The oldest form of Sanskrit has a class of expressions that are in some respects like asyndetically coordinated syntactic phrases, in other respects like single compound words. I propose to resolve the conflicting evidence by drawing on prosodic phonology, stratal optimality theory, and the lexicalist approach to morphological blocking. I then present an account of the semantic properties and the historical development of these expressions. The analysis points to a solution to the theoretical problem of nonmonotonic trajectories in diachrony, a challenge for causal theories of change that claim that analogical processes are simplifying or regularizing. The idea is that optimization of such a highly structured object as a language does not proceed monotonically, but via a sequence of local optima.

Linguists have increased their documentation efforts in response to the sharp decline in the number of languages. Greater awareness and new sources of funding have led to an upsurge in language documentation. While individual languages make unique contributions to the world's linguistic heritage, language families, by virtue of their shared heritage, have related contributions to make. The endangerment of entire families, while implied by the loss of language, has not been explored to date. Here, we examine estimates of how many linguistic stocks (the largest subgroups of related languages that are reconstructable) consist entirely of endangered languages and thus are endangered themselves. Our data set includes 372 stocks that had at least one living language in 1950. Our finding is that since that time, 15% of the world's linguistic stocks have become extinct and another 27% are now moribund in that direct estimates of endangerment indicate that no member languages are being learned by children. For cases where direct estimates were not found, we used population as a proxy for endangerment. If, as many predict, a further 50% of the world's languages become extinct or moribund in this century, then an additional 25% of the linguistic stocks would be at risk of being lost. If 90% share this fate, only 11% of stocks would have at least one presumably ‘safe’ language. A comparison of the vitality of linguistic stocks by world areas yields the following ranking from worst to best: Americas, Pacific, Asia, Africa, Europe. Finally, some aspects of language that are unique to disappearing language stocks are outlined. Renewed efforts at documenting members of such stocks seem justified.

That there is a theoretical distinction between context-dependent and context-independent aspects of utterance interpretation has become a standard assumption in current theories of meaning; however, how and where to draw this distinction has been the subject of considerable debate. In the current study, we investigate whether speakers can systematically distinguish between what is said and what is implicated (Grice 1989 [1967]) using a novel truth-value judgment paradigm across a wide range of implicature types. We found that, by providing participants with a clear set of judgment criteria, including the adoption of an objective third-person perspective, we were able to enhance their ability to distinguish conversational implicature from truth-conditional meaning. In addition, we found that none of the implicature types we investigated was either consistently incorporated into or consistently excluded from what is said. Instead, our findings revealed considerable variation in frequency of incorporation across implicature types in ways that do not correspond straightforwardly to the various taxonomies of implicature types proposed in the literature.

We present and discuss the results of a sociolinguistic historical study of variable deletion of the preverbal negative particle ne ‘not’, a phenomenon observable in many contemporary varieties of spoken French, but which has not yet made its way into standard written French. Our study's two main goals are (i) to contribute to the resolution of a debate over the point in time when ne deletion became a prevalent feature of nonstandard spoken French, and (ii) to assess the role of the affixal status of subject clitic pronouns in the rise of ne deletion.

Our study is based on the analysis of an extensive database comprising a wide range of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century sources providing information on the typical features of nonstandard spoken European and Quebec French. It reveals that ne deletion became widespread in nonstandard spoken French only in the nineteenth century and leads us to hypothesize that the affixal status of subject clitic pronouns contributed to the rise of ne deletion.

This paper presents a parametric theory of poetic meter which defines a set of formally possible meters based on the prosodic constituents and categories given by universal grammar, and a functional principle that selects an optimal meter for a particular language on the basis of its lexical phonological structure. We support this theory by a detailed analysis of a favored meter in Finnish, a stress-based meter in which syllable count varies in accord with constraints on syllable weight, and show why partially similar meters are likewise favored in English.

Genius ipsius linguae Fennicae, copiosa vocum ponderosissimarum et elegantissimarum varietate superbientis, egregie vatum favet industriae. (H. G. Porthan, Dissertatio de Poesi Fennica, 1778.)