-2009-discriminative-corpus-weight-estimation-machine/) - [next → Application-driven Statistical Paraphrase Generation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zhao-2009-application-driven-statistical-paraphrase-generation/) - [↑ back to papers of 2009](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2009/) ## References 4 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Chambers, J. K. (2003). Sociolinguistic theory: linguistic variation and its social implications. Oxford: Blackwell. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Chambers%2C+J%2E+K%2E+%282003%29%2E+Sociolinguistic+theory%3A+linguistic+variation+and+its+social+implications%2E+Oxford%3A+Blackwell%2E) 2. Chambers, J. K. (2004). Dynamic typology and vernacular universals (pp. 127-145). In B. Kortmann (Ed.), Dialectology meets Typology. Berlin: Mouton. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Chambers%2C+J%2E+K%2E+%282004%29%2E+Dynamic+typology+and+vernacular+universals+%28pp%2E+127%2D145%29%2E+In+B%2E+Kortmann+%28Ed%2E%29%2C+Dialectology+meets+Typology%2E+Berlin%3A+Mouton%2E) 3. Ross, M. D. (1996). Contact-induced change and the comparative method: cases from Papua New Guinea (pp. 180-217). In M. Durie & M. Ross (Eds.), The Comparative Method Reviewed. New York: Oxford University Press. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ross%2C+M%2E+D%2E+%281996%29%2E+Contact%2Dinduced+change+and+the+comparative+method%3A+cases+from+Papua+New+Guinea+%28pp%2E+180%2D217%29%2E+In+M%2E+Durie+%26+M%2E+Ross+%28Eds%2E%29%2C+The+Comparative+Method+Reviewed%2E+New+York%3A+Oxford+Univer) 4. Thomason, S. G. (2001). Language contact. Edinburgh University Press. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Thomason%2C+S%2E+G%2E+%282001%29%2E+Language+contact%2E+Edinburgh+University+Press%2E) *Updated 29 October 2026*