This article discusses the variation between masculine and neuter anaphoric pronouns in Afrikaans, especially in reference to inanimate entities such as objects, abstracts, collectives, and masses. The fact that books, governments, and wine can be referred to as both hy ‘he’ and dit ‘it’ is well known, but it is surprising given what is known about pronominal gender systems. Such systems are usually organized according to clear semantic principles, yielding predictable choices. The article summarizes the available literature, provides new data from the NWU-Kommentaarkorpus, and presents an approach that helps to make sense of the synchronic variation and, to some extent, the diachronic developments.

This article examines Afrikaans V1-constructions with the verb laat ‘let’ and compares them with similar constructions in Dutch. I refer to these as pseudo-let imperatives (or PLI-constructions). Although PLI-constructions have the same form as some let-imperatives in both languages, they no longer function as commands and lack the directive force typically associated with imperatives. Instead, PLI-constructions are used to express the speaker’s perspective on a certain event or action. Drawing on grammaticalization criteria used by Van Craenenbroeck & Van Koppen (2015, 2017) in their work on perception and causative verbs in imperative(-like) constructions in Dutch, this article argues that PLI-laat/laten has undergone grammaticalization in both Afrikaans and Dutch. Additionally, I demonstrate that the Afrikaans PLI-laat has grammaticalized further than its Dutch counterpart. I propose that Afrikaans’ contact with a variety of other languages throughout its history may have accelerated the grammaticalization of laat relative to its Dutch counterpart, resulting in the observed differences in the grammaticalization of PLI-laat/laten constructions.

This article concerns the so-called Infinitivus Pro Participio (IPP) effect – in terms of which what appears to be an infinitive surfaces where a selected past participle is expected – as it manifests in modern Afrikaans. Prior research has highlighted the apparent optionality of this effect, leading to conflicting conclusions regarding the continued existence of a productive IPP-effect in contemporary Afrikaans. Here we draw on recent corpus- and questionnaire-based investigations to consider the optionality of the IPP-effect in Afrikaans in more empirical detail, with the objective of establishing (i) the status of the IPP in Afrikaans and (ii) how it differs from the IPP in Dutch. The article’s second objective is to consider the role of language contact in shaping the IPP-effect as it is currently attested in (varieties of) Afrikaans.*

Using a priming picture-description, a digital recall and a non-word repetition task, this study tested 18 four- to six-year-old Mandarin-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and 25 age-matched typically developing (TD) children to examine the performance of children with DLD in producing grammatical aspect and the links of their performance to verbal working memory (VWM). Results indicated that children with DLD performed worse in producing individual aspect markers than TD children, showing better performance on the preverbal zai- than on the post-verbal markers. They showed better performance in producing imperfective than perfective aspect. Heterogeneous performance was noted in aspectual production within the DLD group, but only performance on -guo and perfective aspect significantly correlated with their VWM. Findings highlight the importance of positional and aspectual distinctions in assessment and intervention for Mandarin-speaking children with DLD, and they provide language-specific evidence for cross-linguistic asymmetries in aspect acquisition in language disorders.

Phonotactic patterns are commonly constrained by morphology. In English, for example, non-homorganic nasal–stop sequences are disallowed within morphemes but may occur across morpheme boundaries. This article demonstrates that similar effects of morphology on phonotactics can be found with non-concatenative morphology, even though they involve morphological domains that are more difficult to identify on the surface. Specifically, vowel alternation in a class of Egyptian Arabic verbs is affected by gradient phonotactic restrictions on consonant–vowel co-occurrence. However, such restrictions are only active in the imperfective form (e.g., [-rgaʕ] ‘return.ipfv’), not the perfective (e.g., [rigiʕ] ‘return.pfv’). Using a lexicon study and a wug test, I show that this pattern is in fact bounded by morphological domains and is reliably generalised by speakers when deriving novel forms. I compare accounts of this effect that differ on whether they require abstract morphosyntactic representations and non-concatenative morphemes and discuss their implications.

