This article examines the role of subjecthood in the domain of anaphoric binding through the lens of West Circassian, a Northwest Caucasian language with ergative alignment. West Circassian reflexives and reciprocals display a puzzling mismatch in binding directionality with transitive ergative-absolutive predicates. Reflexives treat the ergative agent as the structurally higher argument, with the bound pronoun appearing in the position of the absolutive theme. A reciprocal pronoun, by contrast, appears in the ergative position and is bound by the absolutive theme, suggesting that the absolutive theme is structurally superior to the ergative agent. The article demonstrates that both anaphors are constrained in crosslinguistically familiar ways, but reflexives are subject to an additional licensing condition that limits the set of possible antecedents to the highest argument in the thematic domain. By demonstrating that structural superiority is domain-sensitive, the article challenges the significance of subjecthood as a grammatical primitive and argues that it should be replaced with a tree-geometrical notion of contextually determined prominence.

This study proposes a design for and examines the effects of a PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING approach to the promotion and assessment of deep learning in undergraduate linguistics education. Specifically, it reports on how the higher-order learning outcomes are achieved by students through a semester-long problem-solving task in an introductory Spanish linguistics course. Specific teaching strategies are described, and achievement is measured by student grades, self-evaluations, and reflections. This approach has proven effective for stimulating such higher-order thinking skills as (i) applying knowledge of the material to solving linguistic problems, (ii) developing skills in research and critical analysis, and (iii) developing a professional work ethic.

Hindi and several other Indo-Aryan languages contain a discourse marker that has been described as having a wide range of functions, including topic marking, intensive, emphatic, contrastive, and assertive. In Hindi, this function is realized by the enclitic =to. Possible translational equivalents for =to include expressions like in fact, sure, you know, well, as for, at least, finally, and but. This article investigates the diverse uses of =to and argues that the full range can be uniformly accounted for only if =to is taken to be a particle that signals that the question resolved by its prejacent is weak. The analysis treats =to as a generalized downtoner that comments on the strength of the question the prejacent addresses, relative to the speaker's information state, prior discourse moves, and assumptions about the common ground.

We present evidence for the influence of semantics on the order of subject, object, and verb in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras) sentences. While some have argued for a prevailing pattern of SVO in Libras, we find a strong tendency for this order in sentences that do not presuppose the existence of the verb's object, but not in sentences that do, which instead favor SOV. These findings are coherent with those of a recent study on gesture. We argue that the variable influence of the relevant predicates is particularly salient in sign languages, due to the iconic nature of the visual modality.

Dissatisfied with traditional grading, we developed a grading system to directly assess whether students have mastered course material. We identified the set of skills students need to master in a course and provided multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of each skill. We describe in detail how we implemented the system for two undergraduate courses, Introductory Phonetics and Phonology I. Our goals were to decrease student stress, increase student learning and make students' study efforts more effective, increase students' metacognitive awareness, promote a growth mindset, encourage students to aim for mastery rather than partial credit, be fairer to students facing structural and institutional disadvantages, reduce our time spent on grading, and facilitate complying with new accreditation requirements. Our own reflections and student feedback indicate that many of these goals were met.

This article presents four experiments that investigate the meaning of English and Italian statements containing the epistemic necessity auxiliary verb must/dovere, a topic of long-standing debate in the philosophical and linguistics literature. Our findings show that the endorsement of such statements in a given scenario depends on the participants' subjective assessment about whether they are convinced that the conclusion suggested by the scenario is true, independently from their objective assessment of the conclusion's likelihood. We interpret these findings as suggesting that English and Italian speakers use epistemic necessity verbs to communicate neither conclusions judged to be necessary (contrary to the prediction of the standard modal logical view) nor conclusions judged to be highly probable (contrary to the prediction of recent analyses using probabilistic models) but conclusions whose truth they believe in (as predicted by the analysis of epistemic must as an inferential evidential). We suggest that this evidential meaning of epistemic must/dovere might have arisen in everyday conversation from a reiterated hyperbolic use of the words with their original meaning as epistemic necessity verbs.

