Semantic classes other than events may be predicated of a referent; this is nonprototypical predication. The primary nonprototypical predication types are object predication, property predication, predicational location, and predicational possession. In addition, clauses may express different information packaging than topic--comment (= referent--predication) packaging. The two main types of nonpredicational information packaging with nonprototypical predication are equational -- a subtype of identificational and found with object concepts -- and presentational -- a subtype of thetic and found especially with location and possession clauses. Strategies for all types of predication are recruited from action predication, predicational location, and possibly equational clause constructions; however, predicational possession has not been surveyed crosslinguistically. Presentational location and possession constructions employ a range of strategies ranging from recruitment of a verb form to expressing the location or possession itself as a verbal form.

Several kinds of relations between events often have distinct complex sentence constructions, in particular those involving degree, causation, factivity (epistemic stance), or a combination of these. Comparative and equative constructions compare degrees of a property predicated of two different referents. The strategy chosen depends on the strategy used for temporal complex sentences, at least for comparative constructions. Conditional constructions express a causal relation (content, epistemic, or speech act), but, unlike causal relations, also express a nonfactive (neutral or negative) epistemic stance toward the events. Past tense constructions are often recruited to express nonfactivity. Concessive constructions presuppose a causal relation that is unexpectedly violated; concessive conditional constructions are the nonfactive counterparts. Strategies use conjunctions recruited from conditionals or expressions of obstinacy, focus marking, and remarkable co-occurrence. Concessive conditionals use a scalar, alternative, or universal strategy to conceptualize the concessive conditional relation. Other relations, such as the comparative conditional, may also be conventionalized.

Relative clause constructions express an event that functions as a modifier of a referent. As such, relative clause constructions share a participant with the matrix clause -- namely, the referent that they modify. Like other complex sentence constructions, relative clause constructions may be balanced or deranked. The primary differences in strategy involve the expression of the shared participant. The most common strategy is the externally headed strategy: the referent is expressed as a common noun phrase in the matrix clause, and in reduced or zero form in the relative clause. A small minority of languages use strategies that appear to form a continuum from internally headed to correlative to adjoined constructions. Events that function to modify a referent that is a very peripheral participant in the relative clause events form noun-modifying clause constructions; these constructions sometimes use a relative clause strategy. Relative clause construction strategies also systematically vary with respect to the semantic role of the referents in the relative clause event, which are ranked by the Accessibility Hierarchy. Relative clauses may have an anaphoric or indefinite head.

A predication prototypically predicates an event. Events have multiple participants in their semantic frame. Some participants are more central than others. The information packaging of event participants construes certain participants as core arguments and others as oblique arguments. Transitivity constructions are defined in terms of the prototypical expression of central participants as core argument phrases. ‘Subject’ and ‘object’ are defined crosslinguistically in terms of degree of topicality (salience) and force dynamics (subject acting on object). Basic argument encoding strategies are flagging, indexation, and word order. An exemplar approach to defining transitive constructions is taken, using the agentive change of state event of breaking as the exemplar event, following Haspelmath. Subject generally precedes verb and object in word order. Variation in alignment is based on the system of transitive and intransitive constructions, in terms of which core argument of the transitive construction the intransitive argument aligns with, including the rare case where the core arguments of intransitive constructions are split between transitive subject and object.

Speech act constructions bear a close functional relationship to modality and polarity, and also to the information packaging of clauses (Chapters 10–11). Declaratives are associated with the modal category of polarity: declaratives assert or deny the truth of a proposition. Interrogatives (questions, and also responses) are associated with identificational packaging: the information asked about is the focus. They are also associated with epistemic modality: they involve degrees of (un)certainty about an event. Imperative--hortative speech acts are associated with deontic modality: both express a future event that is being at least considered by an agent. Exclamations are associated with the mirative (expression of surprise), which in turn is associated with thetic information packaging. These functional relations between speech act, modality, and clausal information packaging are manifested in the sharing of morphosyntactic strategies between the related categories.

Complement clause constructions express an event that functions as a participant in another event -- expressed as the complement and the complement-taking predicate (CTP), respectively. Complement clause constructions often differ depending on the type of CTP, and sometimes by the factivity (epistemic stance) of the complement event. Semantic types of CTPs form a hierarchy, the Binding Hierarchy, in terms of whether their complement will be expressed by a balanced or deranked dependent clause construction. Balanced complement clause constructions may originate in independent clauses, particularly direct speech complements, and spread down the Binding Hierarchy; some deranked complement clauses originate in purpose adverbial clause constructions. Complement clauses may share participants with the CTP event; this is inherent to CTP meaning at the lower end of the Binding Hierarchy, which includes TAMP forms. The argument structure constructions associated with complement clause constructions may reflect sharing of participants through partially or fully merged argument structure strategies, or via logophoric constructions.

