As children learn their mother tongues, they make systematic errors. For example, English-speaking children regularly say mouses rather than mice. Because children's errors are not explicitly corrected, it has been argued that children could never learn to make the transition to adult language based on the evidence available to them, and thus that learning even simple aspects of grammar is logically impossible without recourse to innate, language-specific constraints. Here, we examine the role children's expectations play in language learning and present a model of plural noun learning that generates a surprising prediction: at a given point in learning, exposure to regular plurals (e.g. rats) can decrease children's tendency to overregularize irregular plurals (e.g. mouses). Intriguingly, the model predicts that the same exposure should have the opposite effect earlier in learning. Consistent with this, we show that testing memory for items with regular plural labels contributes to a decrease in irregular plural overregularization in six-year-olds, but to an increase in four-year-olds. Our model and results suggest that children's overregularization errors both arise and resolve themselves as a consequence of the distribution of error in the linguistic environment, and that far from presenting a logical puzzle for learning, they are inevitable consequences of it.

Manner and locative expressions modifying stative predicates, as in own (something) honestly and (be) quiet in the car, are rare compared to those modifying dynamic predicates, and it has been claimed (for example, in Maienborn 2005 and Katz 2008) that they are systematically excluded on semantic grounds. I argue here that this is not so: in fact, they are perfectly acceptable once the restrictions on them are understood. I propose further that these restrictions take the form of (i) a pragmatic condition that generally bans locative modification of stative predicates, but that may be overridden in certain defined contexts, and (ii) regular semantic incompatibilities between adverbs and stative predicates, which, being semantically ‘impoverished’, have relatively few modifiable semantic features compared to dynamic predicates. These proposals are supported by extensive examples. The conclusions indicate that there is no need to treat states as fundamentally different from other eventualities, whether by invoking Kimian states or by avoiding eventuality variables altogether in their representations.

This paper describes a process of laryngeal reduction in San Martín Peras Mixtec (SMPM; ISO: jmx), an Otomanguean language spoken in Oaxaca and by diasporic communities throughout Mexico and the US. In this process, roots containing a laryngealized vowel often appear in a highly reduced form in fast speech. Laryngeal reduction is gradient, dependent on speech rate, and lacks a phonologically-defined conditioning environment, giving it the characteristics of a phonetic process. However, it is at least sometimes correlated with a phonological process of mora deletion, as evidenced by the fact that some highly reduced laryngealized roots—but no unreduced laryngealized roots—undergo a phonological tone sandhi alternation that applies only to mono-moraic rising tones. The phonological process of mora deletion is argued to be conditioned by the same phonetic factors that drive laryngeal reduction, constituting an instance of a phonological process triggered by purportedly phonetic factors.

In Amuzgo (Eastern Otomanguean), the formation of nominal plurals exhibits many realizations, ranging from the simple addition of a nasal prefix (/n-tɛ2/ ‘PL-priesť → [ntɛ2]), to additional initial consonant fortition (/n-sa1/ ‘PL-elote’ → [ntsa1]; /n-ʦəiʔ3/ ‘PL-egg’ → [ntəiʔ3]; /n-ʃo²ʧi2/ ‘PL-griddle’ → [ŋko²ʧi2t]). initial consonant deletion (/n-ʧəm?2/ ‘PL-papeť → [ɲəm?2]), and sometimes also the replacement of the prefixai nasal by a lateral (/n-tsjo3/ ‘PL-bottle’ → [Ijo3]). In this paper, we argue that all of the changes above follow from two main principles: (1) The underlying contrast between the two pairs of phonemes characterized by a delayed release - the [+anterior] /s, ts/ and the [-anterior] /ʃ, ʧ/ - must be maintained; and (2) /s, ʃ/ cannot be faithfully realized after [n]. These principles, in interaction with other considerations, lead to an establishment of a push chain (/s/→/ts/→/t/) among [+anterior] consonants and to a case of saltation (/tʃ/→tʃ/; /ʃ/→/k/) among [-anterior] consonants.

A pattern of reduplication marks the intensity of evaluatives in Fungwa. CV syllables of nominal roots and CV prefixes can be reduplicated, but V syllables cannot. The intensity marker, which also has a CV shape due to an onset condition, can be multiply repeated. The reduplicative intensifier and its repetition(s) are akin to arbitrary affixes in the language in terms of their phonological characteristics, and they are also consistent with non-arbitrary sound-meaning mapping across languages. Formally, the repetition and shape of the reduplicant are considered to be effects of morphosyntax and markedness constraints. Considering that the evaluative marker and the intensifier are consistent with patterns of sound symbolism, Fungwa presents categorical evidence for the perspective that soundmeaning mapping involves both arbitrariness and non-arbitratriness.

