While all of the Scandinavian languages have verb-second order in main clauses, they vary in the word order in subordinate clauses: in Icelandic the finite verb appears in a high position, to the left of negation and sentence-medial adverbs, while in all of the standard Mainland Scandinavian languages it remains in a low position, to the right of these elements. This order in Mainland Scandinavian is known to be the result of a historical change, and has frequently been tied to the loss of agreement morphology. Faroese has been argued to be currently undergoing a change of the same type, but it has proved difficult to establish a sound empirical footing for the various claims about the syntax of this language. In this article we present data from three experimental investigations of acceptability, supplemented with a study of available texts, that show that the language is very close to completing the change in the loss of the high position for the verb, but that its syntax is still distinct in this respect from that of Danish, the mainland Scandinavian language with which it is in most contact. In addition to establishing a firmer empirical basis for theories of verb movement, our study also makes the methodological point that grammaticality-judgment tasks can yield extremely fine-grained results even in cases where variability is at issue.

The Chamic languages of Vietnam have undergone phonological restructuring in the last two thousand years. In contact with the Mon-Khmer languages, all have developed final stress with consequent phonotactic restructuring. Since then, some languages have remained essentially unchanged (Roglai, Rade, and Jarai), but others have undergone radical restructuring: in contact with register languages, Western Cham has become a register language; in contact with the phonology of Bahnar, Haroi has become a restructured register language; in contact with the tonal Vietnamese, Phan Rang Cham has become incipiently tonal; and, in contact with the fully tonal languages of Hainan, Tsat has become fully tonal. The internal paths of change are relatively clear, because of their shallow time depth combined with the richness of the comparative data. However, despite the existence of phonetically plausible internal paths of development, the available evidence makes it clear that external contact set the changes in motion and determined their direction.

Are linguistic signs really as arbitrary as they are assumed to be, and how exceptional are semantically motivated lexical patterns? These old questions are re-addressed with the help of new quantificational data on two genetically unrelated languages, Kambera (Austronesian) and Dutch (Indo-European). The hypothesis is that semantically complex items such as expressives favor a structurally complex form, and vice versa. An examination of seven distinct types of lexical items found statistically robust semantically motivated lexical patterns. Linguistic signs appear to be less arbitrary than is commonly assumed.

This article attempts to provide a precise definition for topic and to derive most of the properties of topic from this definition. The main assumption is that the topic-comment construction is a syntactic device employed to fulfill certain discourse functions. Topic is always related to a position inside the comment. Since topic has no independent thematic role but always depends on an element inside the comment for its thematic role, it has no syntactic function of its own. This dependence relationship is subject to locality constraints.

A grammatical affix undergoing phonetic erosion is sometimes abruptly replaced by a conveniently available lexical stem with which it shares one or more phonological segments. The new affix has the phonological shape of the old independent stem, but acquires the basic grammatical function of the old affix, though it may also bring in a portion of the stem's own morphological and semantic idiosyncrasies. Because the old affixal form is eliminated, the historical process can easily be misdiagnosed as reflecting the gradual compression of an original syntactic construction which includes the relevant independent stem. Recognition of the system-renewing element in this particular type of stem-to-affix grammaticalization leads to awareness of the pivotal role of the inherited system in grammaticalizations, and to a general critique of historical models which see grammaticalization as a straightforward syntax-to-morphology compression.