Certain varieties in the Dutch and German language area distinguish two groups of words on the basis of different tonal melodies, a phenomenon called (Franconian) tonal accent. Despite extensive efforts, scholars are still far from reaching consensus on how this contrast may have developed. We show how both the accent genesis and distributional variation across dialects can be modeled by assuming that intrinsic durational differences between two sets of vowels formed the basis of the opposition. A key insight emerging from our scenario is that vowel-lengthening processes in open syllables must have been ongoing when apocope was completed, counter to the received view in Germanic historical phonology. Our analysis also addresses various broader issues concerning mechanisms of prosodic change, the interaction of sound changes, and the reliability of manuscript evidence.

Vowels vary systematically in F0 based on intrinsic properties of the vowel (e.g. height: VF0) and preceding obstruent (e.g. voicing: CF0). These patterns have been attested in most languages studied, raising the possibility that they stem from physiological sources. However, previous results show a range of variability in maximum effect size and duration. One explanation is that variation could be learned and increased to enhance phonological contrasts or suppressed for functional reasons (e.g. for tone languages). Alternatively, differences could be due to physiological factors such as laryngeal contrast type. We map out the distribution of intrinsic F0 effects across twenty languages, using large corpora of read speech, operationalizing CF0 as the difference between stop series that most closely approximate phonologically ‘voiced’ and ‘voiceless’ stops. We find that both VF0 and CF0 effects are present and are in the same direction in all languages examined, but languages vary greatly in effect size. While some of this variability may be due to phonological properties of the languages (e.g. tone), and some variability in CF0 may be due to the diverse phonetic realizations of ‘voicing’ across languages, much of this variability remains to be explained. We find that the CF0 effect is consistently at least as large as the VF0 effect and is more variable across languages, suggesting a possible explanation for the tendency for CF0 effects to lead to sound change much more often than VF0 effects do. While our results on variability in CF0 effects rely on the validity of ‘lumping’ together diverse phonetic realizations, those on the robustness of CF0 and VF0 and on the variability in VF0 hold regardless. These results motivate further investigation to deepen our understanding of intrinsic F0 effects, their crosslinguistic distribution, and their role as precursors to sound change.

Phrases in a number of syntactic contexts are required, in a variety of languages, to end in their heads. This article offers a unified theory of the relevant properties of these contexts and of why the phenomena in question, while widespread, are not completely universal. The theory makes use of proposals made independently in CONTIGUITY THEORY (Richards 2010, 2016): the relevant syntactic contexts are argued to involve a prosodically dependent element that must attach prosodically to the head of the phrase to its immediate left, and this attachment is often blocked if the phrase in question is not head-final.

The German gender system is known for its complexity, and there is a persistent misconception that it is largely arbitrary, and hence a challenge for the typology of gender systems. In response, we construct a database of more than 30,000 German nouns and show that a boosting tree model achieves a predictive success of 96%. Even more surprising, the model performs at 87% when trained on just the 100 most frequent nouns. We thus demonstrate that the complex German system fits into a typologically well-known scheme, being a combination of semantic and formal assignment principles. In addition to our success with the specific problem, we show the value of statistical modeling for typologists and reflect on what exactly we can learn from these techniques.

This article examines the English phrase-as-lemma (PAL) construction, which treats phrases syntactically as if they were words (e.g. a don't-mess-with-me driver). We argue that it is important to acknowledge and represent the construction's unique syntax directly rather than trying to shoehorn it into a more familiar grammatical category such as Noun or Adjective. PALs do not share the same distribution as other categories, and critically, their unique syntax influences their interpretation in predictable ways, which we demonstrate with survey data (N = 685). In particular, PALs convey the type of meaning associated with individual English words—lemmas—and thus evoke semantic frames that are presumed shared common knowledge. We further predict that the shared common knowledge and the use of quotes encourages PALs to be interpreted as witty and sarcastic. We show that a full analysis of PALs requires a family of constructions that includes certain conventional instances and productive subtypes. Because the construction's special form and function are intimately related, we predict that comparable PAL constructions should appear in other, unrelated languages. While the PAL construction is not terribly frequent in any language, the implications we draw are quite broad: our knowledge of language is rich and complex, providing subtle means for language users to indicate familiarity with listeners while conveying their message.

