Syntax and Prosody in Language Contact and Shift

It is true that scholars concentrate on a certain linguistic level in order to reach the greatest depth in their research. But this general stance should not lead to a complete neglect of other levels. When considering a multi-level phenomenon such as language contact and shift, concentration on a single linguistic level can have the unintended and unfortunate consequence of missing linguistically sig-nificant generalisations. This is especially true of the main division of linguistic research into a phonological and a grammatical camp, where syntacticians miss phonological generalisations and phonologists syntactic ones. In the present pa-per the interrelationship of syntax and prosody is investigated with a view to ex-plaining how and why certain transfer structures from Irish became established in Irish English. In this context, the consideration of prosody can be helpful in explaining the precise form of transfer structures in the target variety, here ver-nacular Irish English. The data for the investigation will consider well-known features of this variety, such as unbound reflexives, non-standard comparatives and tag questions. Furthermore, the paper points out that, taking prosodic pat-terns into account, can help in extrapolating from individual transfer to the com-munity-wide establishment of transfer structures. In sum, prosody is an essential element in any holistic account of language contact and shift. 1