Reference can be done by words defined by type (common nouns), token or individual (proper nouns), or contextually (pronouns). Reference in these three ways is almost always to individuals. The animacy of common noun categories is often relevant for grammatical behavior. Personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns are defined by properties of the speech act context. Contextual expressions may stand alone for reference or function as modifiers of nouns, i.e. attributives or articles. Articles are defined by two subtle contextual properties, referent status and identifiability. Referent status involves accessibility in discourse or shared knowledge, and, for non-accessible referents, whether they are real or not. Identifiability pertains to whether the referent’s identity is known, or is only identifiable by type. Distribution of pronoun/article uses can be represented as semantic maps on a crosslinguistic conceptual space of functions. Tracking of a referent in discourse is grammatically encoded as often as referent accessibility or identifiability. Finally, reference to a type (generic) reference is possible; strategies are typically recruited from reference to a token.

Morphosyntax describes the form and function of grammatical constructions in the world’s languages. The form of constructions includes both syntactic structure and relevant morphology. The function of constructions includes both information content (semantics) and information packaging of the content. The same semantic content can be packaged in different ways. The approach in this textbook is crosslinguistic and empirical: we compare grammatical constructions across languages and describe patterns of variation, universals constraining variation, and diachronic processes that give rise to the variation. Crosslinguistic comparison is done using crosslinguistically valid concepts (comparative concepts). Crosslinguistic constructions are defined as all grammatical forms expressing a particular function. Strategies are crosslinguistically defined formal means for expressing a function. The analysis of grammatical structure in a particular language is the categorization of constructions in the language by their form and their function. Language-particular analysis of constructions and crosslinguistic analysis of constructions can be united via the function of the construction.

Psycholinguists often use experimental tasks of word recognition as a window onto understanding how we process words. Here, we review results with the lexical decision task that show sensitivity to morphological structure in that word recognition task. We then highlight the limitations of assuming that evidence of morphological processing is best interpreted as evidence that lexical entries are decomposed into constituent morphemes. Further, when target words follow primes formed from the same stem and presented at brief durations so as to tap into early processing in the lexical decision task, we argue that finding no difference between semantically transparent and opaque pairs in individual priming experiments is not sufficient to conclude that early analysis proceeds without regard to a word’s semantic properties. We familiarize the reader with the intricacies of the priming methodology for the lexical decision task and the claim that target recognition benefits from structural priming based on repetition of a stem morpheme in prime and target in . Inwe then discuss how outcomes change with processing time for the prime and its implication for the claim that when processing time for the prime is curtailed, morphological processing is insensitive to semantics. We argue instead that morphological priming cannot be attributed solely to the letter sequence that constitutes the stem in part because stem repetition accounts downplay the role of differences and similarities of whole-word targets with words other than just its prime. Inwe provide evidence that challenges an account of early morphological processing based on the form but not the semantic consequences of shared morphology between prime and target. In , we summarize meta-analytic results with funnel plots to ascertain the reliability of early effects of semantic similarity among morphological relatives in lexical decision, thus refuting support for a decomposition account that is semantically blind and based on stem form. Finally, in , we touch upon the power of tuning form-with-semantics models across languages and writing systems that differ with respect to their morphological structure and neighborhood density measures by emphasizing patterning distributed across words rather than local decomposition into morphemes. As an alternative throughout, we align results with models in which analysis of wordform and meaning are interdependent, rather than two independent and sequential processes, thus discounting the privileged role reserved for the stem.

There is a correlation between the phonological shape of a word and the word’s probability in use. Less probable words tend to be longer and more probable words shorter (see Piantadosi et al. , Zipf ). This has been attributed to the lexicon evolving for efficient communication (Zipf ). To identify less probable words, listeners need more information from the segments in the phonological word itself. In this case, longer lengths for less probable words mean a greater amount of information to be used in word identification. However, this does not take into account how listeners actually process words. Research in spoken word recognition has shown that words are processed incrementally and some segments may in fact be more informative (Allopenna et al. , Luce and Pisoni , van Son and Pols , Weber and Scharenborg ). Here, we use corpus data from American English to provide evidence that less probable words contain more informative segments. We also show that the distribution of segmental information is correlated with the word’s probability and that less probable words contain more of their total information in the early segments. We discuss these findings and possible evolutionary avenues for language to reach this state. This work provides support for the idea that the words in the lexicon evolve under pressure for efficient communication.