To successfully learn language—and more specifically how to use verbs correctly—children must solve the linking problem: they must learn the mapping between the thematic roles specified by a verb's lexical semantics and the syntactic argument positions specified by a verb's syntactic frame. We use an empirically grounded and integrated quantitative framework involving corpus analysis, experimental meta-analysis, and computational modeling to implement minimally distinct versions of mapping approaches that (i) either are specified a priori or develop during language acquisition, and (ii) rely on either an absolute or a relative thematic role system. Using successful verb class learning as an evaluation metric, we embed each approach within a concrete model of the acquisition process and see which learning assumptions are able to match children's verb-learning behavior at three, four, and five years old. Our current results support a trajectory where children (i) may not have prior expectations about linking patterns between ages three and five, and (ii) begin with a relative thematic system, progressing toward optionality between a relative and an absolute system. We discuss implications of our results for both theories of syntactic representation and theories of how those representations are acquired. We also discuss the broader contribution of this study as a concrete modeling framework that can be updated with new linking theories, corpora, and experimental results.

In weight-sensitive languages, stress is influenced by syllable weight. As a result, heavy syllables should attract, not repel, stress. The Portuguese lexicon, however, presents a case where weight seems to negatively impact stress: antepenultimate stress is more frequent in light antepenultimate syllables than in heavy ones. This pattern is phonologically unexpected and appears to contradict the typology of weight and stress: it is a case where lexical statistics and the grammar conflict. Portuguese also contains gradient, not categorical, weight effects, which weaken as we move away from the right edge of the word. In this article, I examine how native speakers' grammars capture these subtle weight effects, and whether the negative antepenultimate weight effect is learned or repaired. I show that speakers learn the gradient weight effects in the language, but do not learn the unnatural negative effect. Instead, speakers repair this pattern and generalize a positive weight effect to all syllables in the stress domain. This study thus provides empirical evidence that speakers may not only ignore unnatural patterns, but also learn the opposite pattern.

We explore children's use of syntactic distribution in the acquisition of attitude verbs, such as think, want, and hope. Because attitude verbs refer to concepts that are opaque to observation but have syntactic distributions predictive of semantic properties, we hypothesize that syntax may serve as an important cue to learning their meanings. Using a novel methodology, we replicate previous literature showing an asymmetry between acquisition of think and want, and we additionally demonstrate that interpretation of a less frequent attitude verb, hope, patterns with type of syntactic complement. This supports the view that children treat syntactic frame as informative about an attitude verb's meaning.

Arabic has a construction that expresses a UNIVERSAL PERFECT interpretation. It is here argued that this construction, which is widespread across the different vernaculars, can be analyzed as a possessive perfect construction, a structure thought to be rather rare beyond Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. I further argue that the grammaticalization path differs from that of well-known possessive perfect structures across European languages. I hypothesize that the structure which paved the way for the grammaticalization of a universal perfect construction across Arabic was a possessive structure, originally headed by a preposition, which eventually developed into a transitive verbal predicate taking an interval-denoting object as its possessum, and which subsequently grammaticalized into a construction expressing the universal perfect.

We present a new phenomenon in inflectional morphology, ‘repartitioning’, based on data from Soq (Trans New Guinea). In repartitioning, the semantic boundary between two sets of morphological forms is redrawn in a single domain; one feature value takes over part, but not all, of the meaning of the other. In Soq the boundary is redrawn between the yesterday past tense and the hodiernal; the domain is the lexeme s- ‘stay’. For this one verb, the yesterday past takes over most of the range of the hodiernal, while the morphological forms remain regular. In clause chains the repartitioned verb surprisingly shows no syntactic effects. We demonstrate key differences from known phenomena, notably syncretism and overdifferentiation. Repartitioning is indeed new. It can be modeled in a theory based on default inheritance, but poses problems for other approaches. Finally, we present a typology of featural mismatches that situates Soq relative to known phenomena.

The structural focus of linguistics has led to a static and modular treatment of meaning. Viewing language as practice allows us to transcend the boundaries of subdisciplines that deal with meaning and to integrate the social indexicality of variation into this larger system. This article presents the expression of social meaning as a continuum of decreasing reference and increasing performativity, with sociolinguistic variation at the performative extreme. The meaning potential of sociolinguistic variables in turn is based in their form and their social source, constituting a cline of ‘interiority’ from variables that index public social facts about the speaker to more internal, personal affective states.

Dissatisfied with traditional grading, we developed a grading system to directly assess whether students have mastered course material. We identified the set of skills students need to master in a course and provided multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of each skill. We describe in detail how we implemented the system for two undergraduate courses, Introductory Phonetics and Phonology I. Our goals were to decrease student stress, increase student learning and make students' study efforts more effective, increase students' metacognitive awareness, promote a growth mindset, encourage students to aim for mastery rather than partial credit, be fairer to students facing structural and institutional disadvantages, reduce our time spent on grading, and facilitate complying with new accreditation requirements. Our own reflections and student feedback indicate that many of these goals were met.

We report a statistical test of a long-standing hypothesis in the literature: that phonological neutralization rules are more common at the ends of lexical domains than the beginnings (Houlihan 1975 et seq.). We collected descriptive grammars for an areally and genetically diverse set of fifty languages, identified all active phonological rules that target the edge of a lexical domain (root, stem, word, phrase, or utterance), and further coded each rule for whether it was phonemically neutralizing, that is, able to create surface homophony. We find that such neutralizing rules are strongly, significantly less common at the beginnings of lexical domains relative to ends, and that this pattern is strikingly consistent across all languages within the data set. We show that this pattern is not an artifact of a tendency for syllable codas to be a target for phonological neutralization, nor is it associated with a suffixing or prefixing preference. Consistent with previous accounts, we argue that this pattern may ultimately be based in the greater average information content of phonological categories early in the word, which itself is a consequence of incremental processing in lexical access.

Old English underwent diachronic change in its vowel inventory between its predecessor West Germanic and Middle English. We provide an analysis of the addition and loss of vowels in Old English from the perspective of modified contrastive specification (Dresher et al. 1994). Three main themes emerge from our analysis: (i) the phonological representation of contrast in the vowels in English has remained remarkably stable for over a thousand years, (ii) the proposed analysis improves upon and supersedes similar analyses proposed in Dresher 2015 and Purnell & Raimy 2015, and (iii) the adoption of privative features provides an improved representationally based understanding of phonological activity, feature geometry, and how phonology reflects general cognitive features of memory.