Vowels vary systematically in F0 based on intrinsic properties of the vowel (e.g. height: VF0) and preceding obstruent (e.g. voicing: CF0). These patterns have been attested in most languages studied, raising the possibility that they stem from physiological sources. However, previous results show a range of variability in maximum effect size and duration. One explanation is that variation could be learned and increased to enhance phonological contrasts or suppressed for functional reasons (e.g. for tone languages). Alternatively, differences could be due to physiological factors such as laryngeal contrast type. We map out the distribution of intrinsic F0 effects across twenty languages, using large corpora of read speech, operationalizing CF0 as the difference between stop series that most closely approximate phonologically ‘voiced’ and ‘voiceless’ stops. We find that both VF0 and CF0 effects are present and are in the same direction in all languages examined, but languages vary greatly in effect size. While some of this variability may be due to phonological properties of the languages (e.g. tone), and some variability in CF0 may be due to the diverse phonetic realizations of ‘voicing’ across languages, much of this variability remains to be explained. We find that the CF0 effect is consistently at least as large as the VF0 effect and is more variable across languages, suggesting a possible explanation for the tendency for CF0 effects to lead to sound change much more often than VF0 effects do. While our results on variability in CF0 effects rely on the validity of ‘lumping’ together diverse phonetic realizations, those on the robustness of CF0 and VF0 and on the variability in VF0 hold regardless. These results motivate further investigation to deepen our understanding of intrinsic F0 effects, their crosslinguistic distribution, and their role as precursors to sound change.

Language learners are often faced with a scenario where the data allow multiple generalizations, even though only one is actually correct. One promising solution to this problem is that children are equipped with helpful learning strategies that guide the types of generalizations made from the data. Two successful approaches in recent work for identifying these strategies have involved (i) expanding the set of informative data to include INDIRECT POSITIVE EVIDENCE, and (ii) using observable behavior as a target state for learning. We apply both of these ideas to the case study of English anaphoric one, using computationally modeled learners that assume one’s antecedent is the same syntactic category as one and form their generalizations based on realistic data. We demonstrate that a learner that is biased to include indirect positive evidence coming from other pronouns in English can generate eighteen-month-old looking-preference behavior. Interestingly, we find that the knowledge state responsible for this target behavior is a context- dependent representation for anaphoric one, rather than the adult representation, but this immature representation can suffice in many communicative contexts involving anaphoric one. More generally, these results suggest that children may be leveraging broader sets of data to make the syntactic generalizations leading to their observed behavior, rather than selectively restricting their input. We additionally discuss the components of the learning strategies capable of producing the observed behavior, including their possible origin and whether they may be useful for making other linguistic generalizations.

Macaulay and Brice (1997:798) surveyed example sentences in eleven syntax textbooks published from 1969–1994 and found that virtually all of the authors ‘favor male-gendered NPs as subjects and agents, and regularly stereotype both genders’. In this article, we address the question of whether constructed example sentences in more recent textbooks show similar gender bias. We present an analysis of six syntax textbooks published from 2005–2017, from which we randomly sampled 200 example sentences each. We find that the gender skew and stereotypes reported in 1997 are still present today. Male-gendered arguments are almost twice as frequent as female-gendered ones, and more likely to occur as subjects and agents. In addition, example sentences often perpetuate gender stereotypes. We discuss some broader implications and potential interventions to prevent the implicit perpetuation of gender biases in linguistic materials.

Transitivity involves a number of components, only one of which is the presence of an object of the verb. These components are all concerned with the effectiveness with which an action takes place, e.g., the punctuality and telicity of the verb, the conscious activity of the agent, and the referentiality and degree of affectedness of the object. These components co-vary with one another in language after language, which suggests that Transitivity is a central property of language use. The grammatical and semantic prominence of Transitivity is shown to derive from its characteristic discourse function: high Transitivity is correlated with foregrounding, and low Transitivity with backgrounding.

Joe Pater's (2019) target article calls for greater interaction between neural network research and linguistics. I expand on this call and show how such interaction can benefit both fields. Linguists can contribute to research on neural networks for language technologies by clearly delineating the linguistic capabilities that can be expected of such systems, and by constructing controlled experimental paradigms that can determine whether those desiderata have been met. In the other direction, neural networks can benefit the scientific study of language by providing infrastructure for modeling human sentence processing and for evaluating the necessity of particular innate constraints on language acquisition.

