ABSTRACT
A relatively recent development in linguistics is the emergence of the so-called usage-based approach, which seeks the explanation of people’s linguistic knowledge in the way human brains process linguistic experience. This makes this approach quite different from generative and structuralist accounts of linguistic knowledge, but closely aligned with psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic theories. Some work using this approach has emerged in contact linguistics, and the chapter summarizes the main findings. It also identifies a number of issues that will likely inspire further work in the near future, including work on questions not raised much in other approaches.
