The goal of this article is to analyze the semantic contribution of evaluative adverbs (EAs) such as unfortunately in several languages of the Romance family, namely French, Catalan, and Spanish. Following Bonami and Godard (2008), we propose to analyze EAs as items that convey projective meaning in order to explain their peculiar semantic behavior (they cannot be directly denied, do not change the truth conditions of the proposition they evaluate, and are not factive) and their unacceptability in negative assertions. Unlike what has been claimed for many other languages, French allows EAs in questions, and we show that Catalan and Spanish do too, as long as some conditions are met. We propose an account that derives their interpretation in both assertions and questions: integrated French EAs take the proposition to their right, and if they appear in a WH-question, their interpretation is similar to that of unconditionals. In contrast, nonintegrated EAs in Catalan and Spanish have scope over a set of propositions, and are acceptable in questions only if the speaker is biased toward one of the propositions in the set denoted by the question. The acceptability of EAs in such questions, rejected by previous literature, is confirmed by an experimental study.

An analysis of antecedent mismatch effects under ellipsis is proposed to explain why some cases of verb phrase ellipsis exhibit a sizeable penalty when the elided target is not structurally matched to its antecedent, while other cases show little or no penalty at all. The proposal attributes the penalty in the former case to an information-structural constraint governing contrastive topics, and it is argued that previous accounts have misattributed that penalty to a licensing constraint on ellipsis. Results from four experiments (three off-line acceptability, one on-line self-paced reading) confirm that the relative size of the mismatch penalty can be reliably predicted based on the information structure of the clause containing the ellipsis and that acceptability differences associated with information structure are observable even in the absence of ellipsis.

In the present study we investigate the relevance of the concept of underspecified inflection markers for the processing of language in the human brain. Underspecification is recognized as the main source of syncretism in many current morphological theories. However, relatively little is known about its cognitive status. In underspecification-based theories, a competition among morphological exponents arises systematically. In order to win such a competition, an inflection marker has to meet two requirements: compatibility and specificity. If underspecification is real, these two principles should also be an inherent part of the language processing system. One should therefore be able to observe separable effects for the violation of each of the criteria. We used the event-related potential (ERP) violation paradigm to test this hypothesis in the domain of strong adjective inflection in German. We expected differences in brain potentials between two incorrect conditions whenever they represented different types of violation (of compatibility and specificity). Our findings strongly support underspecification: an ERP-component related to morphosyntactic integration (viz. left anterior negativity; LAN) was modulated by violations of specificity versus compatibility. Furthermore, the neurophysiological evidence helps to distinguish between two kinds of morphological underspecification that have been proposed: it argues for maximal rather than minimal underspecification. Finally, the observed brain responses indicate increased processing demands for highly specific markers, which suggests that LAN effects may be sensitive not only to morphosyntactic violations but also to the degree of processing effort.

Evidence from main and lesser-known Romance languages indicates that the morphosyntactic properties of existential pivots correlate with semantic and pragmatic properties of noun phrases that count toward subjecthood to different degrees crosslinguistically. While fully supporting Beaver and colleagues’ (2005) theory of the definiteness effects, the findings of this research also suggest that the effects cannot be fully explained in a nonconstructional way.

Lexical tone melodies of words and word strings in Dogon languages are overridden by syntactically conditioned word-level or broader tone overlays. In Ben Tey and other Dogon languages, certain NP-internal elements—possessors, adjectives, relative clauses, demonstratives—are controllers, imposing overlays such as {L} and {HL} on adjacent words or word strings (the targets). Other elements (nonsingular quantifiers, discourse-functional morphemes) do not control overlays. The semantic generalization is that reference restrictors are controllers, while non-reference restrictors are not. Tonosyntactic processes have access to input stem-class categories and semantic/pragmatic groupings thereof, input phonological features (tone of the adjacent edge of the controllers), prosodic weight of the target, and, with possible minor exceptions, linear adjacency. Such operations can only be accounted for in a model of grammar with an enriched syntax-phonology interface.

