In this article, we develop a theory of the form and interpretation of nonrestrictive nominal appositives (NAPs) by combining two recent syntactic and pragmatic approaches. Following Ott (2016), we assume that NAPs are independent elliptical speech acts, which are linearly interpolated into their host sentences in production. Building on insights in Onea 2016, we argue that NAPs make their pragmatic contribution as short answers to discourse-structuring Potential Questions. We show how these two assumptions combine to yield a comprehensive theory of NAPs that captures their central syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties and furthermore sheds light on the mechanisms that govern their linear interpolation.

We describe #FPGlobal, a digital platform for revitalizing Francoprovençal, a threatened and underdocumented language. This platform connects speakers and learners of Francoprovençal varieties in three European and two North American countries. Its community-developed, sociolinguistically informed, and electronically mediated approach fosters communication that is less likely to trigger essentialist language ideologies common to language endangerment contexts. Early uptake of the platform illustrates how it encourages language users to share multimodal responses to prompts, archives these responses, and develops corpora of speech and text with potential utility for both pedagogy and research. Our participatory framework increases cross-variety and intergenerational language use, introduces Francoprovençal into new domains, fosters a new generation of linguists, and offers data for investigating developing writing systems and variation patterns.

A central question of language comprehension concerns the interaction between linguistic form and broader representations of discourse in the interpretation of context-sensitive expressions. This interaction is instantiated in the interpretation of verb phrase ellipsis (VPE), where previous work has shown that the linguistic antecedent and the broader context are both considered in resolution. Using a novel experimental paradigm, we investigated VPE interpretation in discourses where the antecedent and the broader context make different information available for inclusion in the interpretation of the ellipsis site. Our results point to a complex interaction between linguistic antecedents and the broader discourse context in interpretation, putting considerable constraints on the set of possible models for VPE resolution. This work contributes to a better understanding of both the connections between and the boundaries separating linguistic structure and mental models of discourse contexts.

This article investigates a novel use of much in a construction that has not yet been recognized in the theoretical literature—as in Angry, much?—which we dub ‘expressive much’. Our primary proposal is that expressive much is a shunting operator in the sense of McCready 2010, which targets a gradable predicate and adds a speaker's evaluative attitude about the degree to which an individual stands out on the relevant scale. In particular, we argue that it does so in a way that allows it to perform an ‘expressive question’, which can be understood as a counterpart to a polar question, but in the expressive meaning dimension. In doing so, we present the first example of a shunting expression in English and provide, based on Gunlogson 2008, a new model of the discourse context that allows us to account for the different ways that expressive and nonexpressive content enters the common ground.

This article examines the ways in which explanation has been achieved in scientific work on language change over the last two hundred years. Explanations have come in many forms and at many levels and are greatly influenced by what are taken as the leading questions, which themselves have varied significantly since the early nineteenth century.

The conscience of the world has shifted greatly since we started this direct engagement with the linguistics community on issues of race, racism, and social justice. The COVID-19 pandemic and the widespread protests in response to statesanctioned police violence toward Black and African-American people have renewed and intensified conversations about racial justice and equity. Many linguists and linguistics departments are now actively grappling with what race and racism mean as theoretical concepts, how we can both address the study of race and act against racist practices in our discipline, and how to work on being not just ‘less racist’ but indeed antiracist in every aspect of our intellectual, professional, and personal lives. We are challenged to think about how we can center the lives and experiences of people of various racial backgrounds, rather than primarily centering whiteness, in linguistics departments. In doing so, we must more directly ask the question: how would linguistics have to change in order for more people from various racial groups to actively want to study, teach, and learn linguistics? We also need to emphasize that these are necessarily intersectional issues and that racialization is intimately tied to inequities on the basis of gender identity, socioeconomic status, disability, citizenship, and other parameters of social difference.

How may the structure of a new linguistic community shape language emergence and change? The 1817 founding of the US's first enduring school for the deaf, the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, heralded profound changes in the lives of deaf North Americans. We report the demographics of the early signing community at ASD through quantitative analyses of the 1,700 students who attended the school during its first fifty years. The majority were adolescents, with adults also well represented. Prior to 1845, children under age eight were absent. We consider two groups of students who may have made important linguistic contributions to this early signing community: students with deaf relatives and students from Martha's Vineyard. We conclude that adolescents played a crucial role in forming the New England signing community. Young children may have pushed the emergence of ASL, but likely did so at home in deaf families, not at ASD.

This article discusses the effects of variation in the meaning of property concept (PC) lexemes (Dixon 1982) on the form of predicative and comparative constructions. We demonstrate the existence of two kinds of PC lexeme, which differ systematically in how they participate in constructions expressing the truth conditions of PC predication. The first kind of lexeme is used in canonical predicative constructions, the other in predicative constructions that invoke possessive morphology or syntax. The differences between the two classes are observable both within a single language and crosslinguistically. The article argues that the morphosyntactic differences in the behavior of the two lexeme types are predictable from their lexical semantics. Specifically, we argue that some PC lexemes denote mass substances (in a technical sense) and therefore require possessive semantics to achieve the relevant truth conditions. A semantic theory for substancedenoting lexemes is developed, and a compositional analysis of the relevant constructions is presented for Ulwa, an endangered Misumalpan language of Nicaragua. We argue that assuming semantic variation is necessary, since the observed generalizations cannot be captured by extending existing semantic analyses of gradable adjectives to all PC lexemes.

The lexicalist hypothesis, which says that the component of grammar that produces words is distinct and strictly separate from the component that produces phrases, is both wrong and superfluous. It is wrong because (i) there are numerous instances where phrasal syntax feeds word formation; (ii) there are cases where phrasal syntax can access subword parts; and (iii) claims that word formation and phrasal syntax obey different principles are not correct. The lexicalist hypothesis is superfluous because where there are facts that it is supposed to account for, those facts have independent explanations. The model of grammar that we are led to is then the most parsimonious one: there is only one combinatorial component of grammar that puts together both words and phrases.

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.

This study is concerned with whether an asymmetric phonetic overlap between speaker groups contributes to the directional spread of sound change. An acoustic analysis of speakers of Southern British English showed that younger speakers’ fronted /u/ was probabilistically closer to that of older speakers’ retracted /u/ distributions than the other way around. Agent-based modeling based on the same data showed an asymmetric shift of older toward younger speakers’ fronted /u/. The general conclusion is that sound change is likely to be propagated when a phonetic bias within an individual is further magnified by a difference between speaker groups that is in the same direction.

Sequences such as [mb, kp, ts] pattern as complex segments in some languages but as clusters of simple consonants in others. What evidence is used to learn their language-specific status? We present an implemented computational model that starts with simple consonants and builds more complex representations by tracking statistical distributions of consonant sequences. This strategy succeeds in a wide range of cases, both in languages that supply clear phonotactic arguments for complex segments and in languages where the evidence is less clear. We then turn to the typological parallels between complex segments and consonant clusters: both tend to be limited in size and composition. We suggest that our approach allows the parallels to be reconciled. Finally, we compare our model with alternatives: learning complex segments from phonotactics and from phonetics.

Documentary linguistics is new and distinctive enough that some linguists and other participants in academic reviews may be uncertain about how to assess its outputs. We recommend specific strategies for assessing documentary linguistic scholarship in academic review contexts, based on a brief description of the field for the benefit of colleagues in other areas.