We investigate the role of two possible sets of factors, cognitive and social, in modulating an individual's linguistic context-sensitivity: the capacity of a neurocognitive system to identify information in a communicative context that satisfies the meaning requirements of a given expression in that context. We assess whether the degree of contextual facilitation of an otherwise dispreferred reading of an English have-sentence is correlated with domain-general cognitive factors—by using the AUTISM-SPECTRUM QUOTIENT (AQ) to index an individual's ‘autistic-like’ traits—and/or with social factors associated with gender expression—by using participants' gender group.

Acceptability ratings (n = 271) for a dispreferred but plausible locative reading were significantly higher only after the facilitatory context, suggesting that relevant context can modulate the acceptability of different readings of a have-sentence. Crucially, the degree of facilitation correlates with participants' AQ scores, but not gender group, directly implicating cognitive variability in linguistic context-sensitivity differences, and leaving open the question of individual-level variability arising from social factors. Our findings are consistent with a model of language variation in which individuals with certain cognitive styles implement their grammatical knowledge at a larger ‘communicative scope’ than others, thereby inducing novel usage patterns of existing variants in their speech community.

In this article, we present the Pangloss Collection, a collection of digital corpora of (mostly) endangered or underdocumented languages, developed in France since the 1990s in the context of a global realization of the considerable potential of digital technologies. The Pangloss Collection currently hosts 1,180 hours of audio and video recordings of about 200 languages. These materials are archived for the long-term using a suite of French public services for digital humanities. The Pangloss Collection can be freely accessed through a bilingual English-French website that was reshaped in 2021 to offer a general-audience interface mode and a professional interface mode (see https://pangloss.cnrs.fr/).

Individual languages in the Mayan family display either rigid VSO or alternating VOS/VSO word orders (England 1991). In this article we review problems with previous accounts of Mayan word order and argue that verb-initial (V1) order is consistently derived by head movement of the verb to a position above the subject and below Infl0, which accounts for uniformity in verb-stem formation across the family. After an in-depth examination of the factors that have been reported to determine postverbal argument order, we present three distinct paths to VOS: (i) postsyntactic reordering of NP objects (following Clemens 2014, 2017), (ii) right-side subject topicalization (Can Pixabaj 2004, Curiel 2007), and (iii) heavy-NP shift (Larsen 1988). This account makes testable predictions in the domains of word order and prosodic constituency and has implications for the derivation of verb-initial order crosslinguistically.

Ross (1967) observed that the coordinate structure constraint can be violated in certain semantically asymmetric structures. In this article we consider one of these structures, namely type A coordination, in detail (the terminology is from Lakoff 1986; an example is Here's the whisky I went to the store and bought). We present experimental evidence showing that the pattern of argument and adjunct extraction from type A coordinate structures matches the pattern of argument and adjunct extraction from structures containing rationale clauses in all crucial respects. This near-perfect parallel behavior suggests that, like rationale clauses, the second conjunct in a type A coordination is an adjunct (see also Brown 2017). We explore the consequences of this finding for both interpretive and syntactic analyses of asymmetric coordination.

The conventional wisdom regarding the diachronic process whereby phonetic phenomena become phonologized appears to be the ‘error accumulation’ model, so called by Baker, Archangeli, and Mielke (2011). Under this model, biases in the phonetic context result in production or perception errors, which are misapprehended by listeners as target productions, and over time accumulate into new target productions. In this article, I explore the predictions of the hypocorrection model for one phonetic change (prevoiceless /ay/-raising) in detail. I argue that properties of the phonetic context underpredict and mischaracterize the contextual conditioning on this phonetic change. Rather, it appears that categorical, phonological conditioning is present from the very onset of this change.

Mainland Scandinavian languages have been reported to allow movement from embedded questions, relative clauses, and complex NPs—domains commonly considered to be islands crosslinguistically. Yet in formal acceptability studies Scandinavian participants often show ‘island effects’: they reject island-violating movement similarly to native speakers of ‘island-sensitive’ languages. To investigate this apparent mismatch between informal and formal judgments, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments testing the acceptability of topicalization from various island domains in Norwegian. We were interested in determining whether we could (i) find evidence for island insensitivity and (ii) pin down the source of qualitatively different island effects. We asked whether such effects are best explained as reflecting violations of a uniform syntactic constraint or extrasyntactic factors. Our results suggest that embedded questions and relative clauses are not uniform syntactic islands for topicalization, but complex NPs are. Unexpectedly, we also found evidence suggesting that conditional adjunct clauses may not be islands.