In many languages, finite-clause-embedding verbs vary in whether they allow WH-dependencies to cross from the embedded to the matrix clause—a phenomenon we call ‘bridge effects’. Why bridge effects exist has been the subject of much debate; we argue that contributing to the lack of consensus are the relatively small samples of verbs (from twelve to seventy-five for English) previously tested in the literature. To resolve this issue, we report two new data sets of bridge effects covering a nearly exhaustive sample of 640 English verbs. We use these data sets to address three research questions: Are there bridge effects at all? How well do leading theories of bridge effects explain observed variation across the full range of verbs? And are there new patterns emerging from our data that could lead to a better theory? We ultimately argue in favor of a multivariate approach, drawing upon existing ideas while including a novel morphosyntactic licensing component identified from our data. We also discuss implications for theories of locality and explore how context might affect the acceptability of WH-dependencies.

Cross-category harmony is one of the most well-known typological universals. It describes a trend of consistent alignment of different syntactic categories across phrases within a language. Explanations for this universal vary as to whether cognitive factors play a role or the tendency is instead due to mechanisms of language change alone. In this article we report a series of artificial language learning experiments that aim to test a hypothesized link between cognition and cross-category harmony. As with the typological tendency itself, we find mixed evidence for harmony across different types of phrases. Specifically, learners are biased in favor of consistent alignment of the verb in the verb phrase and the adposition in the adpositional phrase. However, the bias for consistent alignment of the verb in the verb phrase and the adjective in the noun phrase depends on the semantic similarity between adjectives and verbs. When adjectives are active and therefore more verb-like (e.g. broken), we find harmony; when they are stative and therefore less verb-like (e.g. blue), we do not. These results suggest that the bias for cross-category harmony is not purely based on the syntactic notions of head and dependent, but reflects the interaction between a general cognitive bias favoring consistent order and cross-category similarity.

This study considers how lexical frequency effects and collocations help shape a case of language change in progress. The case of change involves the sentential negative markers point and pas in Acadian French. While point has been lost from most contemporary spoken varieties of French, it has been retained in conservative varieties of Acadian French. Quantitative analyses of one such variety show that point is replacing the pas variant, with the youngest speakers making almost exclusive use of point. Furthermore, the analysis shows how lexical frequency effects and collocations help us understand the evolution of constraints operating on the variable.

The organization of taking turns to talk is fundamental to conversation, as well as to other speech-exchange systems. A model for the turn-taking organization for conversation is proposed, and is examined for its compatibility with a list of grossly observable facts about conversation. The results of the examination suggest that, at least, a model for turn-taking in conversation will be characterized as locally managed, party-administered, interactionally controlled, and sensitive to recipient design. Several general consequences of the model are explicated, and contrasts are sketched with turn-taking organizations for other speech-exchange systems.

Transitivity involves a number of components, only one of which is the presence of an object of the verb. These components are all concerned with the effectiveness with which an action takes place, e.g., the punctuality and telicity of the verb, the conscious activity of the agent, and the referentiality and degree of affectedness of the object. These components co-vary with one another in language after language, which suggests that Transitivity is a central property of language use. The grammatical and semantic prominence of Transitivity is shown to derive from its characteristic discourse function: high Transitivity is correlated with foregrounding, and low Transitivity with backgrounding.

