This article presents the results of an acoustic study of nasal assimilation and gestural overlap at word boundaries in Korean and Korean-accented English. Twelve speakers of Seoul Korean recorded phrases containing obstruent#nasal and obstruent#obstruent sequences in both Korean and English. Nasalization of the word-final obstruent, predicted by the rules of Korean phonology, occurred in 93% of obstruent#nasal sequences in Korean and in 32% of such sequences in Korean-accented English, a rate of application higher than that reported in most other studies of external sandhi alternations in nonnative speech. Acoustic analysis found categorical nasalization in the L1 Korean productions, but both categorical and gradient nasalization, along with a high degree of inter- and intraspeaker variation, in the L2 English productions. For a subset of speakers, there was a significant correlation between quantitative measures of nasalization in English and measures of consonant overlap in the English obstruent#obstruent sequences. An analysis in terms of articulatory gestures and the coupled-oscillator model of speech planning is supported. The analysis is based on the ARTICULATORY PHONOLOGY model (Browman & Goldstein 1990a,b, 1992, 2000, Goldstein et al. 2006), though with modifications. Implications for phonetic and phonological representations, and for speech planning in both L1 and L2, are explored.

The existence of OBLIGATORY ADJUNCTS in both predication and modification constructions is best understood as following from general conversational pragmatics, rather than from grammatical factors. In the case of clausal predication, adjuncts are used to satisfy the often-cited requirement that every utterance have a focus that serves to convey new information in the discourse; adjuncts are just one of several ways in which the focal requirement can be satisfied. We argue that as a pragmatic constraint, the focal requirement is derivative from Grice's maxim of quantity or Horn's R-principle. This allows us to account for the fact that while utterances do normally require a successful focus, there can be certain principled exceptions. The appeal to conversational maxims also allows us to account for the appearance of obligatory adjuncts within nominal modification structures, in which focus is not the relevant notion.

The purpose of this paper is to explore academic linguistics' tacit reliance on a Christian missionary organization, SIL International, to develop technological infrastructure and offer service in local linguistic communities—areas that have generally been ignored by academic linguistics because they have been seen as falling outside its domain of professional responsibility. We refer to these kinds of activities as PRACTICAL LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT because they draw upon linguistic expertise to solve practical real-world problems. Until now, academic linguists have benefited from the practical language development work carried out by our missionary counterparts without much deliberation. But with the contemporary rise in concern over language endangerment, the time has come for us to reflect on how this partnership of convenience can be reconciled with the changing priorities of the discipline. As we redouble our efforts to document, understand, and support the world's linguistic diversity, academic linguists are taking a renewed interest in fieldwork. There are more numerous and generous sources of funding for endangered-language research. Documentary linguistics, which takes the collection, preservation, and annotation of primary linguistic data as its key aim, is emerging as a subfield in its own right (Woodbury 2003, Himmelmann 2006). A growing recognition of the social and economic forces that drive language shift has led many linguists to see basic research in small, minority, and indigenous language communities as addressing issues of human rights (Nettle & Romaine 2000, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, Hinton 2002). Moral and political questions like who funds linguistic work, who carries it out, and who benefits from it and how are much harder to ignore in the context of these changes (Dorian 1993, England 1995). At the same time, changes in the way information is communicated, initiated by the spread of digital technology, have created demands for precise methods of referring to language names, written characters, lexical items, and other linguistic objects. But movements within the academy have not kept pace with these demands.

We present the first proposal of detailed internal subgrouping and higher-order structure of the Pama-Nyungan family of Australian languages. Previous work has identified more than twenty-five primary subgroups in the family, with little indication of how these groups might fit together. Some work has assumed that reconstruction of higher nodes in the tree was impossible, either because extensive internal borrowing has obscured more remote relations, or because the languages are not sufficiently well attested (see, for example, Bowern & Koch 2004b, Dixon 1997). With regard to the first objection, work by Alpher and Nash (1999) and Bowern and colleagues (2011) shows that loan levels are not high enough to obscure vertical transmission for all but a few languages. New data remove the second objection. Here we use Bayesian phylogenetic inference to show that the Pama-Nyungan tree has a discernible internal subgrouping. We identify four major divisions within the family and discuss the implications of this grouping for future work on the family.

Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips (2012) carried out two experiments in which they measured individual differences in memory to test processing accounts of island effects. They found that these individual differences failed to predict the magnitude of island effects, and they construe these findings as counterevidence to processing-based accounts of island effects. Here, we take up several problems with their methods, their findings, and their conclusions.

First, the arguments against processing accounts are based on null results using tasks that may be ineffective or inappropriate measures of working memory (the n-back and serial-recall tasks). The authors provide no evidence that these two measures predict judgments for other constructions that are difficult to process and yet are clearly grammatical. They assume that other measures of working memory would have yielded the same result, but provide no justification that they should. We further show that whether a working-memory measure relates to judgments of grammatical, hard-to-process sentences depends on how difficult the sentences are. In this light, the stimuli used by the authors present processing difficulties other than the island violations under investigation and may have been particularly hard to process. Second, the Sprouse et al. results are statistically in line with the hypothesis that island sensitivity varies with working memory. Three out of the four island types in their experiment 1 show a significant relation between memory scores and island sensitivity, but the authors discount these findings on the grounds that the variance accounted for is too small to have much import. This interpretation, however, runs counter to standard practices in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and psychology.