Crosslinguistically, inflectional morphology exhibits a spectacular range of complexity in both the structure of individual words and the organization of systems that words participate in. We distinguish two dimensions in the analysis of morphological complexity. Enumerative complexity (E-complexity) reflects the number of morphosyntactic distinctions that languages make and the strategies employed to encode them, concerning either the internal composition of words or the arrangement of classes of words into inflection classes. This, we argue, is constrained by integrative complexity (I-complexity). The I-complexity of an inflectional system reflects the difficulty that a paradigmatic system poses for language users (rather than lexicographers) in information-theoretic terms. This becomes clear by distinguishing average paradigm entropy from average conditional entropy. The average entropy of a paradigm is the uncertainty in guessing the realization for a particular cell of the paradigm of a particular lexeme (given knowledge of the possible exponents). This gives one a measure of the complexity of a morphological system—systems with more exponents and more inflection classes will in general have higher average paradigm entropy— but it presupposes a problem that adult native speakers will never encounter. In order to know that a lexeme exists, the speaker must have heard at least one word form, so in the worst case a speaker will be faced with predicting a word form based on knowledge of one other word form of that lexeme. Thus, a better measure of morphological complexity is the average conditional entropy, the average uncertainty in guessing the realization of one randomly selected cell in the paradigm of a lexeme given the realization of one other randomly selected cell. This is the I-complexity of paradigm organization. Viewed from this information-theoretic perspective, languages that appear to differ greatly in their E-complexity—the number of exponents, inflectional classes, and principal parts— can actually be quite similar in terms of the challenge they pose for a language user who already knows how the system works. We adduce evidence for this hypothesis from three sources: a comparison between languages of varying degrees of E-complexity, a case study from the particularly challenging conjugational system of Chiquihuitlán Mazatec, and a Monte Carlo simulation modeling the encoding of morphosyntactic properties into formal expressions. The results of these analyses provide evidence for the crucial status of words and paradigms for understanding morphological organization.

We investigate what possessives mean by examining a wide range of English examples, pre- and postnominal, quantified and nonquantified, to arrive at general, systematic truth conditions for them. In the process, we delineate a rich class of paradigmatic possessives having crosslinguistic interest, exploiting characteristic semantic properties. One is that all involve (implicit or explicit) quantification over possessed entities. Another is that this quantification always carries existential import, even when the quantifier over possessed entities itself does not. We show that this property, termed possessive existential import, is intimately related to the notion of narrowing (Barker 1995). Narrowing has implications for compositionally analyzing possessives’ meaning. We apply the proposed semantics to the issues of the definiteness of possessives, negation of possessives, partitives and prenominal possessives, postnominal possessives and complements of relational nouns, freedom of the possessive relation, and the semantic relationship between pre- and postnominal possessives.

An automated sound correspondence-recognition program developed by the authors is applied to a data set consisting of standardized word lists for over half of the world's languages. Online appendices present the results in a compendium of 692 recurrent sound correspondences that contains information about the frequency of occurrence of each correspondence. Applications of the compendium to historical linguistics are proposed. For example, the catalog of correspondences and frequencies facilitates objective assessment of the commonness or rarity of shared phonological innovations cited as evidence for language-family subgrouping. In another analysis, correspondence frequency is used to measure the degree of similarity between different sounds, yielding models for classifying consonants and vowels that substantially agree with articulatory properties. Correspondence-based similarities are also compared with measurements of sound similarity involving factors such as perceptual confusions, speech errors, and cooccurrence patterns in synchronic phonological rules. Sound similarity discerned from both the perception and production of speech is found to correlate to about the same extent with correspondence-based similarities.

This study investigates a contrast in tonal alignment that involves falling contours in Dinka. This contrast calls into question the assumption that tonal alignment cannot distinguish contour tones of the same shape within the syllable domain (e.g. Odden 1995). A qualitative description and a small-scale perception study are followed by a detailed production study. The results indicate that the main correlate of the contrast is indeed tonal alignment: the early-aligned fall sets in during the onset or early in the vowel; the late-aligned fall sets in well into the vowel. The production study also suggests that it is unlikely for more than two patterns of alignment in contour tones of the same shape to be accurately produced and perceived, given various phonetic limitations. The contrast is represented phonologically using a binary feature. This representation is adequate in an explanatory sense, in that the category boundary is in line with the quantal threshold hypothesized in House 1990. The results also corroborate the hypothesis of three-level vowel length in Dinka.

This article argues for a three-way structural characterization of Fijian objects: common nouns can be incorporated or dislocated, but pronouns and proper nouns occur inside the VP as complements. These facts support an analysis of Fijian as a polysynthetic language, since it is a pronominal argument language with incorporated objects. Having complement nominals inside the VP, however, puts Fijian outside the scope of Baker's (1996) polysynthesis parameter. The distribution of complements in Fijian follows from Hopper and Thompson's (1980) transitivity hypothesis, since only those nominals with the highest degree of individuation can occur inside the VP.

The study of sound change in progress in Philadelphia has been facilitated by the application of forced alignment and automatic vowel measurement to a large corpus of neighborhood studies, including 379 speakers with dates of birth from 1888 to 1991. Two of the sound changes active in the 1970s show a linear pattern of incrementation in succeeding decades. The fronting of back upgliding vowels/aw/and/ow/shows a reversal in the direction of change, beginning with those born after 1940. The study also finds a general withdrawal from two salient features of local phonology, tense/æh/and/oh/, led by those with higher education. Younger speakers with higher education have also reorganized the traditional Philadelphia tense/lax split of short-a to form a nasal system with tensing before all and only nasal consonants. The development of the Philadelphia vowel system can be understood in the geographic context of neighboring dialects. Features in common with North and North Midland dialects have accelerated in use while features in common with South Midland and Southern dialects have been reversed in favor of Northern patterns. The microevolution of a linguistic system can be seen here as subject to phonological generalizations but driven by social evaluation as features rise in level of salience for members of the speech community.