The publication of ‘A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation’ by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson in Language in 1974 marked the beginning of what was to be a major shift in the way social interaction was to be conceived of and how it was to be studied across the social sciences and linguistics. Widely regarded as the foundational paper of CONVERSATION ANALYSIS (CA), it remains the most cited article in Language. While the authors had published CA studies previously (for example, Sacks 1967, 1972, 1973, Schegloff 1968, Jefferson 1972, 1973, 1974, Schegloff & Sacks 1973), ‘A simplest systematics’ was to bring this new approach to a different and, as it turned out, a more receptive audience in linguistics. At its heart the paper demonstrated both THAT routine interaction or ‘conversation’ was highly organized and locally managed and HOW this could be studied systematically and in detail across forms of interaction and interactional contexts. Initiating a new research direction within an established field is difficult enough, but this achievement is made even more impressive coming from a group of sociologists working in connection with Harold Garfinkel's ETHNOMETHODOLOGY (EM; see Garfinkel 1967), who were at the time finding it difficult to publish in their own discipline (Watson 1994).

The 1980 publication of ‘Transitivity in grammar and discourse’ by Paul Hopper and Sandra Thompson offered an alternative to the focus of much of the field at that time in both methodology and goals. Shared objectives were, of course, an understanding of what language is like and why. But views of just what this might mean and how to achieve it differed in several ways.

This article introduces a framework for systematically evaluating and comparing language rights across national contexts. We develop an index to assess the range of language freedoms, focusing on areas such as government services, education, healthcare, and media. The index compiles multiple variables into a single indicator, offering a concise measure of linguistic freedom. Our analysis shows that larger language communities typically enjoy more language rights, though this relationship is influenced by civil liberties. We argue that this index is both descriptive and normative, providing a tool for comparing language policy and advocating for linguistic justice.

This article introduces the Corpus of Language Discrimination in Interaction (CLDI)—an open-access corpus of transcribed video data, capturing moments where individuals are policed in some way for the language they are speaking or otherwise endorsing while sharing public space (e.g. in stores, restaurants, parking lots, and parks). Despite having thus far largely evaded systematic inquiry, such interactions are illustrative of a particular genre of language policymaking and enforcement that takes place in everyday social life, which the CLDI aims to document and make available for ongoing empirical examination. After presenting the corpus itself, as an initial exploration into some of the practices and actions observable in these data, we describe the recurrent use of Speak English directives, accompanied by nation-state declarative accounts like This is America. Detailed analysis of such turns, and the responses they receive, throws into relief ways that language policies and ideologies can be instantiated, ratified, challenged, defended, and otherwise negotiated in and through the particulars of interactants' joint conduct. We conclude by describing some future avenues for research, teaching, and public engagement on the basis of the CLDI.

We describe #FPGlobal, a digital platform for revitalizing Francoprovençal, a threatened and underdocumented language. This platform connects speakers and learners of Francoprovençal varieties in three European and two North American countries. Its community-developed, sociolinguistically informed, and electronically mediated approach fosters communication that is less likely to trigger essentialist language ideologies common to language endangerment contexts. Early uptake of the platform illustrates how it encourages language users to share multimodal responses to prompts, archives these responses, and develops corpora of speech and text with potential utility for both pedagogy and research. Our participatory framework increases cross-variety and intergenerational language use, introduces Francoprovençal into new domains, fosters a new generation of linguists, and offers data for investigating developing writing systems and variation patterns.

In this article, we present the Pangloss Collection, a collection of digital corpora of (mostly) endangered or underdocumented languages, developed in France since the 1990s in the context of a global realization of the considerable potential of digital technologies. The Pangloss Collection currently hosts 1,180 hours of audio and video recordings of about 200 languages. These materials are archived for the long-term using a suite of French public services for digital humanities. The Pangloss Collection can be freely accessed through a bilingual English-French website that was reshaped in 2021 to offer a general-audience interface mode and a professional interface mode (see https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/).

Podcasts are an immensely popular medium for news, documentaries, interviews, and many other genres. They are also an effective pedagogical tool, both as texts for learners to consume and as assignments for students to create. In this article we present findings from our students' experiences of creating podcasts in upper-level Language and Gender courses and reflect on the affordances and possible risks of this kind of project. We argue that podcasting projects, which center student learning and produce accessible, public-facing scholarship, can also provide a means of resisting injustice in linguistics, in the academy, and in the wider community.