This article reports on the results of a broad crosslinguistic study on the semantics of quantity words such as many in the superlative (e.g. most). While some languages use such a form to express both a relative reading (as in Gloria has visited the most continents) and a proportional reading (as in Gloria has visited most continents), the vast majority do not allow the latter, though all allow the former. It is argued that a degree-quantifier analysis of quantity words is best suited to explain why proportional readings typically do not arise for quantity superlatives. Based on morphosyntactic evidence, two alternative diachronic pathways through which proportional quantifiers may develop from quantity superlatives are identified.

This article presents a descriptive and theoretical framework for the analysis of prosodic systems that have emerged from contact between African tone and European intonation-only languages. A comparative study of the prosodic systems of two Romance contact varieties, Central African French and Equatorial Guinean Spanish, shows that they feature two-tone systems, fixed word-tone patterns, tonal minimal pairs, the arbitrary assignment of tone in function words, and tonal processes. Evidence from further contact varieties and creole languages shows that similar systems evolved in other Afro-European contact ecologies. We conclude that tone is imposed by default on contact varieties and creoles that take shape in ecologies characterized by source-language agentivity in tone languages. In doing so, we argue against claims that tone necessarily cedes to stress during language contact and creolization. Instead, contact varieties and creoles partake just like other languages in the convergence processes that lead to the areal clustering of prosodic systems.

The English past tense contains pockets of variation, where regular and irregular forms compete (e.g. learned/learnt, weaved/wove). Individuals vary considerably in the degree to which they prefer irregular forms. This article examines the degree to which individuals may converge on their regularization patterns and preferences. We report on a novel experimental methodology, using a cooperative game involving nonce verbs. Analysis of participants' postgame responses indicates that their behavior shifted in response to an automated co-player's preferences, on two dimensions. First, players regularize more after playing with peers with high regularization rates, and less after playing with peers with low regularization rates. Second, players' overall patterns of regularization are also affected by the particular distribution of (ir)regular forms produced by the peer.

We model the effects of the exposure on participants' morphological preferences, using both a rule-based model and an instance-based analogical model (Nosofsky 1988, Albright & Hayes 2003). Both models contribute separately and significantly to explaining participants' pre-exposure regularization processes. However, only the instance-based model captures the shift in preferences that arises after exposure to the peer. We argue that the results suggest an account of morphological convergence in which new word forms are stored in memory, and on-line generalizations are formed over these instances.

Perlmutter and Postal (1977 and subsequent) argued that passives cannot passivize. Three prima facie counterexamples have come to light, found in Turkish, Lithuanian, and Sanskrit. We reexamine these three cases and demonstrate that rather than counterexemplifying Perlmutter and Postal's generalization, these confirm it. The Turkish construction is an impersonal of a passive, the Lithuanian is an evidential of a passive, and the Sanskrit is an unaccusative with an instrumental case-marked theme. We provide a syntactic analysis of both the Turkish impersonal and the Lithuanian evidential. Finally, we develop an analysis of the passive that captures the generalization that passives cannot passivize.

The regularity of sound change as set out by the scholars of the late nineteenth century is a fundamental principle of historical linguistics. The principle as recognized by the Neogrammarian linguists states that once a sound change has begun, it affects every word in the vocabulary that contains the sound in question. The principle has been disputed by many linguists and especially dialectologists, who argue that ‘every word has its own history’. This article demonstrates how the Neogrammarian principle operates in one prototypical change in progress, the raising of the mid front long vowel /ey/ before a consonant in Philadelphia English. Mixed-level regression analysis shows consistent phonetic constraints across the nineteenth century, with no effect of word frequency. The regularity of sound change is reflected in the common pattern of behavior of the most frequent words, those of moderate frequency, and words that occur only once in the corpus.

This article presents the first experimental evidence on nominal tense. Data are from Pomak, a Slavic variety that makes use of a deictic suffix for referents in the interlocutor's sphere and for past-modal reference. Forty L1-Pomak participants completed an acceptability judgment task (in Pomak) and two reaction-time experiments using auditory stimuli (in L1 Pomak and in L2 Greek). In the Pomak reaction-time experiment, in particular, participants listened to NPs with temporal reference marked either purely grammatically, with a deictic suffix, or grammatically and semantically/pragmatically. As predicted, responses were accurate and fast in grammatical-only items even though success rates improved for nominals that had additional semantic and pragmatic temporal reference. To conclude, our study confirms that Pomak deictic suffixes provide temporal information at the level of the NP and introduces a method that could be used to test the existence of nominal tense in other languages.

