From my perspective, Pater's (2019) target article does a great service both to researchers who work in generative linguistics and to researchers who utilize neural networks—and especially to researchers who might find themselves wanting to do both by harnessing the insights of each tradition. The fusion of theories of linguistic representation and probabilistic learning techniques has certainly led to many interesting and valuable insights about the nature of both linguistic representation and the language acquisition process. However, I feel that the most exciting aspect of Pater's article is the increasing interpretability of neural network models, especially when combined with insights from the theoretical framework of generative linguistics. This allows for the possibility that neural networks could be used to actually generate new theories of representation. I describe how I think this theory-generation process might work with interpretable neural networks.

Grammaticalization as standardly conceived is a change whereby an item develops from a lexical to a grammatical or functional meaning, or from being less to more grammatical. In this article we show that this can only be part of the story; for a full account we need to understand the syntactic structures into which grammaticalizing elements fit and how they too develop. To achieve this end we consider in detail the history of definiteness marking within the noun phrase in North Germanic, and in particular in Faroese. We show how this change requires us to distinguish between projecting and nonprojecting categories, and how a category can emerge over time and only subsequently develop into a head with its own associated functional projection. The necessary structure, rather than being intrinsic to an aprioristic universal grammar, grows over time as part of the grammaticalization process. We suggest that this in turn argues for a parallel correspondence theory of grammar such as the one adopted here, LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR, in which different dimensions of linguistic structure can change at different rates.

This article presents a case of allotony based on the phonation of the vowel in Nuer, a Western Nilotic language; the falling tone is found only on modal vowels in this language, while the high level tone is found only on breathy vowels. We describe the phenomenon and present evidence suggesting that it may be due to the neutralization of two separate tonal contours, H and HL, conditioned by the phonation of the vowel. We place this phenomenon within the known typology of phonation-tone interaction and advance a proposal as to the phonetic factors behind its development.

Discussing language variation in introductory linguistics courses is a given in helping university students understand that speakers and communities use language differently. For Spanish majors/minors in the US, such content can be explored in linguistics courses taught in Spanish. However, little research has been done on pedagogy for teaching Hispanic linguistics in this context. Following an action-based design, this study contributes to research on linguistics pedagogy by exploring how students in four sections of an introductory Spanish linguistics course reacted not only to the topic of social and/or structural variation but also to the use of corpus tools in exploring this topic.

Negation in Tuparí (Tupían; Brazil) is an exclusively nominal category: verbs must enter into a nominalized form to accept the negator -'om and must undergo a subsequent process of reverbalization so as to combine with tense and evidential morphology. These category-changing processes leave -'om in a low position in the clause, and scopal evidence confirms that negation is also interpreted low. In keeping with the low structural position of -'om, the same negative strategy known from finite matrix clauses appears in nonfinite embedded contexts as well.

Tuparí shows that negative phrases exhibit more crosslinguistic variation than standardly assumed: they may appear in either the nominal or verbal extended projection. This finding is not compatible with cartographic efforts to strictly circumscribe the distribution of NegP within the clause. Like nominal tense in Tupi-Guaraní and other languages, in Tuparí a grammatical category normally associated with the verbal domain instead surfaces within the nominal one. For the purpose of typological comparison, the Tuparí facts highlight the need for classifications of negation that take into account both constructional asymmetries between affirmative and negative clauses and individual negator morphemes' selectional and categorical properties.

In this article we consider the nature of ‘result verbs’, typically defined as verbs describing scalar changes, which have played a significant role in the literature on verb typologies, event structures, and theories of (im)possible word meanings. We argue that the entailment of scalar change and the entailment of a new result state should not be wholly conflated. Rather, various previously proposed diagnostics for scalar change actually pick out at least two distinct notions— entailing change along a scale regardless of whether a new state obtains for the theme argument, more broadly, and change along a scale that does result in a new state, more narrowly. We specifically examine verbs of manner of motion, with a special emphasis on the verb climb, and show that there is a subclass of manner-of-motion verbs that entail scalar change without a new result and are themselves also cross-classified by other standard distinctions among scalar change verbs. These observations have several consequences. First, manner-of-motion verbs are not as distinct from path verbs as prior work in the Talmy typology has suggested. Second, prior diagnostics for identifying result verbs and subtypes of result verbs are sensitive to the various distinctions we propose, producing more nuanced results than previously assumed. Third, the observation that a large swath of manner-of-motion verbs also have result entailments further supports the conclusion in Beavers & Koontz-Garboden 2012 that there is no truth-conditional manner/result complementarity in verb meaning, expanding the base of potential counterexamples and raising questions about how the claim is meant to be interpreted.