Why can't we say the asleep cat? There is a class of adjectives in English, all of which start with a schwa (e.g. afraid, alone, asleep, away, etc.), that cannot be used attributively in a prenominal position. A frequently invoked strategy for the acquisition of such negative constraints in language is to use indirect negative evidence. For instance, if the learner consistently observes paraphrases such as the cat that is asleep, then the conspicuous absence of the asleep cat may be a clue for its ungrammaticality (Boyd & Goldberg 2011). This article provides formal and quantitative evidence from child-directed English data to show that such learning strategies are untenable. However, the child can rely on positive data to establish the distributional similarities between this apparently idiosyncratic class of adjectives and locative particles (e.g. here, over, out, etc.) and prepositional phrases. With the use of an independently motivated principle of generalization (Yang 2005), the ungrammaticality of attributive usage can be effectively extended to the adjectives in question.

This discussion note compares several current linguistic theories: at the extreme ends of the current views are minimalist theories, which restrict themselves to the binary branching operations Move and Merge, and simpler syntax, which assumes flat structures and a surface-oriented mapping between syntactic structures and grammatical functions.

I show that purely surface-oriented theories have problems in accounting for the relatedness of syntactic and morphological structures and for the iteration of valence-changing processes, and I argue for a lexical analysis, as can be found in current minimalist theories, head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), and categorial grammar. I furthermore show that the Chomskyan view on label computation is problematic for several reasons and should be given up in favor of explicit accounts like the one used in HPSG. I discuss problems for the analysis of complements and specifiers in minimalist theories with special focus on Stabler's minimalist grammars. I argue that once all problems are fixed, the resulting combinatorial rules are rather similar to what HPSG does.

As various proponents of more surface-oriented theories like construction grammar, simpler syntax, and HPSG have pointed out, two types of binary branching, headed rules are not sufficient to account for the entirety of language, which leads to the conclusion that both research directions are right to a certain extent: there is need for (constraint-based versions of) Move and Merge and there is need for special phrasal constructions.

This discussion note revolves around the early days of generative grammar, that is to say the late 1950s and the 1960s. Anumber of commentators have claimed that MIT linguists in this period formed an elitist in-group, talking only to each other by means of inaccessible ‘underground’ publications and thereby erecting a barrier between themselves and the outside world of linguistics. I attempt to refute such claims. We see that the early generativists used every means at their disposal at the time to diffuse their ideas: publishing single-authored books, journal articles, anthology chapters, and technical reports; aiding the writing of textbooks; giving conference talks; teaching at LSA(Linguistic Society of America) Institutes; and hosting numerous visitors to MIT. And in particular, there was no significant ‘underground’ literature to obstruct the acceptance of the new theory.

This article focuses on the role of congruence in Creole formation and development, using a competition-and-selection framework. The proposal is that the similarities (the congruent features) that speakers perceive between the languages in contact are favored to participate in the emergence and development of a new language. Specifically, I illustrate how morphosyntactic and semantic features are more likely to be selected into the grammatical makeup of a given Creole when they PREEXIST and are shared by some of the source languages present in its linguistic ecology. This is empirically supported in this article by numerous case studies and a survey of congruent features in twenty contact languages across nineteen grammatical and lexical domains. In order to show how congruence operates, I propose a model of matter and pattern mapping, adapted to the multilingual setting in which Creole languages emerge.

The rajaz meter of Hausa is based on syllable quantity. In its dimeter form, it deploys lines consisting of two metra, each usually containing six moras. A variety of metra occur, and the key analytic challenge is to single out the legal metra from the set of logically possible ones. We propose an analysis, framed in maximum entropy optimality theory, that does this and also accounts for the statistical distribution of metron types, varying from poem to poem, within the line and stanza. We demonstrate a law of comparative frequency for rajaz and show how it emerges naturally in the maxent framework when competing candidates are in a relationship of harmonic bounding.

Turning to how the verse is sung, we observe that rajaz verse rhythm is typically remapped onto a distinct sung rhythm. We consider grammatical architectures that can characterize this remapping. Lastly, we develop a maxent phonetic grammar to predict the durations of the sung syllables. Our constraints simultaneously invoke all levels of structure: the syllables and moras of the phonology, the grids used for poetic scansion, and the grids used for sung rhythm.