This study is a prolegomenon to a formal theory of the natural growth of conceptual and lexical fields. Negation, in the various forms in which it occurs in language, is found to be a powerful indicator. Other than in standard logic, natural language negation selects its complement within universes of discourse that are, for practical and functional reasons, restricted in various ways and to different degrees. It is hypothesized that a system of cognitive principles drives recursive processes of universe restriction, which in turn affects logical relations within the restricted universes. This approach provides a new perspective in which to view the well-known clashes between standard logic and natural logical intuitions. Lexicalization in language, especially the morphological incorporation of negation, is limited to highly restricted universes, which explains, for example, why a dog can be said not to be a Catholic, but also not to be a non-Catholic. Cognition is taken to restrict the universe of discourse to contrary pairs, splitting up one or both of the contraries into further subuniverses as a result of further cognitive activity. It is shown how a logically sound Square of Opposition, expanded to a hexagon (Jacoby 1950, 1960, Sesmat 1951, Blanche 1952, 1953, 1966), is generated by a hierarchy of universe restrictions, defining the notion ‘natural’ for logical systems. The Logical Hexagon contains two additional vertices, one for ‘some but not all’ (the Y-type) and one for ‘either all or none’ (the U-type), and incorporates both the classic square and the Hamiltonian Triangle of Contraries. Some is thus considered semantically ambiguous, representing two distinct quantifiers. The pragmaticist claim that the language system contains only the standard logical ‘some perhaps all’ and that the ‘some but not all’ meaning is pragmatically derived from the use of the system is rejected. Four principles are proposed according to which negation selects a complement from the subuniverses at hand. On the basis of these principles and of the logico-cognitive system proposed, the well-known nonlexicalization not only of *nall and *nand but also of many other nonlogical cases found throughout the lexicons of languages is analyzed and explained.

In the analysis of free variation in phonology, we often encounter the effects of INTERSECTING CONSTRAINT FAMILIES: there are two independent families of constraints, each of which has a quantifiable effect on the outcome. A challenge for theories is to account for the patterns that emerge from such intersection. We address three cases: Tagalog nasal substitution, French liaison/elision, and Hungarian vowel harmony, using corpus data. We characterize the patterns we find as across-the-board effects in both dimensions, restrained by floor and ceiling limits. We analyze these patterns using several formal frameworks, and find that an accurate account is best based on HARMONIC GRAMMAR (in one of its two primary quantitative implementations). Our work also suggests that certain lexical distinctions treated as discrete by classical phonological theory (e.g. ‘h-aspiré’ vs. ordinary vowel-initial words of French) are in fact gradient and require quantitative treatment.

Studies of variable lenition patterns converge on two phonetic properties as characteristic of lenition: reduced duration and increased intensity. However, the causal precedence of the two factors remains unclear. We focus on the causal structure of variable lenition. Study 1 examines the relationship between three correlates of lenition—speech rate, stress, and low information content—and their effect on reduced duration and increased intensity. We find that though increased intensity is more prototypically viewed as the core aspect of lenition, the effect of the three correlates on intensity is mediated by duration. Study 2 shows that all frequent lenition processes in the Buckeye corpus involve durational reduction. The contribution of this article is a proposal with a fairly simple principle, with few auxiliary assumptions: reduced duration precedes increased intensity in variable lenition.

Tagalog adjectives and nouns variably occur in two word orders, separated by an intermediary linker: adjective-linker-noun versus noun-linker-adjective. The linker has two phonologically conditioned surface forms, -ng and na. This article presents a large-scale corpus study of adjective/ noun order variation in Tagalog, focusing in particular on phonological conditions. Results show that word-order variation in adjective/noun pairs optimizes for phonological structure, abiding by phonotactic, syllabic, and morphophonological well-formedness preferences that are also found elsewhere in Tagalog grammar. The results indicate that surface phonological information is accessible for word-order choice.

Morphological strategies for inflectional exponence have traditionally been associated with different stages in the evolution of languages. Moreover, the so-called MORPHOLOGICAL CYCLE (or the TYPOLOGICAL CYCLE inmorphology) is claimed to involve a unidirectional sequence of changes that leads from isolation to agglutination (separative exponence in inflection) and subsequently to fusion (cumulative exponence). But this rigid schema happens to exclude a wealth of diachronic developments that are solidly attested in the history of various languages: the shift from cumulative toward separative exponence perhaps constitutes the strongest challenge to the unidirectionality hypothesis implied by the classic typological cycle. Here I survey the data illustrating agglutinative developments inside fusional systems, a task that first requires a canonical definition of morphological techniques. Then the mechanisms underlying this significant typological change are classified and analyzed in detail. The final part of the article is devoted to discussing the possible causes behind the reversal of the morphological cycle. The diachronic evidence at our disposal points to a rather clear differentiation between the language-internal causes that seem to determine the shift from agglutinative to fusional structures and the language-external causes (contact influence of a particular kind) that commonly lie behind the reverse morphological change.

A compositional analysis is provided of temporal perspective and orientation (Condoravdi 2002) of modals in Dutch, English, Gitksan (Tsimshianic), and St‘át'imcets (Lillooet Salish). Modals interact freely with the tense-aspect architecture in each language. Temporal perspective is determined by an operator scoping over the modal, usually tense, while temporal orientation is determined by aspectual operators below it (and further restricted by the diversity condition). In contrast to much of the literature, it is argued that epistemic modals can scope under past tense. Modal-temporal interactions behave in predictable ways in Dutch, Gitksan, and St‘át'imcets, whereas the English system is more idiosyncratic and partly lexicalized.

Sentences that contain the verb ‘seem’, an experiencer, and an embedded infinitival phrase (e.g. Jill seems to me to be smart) have traditionally been considered acceptable in English, but not in Spanish. However, a corpus analysis reveals that such sentences are produced in both languages, most commonly with the embedded infinitives ‘be’ and ‘have’. Acceptability judgment tasks completed by fifty English speakers and fifty Spanish speakers further reveal that the embedded verbs ‘be’ and ‘have’ render this sentence structure most acceptable in both languages, and that the degree of contextual subjectivity in a sentence significantly affects acceptability. This study demonstrates how multiple data types can be used to uncover novel crosslinguistic patterns that have gone unnoticed in previous research that was based primarily on informal introspective judgments.