San Sebastián del Monte Mixtec (henceforth SSM), also known as Tò’on Ndà’vi, is a language of the Mixtecan family, Otomanguean stock. SSM has lexical tones that are orthogonal to rearticulation on vowels. The aim of this production study is to examine both long modal and rearticulated vowels to gain insight into the SSM tonal system, contrastive voice quality, and any potential interactions between voice quality and f0. Rearticulated vowels are described as having a glottal gesture between two vowels of the same quality (V͡ˀV), while modal vowels have no such gesture (VV). To this end, we examined the phonetic realization of the lexical tones in long modal vowels in terms of f0. All tones are distinguished by f0; f0 patterns largely as expected given previously ascribed labels, with minor deviations. Secondly, the phasing and degree of glottalization in rearticulated vowels was measured using ‘strength of excitation’ (SoE); generally the glottal gesture was vowel medial with a dip in SoE at the beginning of the glottal gesture and a rise in SoE following the glottal gesture. However, there was a large degree of interspeaker variation in the production of rearticulated vowels. Additionally, lexical tone category was found to have an impact on the phasing and degree of glottal gesture in rearticulated vowels, and on voice quality in long modal vowels. This supports the idea that voice quality is an additional correlate of lexical tone in SSM.

An open question about cartography is whether one and the same functional head may iterate on the functional hierarchy. We demonstrate that the stackability of certain modals from the same semantic class in Mandarin offers clear evidence for such a possibility.

Jury selection in the US involves voir dire, an examination process wherein prospective jurors are questioned about their potential for fairness or bias. Such inquiries are hampered by social desirability pressures inhibiting admissions of bias. Analogous pressures hamper survey interviews, but since voir dire examinations are unscripted their study can reveal how desirability pressures are addressed through naturally occurring variations in question design. This article combines sequential and distributional analyses of >100 transcribed question-answer sequences targeting juror fairness/bias, and documents various tendencies and preferences in question design. Court officials focus on bias rather than fairness by default, and the predominant bias-targeting questions are mitigated through: (i) indirect references to bias, (ii) diffusion of responsibility for bias, and (iii) projecting bias as minimal or unlikely. The findings shed light on the social dynamics of jury selection and, more broadly, how question design practices are adapted for inquiry into sensitive subjects. (Questions, law, voir dire, juries, social desirability bias, conversation analysis)

Cadastral data reveal key information about the historical organization of cities but are often non-standardized due to diverse formats and human annotations, complicating large-scale analysis. We explore as a case study Venice’s urban history during the critical period from 1740 to 1808, capturing the transition following the fall of the ancient Republic and the Ancien Régime. This era’s complex cadastral data, marked by its volume and lack of uniform structure, presents unique challenges that our approach adeptly navigates, enabling us to generate spatial queries that bridge past and present urban landscapes. We present a text-to-programs framework that leverages large language models to process natural language queries as executable code for analyzing historical cadastral records. Our methodology implements two complementary techniques: a SQL agent for handling structured queries about specific cadastral information, and a coding agent for complex analytical operations requiring custom data manipulation. We propose a taxonomy that classifies historical research questions based on their complexity and analytical requirements, mapping them to the most appropriate technical approach. This framework is supported by an investigation into the execution consistency of the system, alongside a qualitative analysis of the answers it produces. By ensuring interpretability and minimizing hallucination through verifiable program outputs, we demonstrate the system’s effectiveness in reconstructing past population information, property features and spatiotemporal comparisons in Venice.

Prediction is a central feature of mature language comprehension, but little is known about how and when it develops. This study investigates whether lexical prediction emerges before seven using a novel, naturalistic cloze task. Five and six-year-old children listened to a storybook and occasionally guessed which word might come next. We selected 180 words from the story that were shown to be more or less predictable in a prior cloze norming task with adults. We found that children frequently guessed the correct word or provided an alternative that was semantically related to the target, demonstrating an ability to use the context to explicitly predict upcoming words. Six-year-olds were more accurate than 5-year-olds. These findings show prediction is present (but still improving) in early childhood, motivating future work on the role of prediction in children’s comprehension and learning. Finally, we demonstrate that it is feasible to collect cloze values from children.