Whorfian socioeconomics is an emerging interdisciplinary field of study that holds that linguistic structures explain differences in beliefs, values, and opinions across communities. This field, which draws on linguistic relativity but extends it radically, holds that linguistic features are a fundamental explanation for variation in human behavior. This essay provides a conceptual overview and methodological critique of Whorfian socioeconomics, with a particular emphasis on empirical studies that document a correlation between the presence or absence of a linguistic feature in a survey respondent's language and their responses to survey questions. Using the universe of linguistic features from the World atlas of language structures online and a wide array of responses from the World Values Survey, I show that such an approach produces highly statistically significant correlations in a majority of analyses, irrespective of the theoretical plausibility linking linguistic features to respondent beliefs and behavior. I show how two simple and well-understood statistical fixes can more accurately reflect uncertainty in these analyses, and use them to replicate two prominent findings in Whorfian socioeconomics. The essay concludes by reflecting on the common methodological challenges facing linguists and other social scientists interested in nonlinguistic effects of linguistic structures.

A central debate in the literature on grammatical number systems and nominal semantics is whether the countable/noncountable contrast is ontologically based or ultimately arbitrary. This article examines this question in light of several languages that express three or more categories of grammatical number, in particular including a collective category containing nouns of an intermediate status between prototypical countable nouns and prototypical noncountable nouns. I connect this crosslinguistic data to psycholinguistic research on individuation, identifying several individuation types, that is, noun meanings organized into equivalence classes based on shared individuation properties. The individuation types themselves can be ordered, giving rise to a scale of individuation. I propose that the organization of grammatical number systems reflects the scale of individuation, effectively steering a middle course between ontological and grammatical accounts. This approach accounts for a range of grammatical number systems and makes broad predictions bearing on what possible grammatical number systems are.

We review The Austronesian languages, by Robert Blust, with particular attention to how some of Blust's generalizations about the phonology and morphology of Austronesian languages play out in Malagasy and Chamorro.

This article expands on cophonologies by phase, a model of the interface between morphology and phonology, which was introduced in Sande & Jenks 2018. The crucial innovation of cophonologies by phase is the enhancement of lexical or vocabulary items to include morpheme-specific constraint weights. These weights modify the default phonological grammar of the language only in the domain of evaluation that contains the triggering morpheme, where domains are determined by syntactic phase boundaries. The interactions of the default grammar and morpheme-specific constraint weights function as cophonologies (Orgun 1996, Anttila 2002, Inkelas & Zoll 2005, 2007) in that they result in morphosyntactic construction-specific phonological grammars. Here, cophonologies by phase is shown to provide a unified account of syntactically, morphologically, and lexically conditioned phonological alternations, phenomena that have been analyzed using distinct theoretical tools in previous work. In order to demonstrate the application of cophonologies by phase to a diverse set of interface interactions, this article considers three case studies of phonological alternations in Guébie (ISO: gie), an endangered Kru language, each conditioned by a different set of extraphonological factors.

This response builds upon ideas introduced in Charity Hudley et al.'s (2020) target article by focusing on the themes of excellence and racial justice. In addition to relying on previous academic work on race and racism, I also draw from my own experiences as a person of color in the field of linguistics and as a scholar who works with racially minoritized communities. The primary claims of this paper are that the field of linguistics as a whole benefits from broadening and deepening our conceptualizations of scholarly excellence and from consciously attending to the needs and concerns of scholars and community members from racially minoritized groups. To support these claims, I discuss ways in which institutional structures of universities hinder equity and inclusion by marginalizing contributions of scholars from racially minoritized groups and by promoting extractive and neocolonial work involving minoritized communities. I conclude by offering general principles that can serve as guides for fostering greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in university settings. These principles involve acknowledging present shortcomings, aligning the reward system to a broadened notion of excellence and to inclusion, and embracing creative alternatives.

Inspired by Beddor 2009, this article explores whether and how trading relations between coarticulatory source and effect may serve as a precursor for sound change. It aims at extending the case of vowel nasalization examined by Beddor to the relationship between closure voicing (source) and co-intrinsic pitch (effect). Through four production and perception studies, we show that the inverse source-effect relation observed for vowel nasalization is not found in the voicing contrast of French, a true-voicing language. Instead, we propose that the phonologization of co-intrinsic pitch (a.k.a. tonogenesis) originates from spontaneous devoicing (a production bias), which subsequently triggers an upweighting of pitch (a perceptual adaptation strategy).

In this article we lay out the tenets of a communicative repertoire (CR) approach to meeting the needs of English learners (ELs) in the context of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). We begin by critiquing the underlying theory of language that has long guided approaches to EL instruction. We then illustrate how the CR approach builds on more contemporary understandings of language and language development, noting its compatibility with the CCSS, and providing an example of what this approach looks like in a twelfth-grade English literature class for ELs. Building from this example, we illustrate the general framework for developing lessons from a CR perspective that align with the CCSS and can be used across a variety of instructional settings. Finally, we discuss what policies and opportunities for teacher professional development might be conducive to supporting this instructional approach and to ensuring that the CCSS is implemented in ways that maximize EL academic achievement and engagement.