A new phonological system is becoming conventional across a group of DeafBlind signers in the United States who communicate via reciprocal, tactile channels—a practice known as ‘Protactile’. The recent conventionalization of protactile phonology is analyzed in this article. Research on emergent visual signed languages has demonstrated that conventionalization is not a single monolithic process, but a complex of principles involving patterns of distribution—discreteness, stability, and productivity of form—as form becomes linked with meaning in increasingly stable ways. Conventionalization of protactile phonology involves assigning specific grammatical roles to the four hands (and arms) of signer 1 ('conveyer') and signer 2 ('receiver') in ‘proprioceptive constructions’ (PCs)—comparable to ‘classifier constructions’ in visual signed languages. Analyzing PCs offers new insights into how the conventionalization of a phonological system can play out in the tactile modality.

This study investigates how listeners associate acoustically different vowels with a single linguistic vowel quality. Listeners were asked to identify vowel sounds as /æ/ or /ʌ/ and to indicate the size of the speaker that produced them. Results indicate that perceived vowel quality trades off with the perception of speaker size: different vowels can sound the same, and the same vowel can sound different when a different speaker is perceived. These findings suggest that vowel normalization is broadly similar to perceptual constancy in other domains, and that social, indexical, and linguistic information play an important role in determining even the most fundamental units of linguistic representation.

Adjectives have the logical options of being used predicatively or attributively as well as being conjoined syndetically or asyndetically. Moreover, attributive adjectives may occur prenominally and/or postnominally. On the basis of a sample of fifty-three languages, an analysis is performed of the interaction of syntactic function/position and type of linkage. While predicative adjectives generally prefer syndetic linkage, attributive adjectives are more open to juxtaposition. Further, postnominal attributive adjectives are more likely to be syndetically linked than prenominal ones are. The following adjective use types can be arranged from left to right on a scale of increasing sentence-likeness, which is termed ‘syntacticity’: prenominal attributive > postnominal attributive > predicative. An implicational universal is formulated to the effect that if two left-hand adjectives are syndetically linked, two adjectives to their right on the scale will be also. An attraction model is proposed which is based on the notion that like attracts like. The relevant dimension of similarity is syntacticity. The more similar the syntacticity values, the higher the probability of attraction. Because syndetic linkage is more syntactic than the asyndetic type, predicative adjectives are most likely, postnominal attributive adjectives less likely, and prenominal attributive adjectives least likely to be syndetically linked.

Frankenduals, that is, duals composed (as in Hopi) of a ‘singular’ and a ‘plural’ morpheme, display a consistent asymmetry. A new typological study shows that the element closer to the nominal is sensitive to singularity, whereas the one sensitive to plurality is more peripheral. This pattern impacts the theory of morphology (dual featurally crosscuts singular and plural), morphosemantics (number features are sensitive to order of composition), and syntax and its interfaces (the features are interpreted and pronounced where they are merged, not copied and partially deleted). The resulting account instantiates Hale's (1986) idea that features are semantically broad, ontologically flexible, and category-independent.

Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Rarámuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesize a probabilistic universal of CATEGORY CLUSTERING, with two effects: (i) markers in paradigmatic opposition tend to be placed in the same morphological position (‘paradigmatic alignment’; Crysmann & Bonami 2016); (ii) morphological positions tend to be categorically uniform (‘featural coherence’; Stump 2001). We first show in a corpus study that category clustering drives the distribution of agreement prefixes in speakers' production of Chintang, a language where prefix placement is not constrained by any categorical rules of sequential ordering. We then show in a typological study that the same principle also shapes the evolution of morphological structure: although exceptions are attested, paradigms are much more likely to obey rather than to violate the principle. Category clustering is therefore a good candidate for a universal force shaping the structure and use of language, potentially due to benefits in processing and learning.

How and why speakers differ in the phonetic implementation of phonological contrasts, and the relationship of this ‘structured heterogeneity’ to language change, has been a key focus over fifty years of variationist sociolinguistics. In phonetics, interest has recently grown in uncovering ‘structured variability’—how speakers can differ greatly in phonetic realization in nonrandom ways—as part of the long-standing goal of understanding variability in speech. The English stop voicing contrast, which combines extensive phonetic variability with phonological stability, provides an ideal setting for an approach to understanding structured variation in the sounds of a community's language that illuminates both synchrony and diachrony. This article examines the voicing contrast in a vernacular dialect (Glasgow Scots) in spontaneous speech, focusing on individual speaker variability within and across cues, including over time. Speakers differ greatly in the use of each of three phonetic cues to the contrast, while reliably using each one to differentiate voiced and voiceless stops. Interspeaker variability is highly structured: speakers lie along a continuum of use of each cue, as well as correlated use of two cues—voice onset time and closure voicing—along a single axis. Diachronic change occurs along this axis, toward a more aspiration-based and less voicing-based phonetic realization of the contrast, suggesting an important connection between synchronic and diachronic speaker variation.