As children learn their mother tongues, they make systematic errors. For example, English-speaking children regularly say mouses rather than mice. Because children's errors are not explicitly corrected, it has been argued that children could never learn to make the transition to adult language based on the evidence available to them, and thus that learning even simple aspects of grammar is logically impossible without recourse to innate, language-specific constraints. Here, we examine the role children's expectations play in language learning and present a model of plural noun learning that generates a surprising prediction: at a given point in learning, exposure to regular plurals (e.g. rats) can decrease children's tendency to overregularize irregular plurals (e.g. mouses). Intriguingly, the model predicts that the same exposure should have the opposite effect earlier in learning. Consistent with this, we show that testing memory for items with regular plural labels contributes to a decrease in irregular plural overregularization in six-year-olds, but to an increase in four-year-olds. Our model and results suggest that children's overregularization errors both arise and resolve themselves as a consequence of the distribution of error in the linguistic environment, and that far from presenting a logical puzzle for learning, they are inevitable consequences of it.

This article considers two instances of rapidly accelerating linguistic change in Glaswegian vernacular, th-fronting and l-vocalization, both typically associated with the Cockney dialect of London. Both changes have been underway for some time, but took off during the 1990s. In this article we consider a range of factors that are contributing to the rapid proliferation of these forms in the speech of inner-city Glaswegian adolescents. Our multivariate analysis shows very strong effects for linguistic factors, as well as strong positive correlations with social practices relating to local Glaswegian street style, some links with dialect contact with friends and family living in England, and—perhaps surprisingly—also positive correlations with strong psychological engagement with the London-based TV soap drama EastEnders. Our results suggest that the changes are being propelled by several processes: ongoing transmission and at the same time continuing diffusion through dialect contact; the local social meanings carried by these variants for these speakers; and strong engagement with a favorite TV drama. For this community at least, engaging with a favorite TV drama is an additional accelerating factor in rapid linguistic diffusion.

Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts's (2005) conventional implicatures, are contents that may project when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the family-of-sentences diagnostic (e.g. Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet 1990). This article establishes distinctions among projective contents on the basis of a series of diagnostics, including a variant of the family-of-sentences diagnostic, that can be applied with linguistically untrained consultants in the field and the laboratory. These diagnostics are intended to serve as part of a toolkit for exploring projective contents across languages, thus allowing generalizations to be examined and validated cross-linguistically. We apply the diagnostics in two languages, focusing on Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupí-Guaraní), and comparing the results to those for English. Our study of Paraguayan Guaraní is the first systematic exploration of projective content in a language other than English. Based on the application of our diagnostics to a wide range of constructions, four subclasses of projective contents emerge. The resulting taxonomy of projective content has strong implications for contemporary theories of projection (e.g. Karttunen 1974, Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992, Potts 2005, Schlenker 2009), which were developed for the projective properties of particular subclasses and fail to generalize to the full set of projective contents.

The nominal anaphoric element one has figured prominently in discussions of linguistic nativism because of an important argument advanced by C. L. Baker (1978). His argument has been frequently cited within the cognitive and linguistic sciences, and has provided the topic for a chain of experimental and computational psycholinguistics papers. Baker's crucial grammaticality facts, though much repeated in the literature, have not been critically investigated. A corpus investigation shows that his claims are not true: one does not take only phrasal antecedents, but can also take nouns on their own, including semantically relational nouns, and can take various of-PP dependents of its own. We give a semantic analysis of anaphoric one that allows it to exhibit this kind of freedom, and we exhibit frequency evidence that goes a long way toward explaining why linguists have been inclined to regard phrases like the one of physics or three ones as ungrammatical when in fact (as corpus evidence shows) they are merely dispreferred relative to available grammatical alternatives. The main implication for the acquisition literature is that one of the most celebrated arguments from poverty of the stimulus is shown to be without force.

Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language combining Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan) with varieties of English and/or Kriol that has emerged within approximately the last thirty-five years, shows radical restructuring of the verbal auxiliary system, including modal categories that differ from those in the source languages. The structure of Light Warlpiri overall is that of a mixed language, in that most verbs and some verbal morphology are drawn from English and/or Kriol, and most nominal morphology is from Warlpiri. Nouns are drawn from both Warlpiri-lexicon and English-lexicon sources. The restructuring of the auxiliary system draws selectively on elements from Warlpiri and several varieties and styles of English and/or Kriol, combined in such a way as to produce novel constructions. It may be that when multiple sources provide input to a rapidly emerging new system, innovative categories are likely to appear.