What motivates a fluent bilingual speaker to switch languages within a single utterance? We propose a novel discourse-functional motivation: less predictable, high information-content meanings are encoded in one language, and more predictable, lower information-content meanings are encoded in another language. Switches to a speaker's less frequently used, and hence more salient, language offer a distinct encoding that highlights information-rich material that comprehenders should attend to especially carefully. Using a corpus of natural Czech-English bilingual discourse, we test this hypothesis against an extensive set of control factors from sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and discourse-functional lines of research using mixed-effects logistic regression, in the first such quantitative multifactorial investigation of code-switching in discourse. We find, using a Shannon guessing game to quantify predictability of meanings in conversation, that words with difficult-to-guess meanings are indeed more likely to be code-switch sites, and that this is in fact one of the most highly explanatory factors in predicting the occurrence of code-switching in our data. We argue that choice of language thus serves as a formal marker of information content in discourse, along with familiar means such as prosody and syntax. We further argue for the utility of rigorous, multifactorial approaches to sociolinguistic speaker-choice phenomena in natural conversation.

This article investigates the syntactic properties of deponents in finite and nonfinite contexts in several Indo-European languages (Vedic Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Latin, Hittite, Modern Greek) and proposes a novel definition of deponency: deponents are morphologically nonactive verbs with noncanonical agent arguments that are merged below VoiceP. Since VoiceP is spelled out with nonactive morphology in those languages if it does not introduce an external argument itself, the result is a surface mismatch between morphological form and syntactic function. This proposal predicts that only certain nonfinite forms of deponents will surface with the syntax/morphology mismatch, namely, those that include VoiceP. Nominalizations without VoiceP will appear to suspend the voice mismatch. These predictions are shown to be correct with respect to the behavior of deponent participles in the languages under study.

In Landau 2015, it is proposed that the acceptability of implicit control (i.e. control by the implicit external argument of a passivized verb into complement clauses) is not only restricted by the revised Visser's generalization (van Urk 2013), but also depends on the type of matrix predicate involved. While attitude matrix predicates allow implicit control (IMPLICIT LOGOPHORIC CONTROL), nonattitude matrix predicates do not. Landau takes this bifurcation to support his TWOTIERED THEORY OF CONTROL by assuming that in the case of nonattitude matrix predicates, the control relation is essentially a predication relation, from which implicit arguments are independently excluded. In this article, we subject these claims to empirical scrutiny, showing that Landau's generalization on implicit control holds only in a subset of languages, while other languages license implicit control with both types of matrix predicates. We investigate and reject the hypothesis that this crosslinguistic split is the consequence of different types of implicit arguments, only some of which are syntactically represented in a way that allows them to enter a predication relation. Based on an investigation of the acceptability of agent-modifying depictives in passives, we conclude that, in principle, implicit external arguments of passives in all languages under consideration can enter predication. We show, however, that there is a different correlation: languages that allow implicit control with nonattitude verbs (IMPLICIT PREDICATIVE CONTROL) are exactly those languages that allow impersonal passives of unergative predicates. To account for this correlation, we argue that implicit logophoric control, but not implicit predicative control, can be construed as a personal passive.

In many languages, finite-clause-embedding verbs vary in whether they allow WH-dependencies to cross from the embedded to the matrix clause—a phenomenon we call ‘bridge effects’. Why bridge effects exist has been the subject of much debate; we argue that contributing to the lack of consensus are the relatively small samples of verbs (from twelve to seventy-five for English) previously tested in the literature. To resolve this issue, we report two new data sets of bridge effects covering a nearly exhaustive sample of 640 English verbs. We use these data sets to address three research questions: Are there bridge effects at all? How well do leading theories of bridge effects explain observed variation across the full range of verbs? And are there new patterns emerging from our data that could lead to a better theory? We ultimately argue in favor of a multivariate approach, drawing upon existing ideas while including a novel morphosyntactic licensing component identified from our data. We also discuss implications for theories of locality and explore how context might affect the acceptability of WH-dependencies.

This article provides a general analysis of the semantics of person, broadly construed, through a case study of Ojibwe (Central Algonquian). Ojibwe shows person-like distinctions based on whether an entity is living or nonliving (i.e. animacy) and, within living things, whether a being is prominent or backgrounded in the discourse (i.e. obviation). The central principle of the account is contrast: the activation and interpretation of a feature is driven by the requirement that it makes a cut to derive the proper categories within a given inventory. With this principle, I show that a small set of bivalent features denoting first-order predicates can capture Ojibwe as well as a wider typology of person, animacy, obviation, and noun classification distinctions.

A key learning outcome for undergraduate linguistics courses is for students to learn to reason scientifically about language. This article presents the findings from a think-aloud study of undergraduates in an introductory linguistics course who were in the process of learning linguistic reasoning about phonology. I describe the students’ developing concepts and make recommendations for instructors to help students develop fully formed linguistics concepts and the ability to think scientifically about language.