A field-based ultrasound and acoustic study of Iwaidja, an endangered Australian Aboriginal language, investigates the phonetic identity of nonnasal velar consonants in intervocalic position, where past work has proposed a [+continuant] vs. [-continuant] phonemic contrast. We analyze the putative contrast within a continuous phonetic space, defined by both acoustic and articulatory parameters, and find gradient variation: from more consonantal realizations, such as [ɰ], to more vocalic realizations, such as [a]. The distribution of realizations across lexical items and speakers does not support the proposed phonemic contrast. This case illustrates how lenition that is both phonetically gradient and variable across speakers and words can give the illusion of a contextually restricted phonemic contrast.

This article examines obligatory backward resumption in Karuk (kyh; isolate), a verb-final language of Northern California, and argues that it is the result of conflicting word-order requirements. This conceptual analysis is further developed within the chain-resolution framework of Landau 2006, in which resumption is the result of partial deletion. The Karuk facts indicate that partial deletion targets spellout domains and not phases, contra van Urk 2018. Examination of two case studies from the literature and a reinterpretation of the Dinka resumption data discussed in van Urk 2018 further demonstrate that partial deletion of spellout domains has broader empirical coverage than partial deletion of phases. The second part of the article pivots to the predictions made by the chain-resolution analysis about alternatives to backward resumption. These predictions are shown to be borne out in three other verb-final languages, namely Hindi-Urdu, Persian, and Turkish. The article closes with an examination of the parallels between backward resumption and regular forward resumption and concludes that both may be derived by movement or by base-generation of the proform.

This article proposes that the possible word orders for any natural language construction composed of n elements, each of which selects for the category headed by the next, are universally limited both across and within languages to a subclass of permutations on the ‘universal order of command’ 1, …, n, as determined by their selectional restrictions. The permitted subclass is known as the ‘separable’ permutations, and grows in n as the large Schröder series {1, 2, 6, 22, 90, 394, 1806, … }. This universal is identified as formal because it follows directly from the assumptions of COMBINATORY CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR (CCG)—in particular, from the fact that all CCG syntactic rules are subject to a combinatory projection principle that limits them to binary rules applying to contiguous nonempty categories.

The article presents quantitative empirical evidence in support of this claim from the linguistically attested orders of the four elements Dem(onstrative), Num(erator), A(djective), N(oun), which have been examined in connection with various versions of Greenberg's putative 20th universal concerning their order. A universal restriction to separable permutation is also supported by word-order variation in the Germanic verb cluster and in the Hungarian verb complex, among other constructions.

Final obstruent devoicing is common in the world's languages and constitutes a clear case of parallel phonological evolution. Final obstruent voicing, in contrast, is claimed to be rare or nonexistent. Two distinct theoretical approaches crystalize around obstruent voicing patterns. Traditional markedness accounts view these sound patterns as consequences of universal markedness constraints prohibiting voicing, or favoring voicelessness, in final position, and predict that final obstruent voicing does not exist. In contrast, phonetic-historical accounts explain skewed patterns of voicing in terms of common phonetically based devoicing tendencies, allowing for rare cases of final obstruent voicing under special conditions. In this article, phonetic and phonological evidence is offered for final obstruent voicing in Lakota, an indigenous Siouan language of the Great Plains of North America. In Lakota, oral stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ are regularly pronounced as [b], [l], and [ɡ] in word- and syllable-final position when phrase-final devoicing and preobstruent devoicing do not occur.

This article argues for a new theory of the origin of WH-correlatives from indefinite uses of WH-words in paratactic or asyndetic conditionals. We show that this theory predicts a generalization that has so far gone unnoticed: WH-based correlatives always have a universal reading; they may also have a definite reading, which may be morphologically marked. This is in contrast to correlatives where the relativizer originates from a demonstrative element: these always have a definite reading and may also have a universal reading. We demonstrate the validity of this generalization on a data set containing thirty-eight correlative structures from thirty-two languages, that is, all of the correlative structures that are sufficiently well described in the literature.

This article investigates whether speakers marshal phonetic integration as a strategy to distinguish language-contact phenomena. Systematic comparison of the behavior of individuals, diagnostics, and language-mixing types (code-switches, established loanwords, and nonce borrowings) reveals variability at every level of the adaptation process, providing strong evidence that bilinguals do not phonetically distinguish other-language words, nonce or dictionary-attested, in a uniform way. This is in striking contrast to the community-wide morphosyntactic treatment they afford this same material when borrowing it: immediate, quasi-categorical, and consistent. This confirms that phonetic and morphosyntactic integration are independent. Only the latter is a reliable metric for distinguishing language-mixing types.