Northern Paiute uses clause chaining to express certain temporal relations between clauses, which are conveyed by temporal subordinators such as after and while in English. Rather than a subordination structure, however, I show that clause chaining in Northern Paiute has an underlying coordination structure. I propose that temporal relations between the clauses in a chain arise, in part, from verbal morphology conveying relative tense. In Northern Paiute, relative tense can be bound in a coordination structure, as in an embedded clause in other languages (Ogihara 1994, 1995, 1996, Abusch 1997). In addition, I argue that this semantics is enriched pragmatically to produce a ‘forward-moving’ temporal interpretation characteristic of narrative discourse (Kamp & Rohrer 1983, among others). This in-depth investigation of one language raises questions about the syntax and semantics of clause chaining in other languages.

Anti-pied-piping is a widespread but understudied phenomenon where a language targets a proper subpart of the logical focus for focus morphosyntax: for example, focus particle placement or focus movement. We show that anti-pied-piping is attested in over sixty languages from over forty distinct language groups. We present a theory of focus particle syntax/semantics that involves severing the pronounced position of a focus particle and the logical position of its corresponding semantic contribution, which successfully accounts for both anti-pied-piping and pied-piping behavior. Constraints on attested anti-pied-piping behavior and its interaction with movement show that particle placement takes place at particular, punctuated points in the derivation, in a cyclic model of syntactic structure building. We also discuss the relation of particle placement to other processes such as linearization and stress assignment.

Crosslinguistically, inflectional morphology exhibits a spectacular range of complexity in both the structure of individual words and the organization of systems that words participate in. We distinguish two dimensions in the analysis of morphological complexity. Enumerative complexity (E-complexity) reflects the number of morphosyntactic distinctions that languages make and the strategies employed to encode them, concerning either the internal composition of words or the arrangement of classes of words into inflection classes. This, we argue, is constrained by integrative complexity (I-complexity). The I-complexity of an inflectional system reflects the difficulty that a paradigmatic system poses for language users (rather than lexicographers) in information-theoretic terms. This becomes clear by distinguishing average paradigm entropy from average conditional entropy. The average entropy of a paradigm is the uncertainty in guessing the realization for a particular cell of the paradigm of a particular lexeme (given knowledge of the possible exponents). This gives one a measure of the complexity of a morphological system—systems with more exponents and more inflection classes will in general have higher average paradigm entropy— but it presupposes a problem that adult native speakers will never encounter. In order to know that a lexeme exists, the speaker must have heard at least one word form, so in the worst case a speaker will be faced with predicting a word form based on knowledge of one other word form of that lexeme. Thus, a better measure of morphological complexity is the average conditional entropy, the average uncertainty in guessing the realization of one randomly selected cell in the paradigm of a lexeme given the realization of one other randomly selected cell. This is the I-complexity of paradigm organization. Viewed from this information-theoretic perspective, languages that appear to differ greatly in their E-complexity—the number of exponents, inflectional classes, and principal parts— can actually be quite similar in terms of the challenge they pose for a language user who already knows how the system works. We adduce evidence for this hypothesis from three sources: a comparison between languages of varying degrees of E-complexity, a case study from the particularly challenging conjugational system of Chiquihuitlán Mazatec, and a Monte Carlo simulation modeling the encoding of morphosyntactic properties into formal expressions. The results of these analyses provide evidence for the crucial status of words and paradigms for understanding morphological organization.

In some languages, creaky voice is used over relatively long stretches of speech as a prosodic element, to convey emotion, and/or stylistically. A primary acoustic and perceptual cue to creaky voice quality is a low fundamental frequency. Previous research has shown that listeners can make fine-grained comparisons of speakers' habitual modal pitch, but this study focuses on how a combination of modal and nonmodal phonation affects the perception of habitual pitch. A perception experiment assesses whether listeners are more likely to rate a speaker's utterance as being holistically lower in pitch if it contains both modal and creaky voice than if it is fully modal speech. Results indicate that for female American English speakers with higher modal pitch, the inclusion of creaky voice leads listeners to rate such utterances as lower in pitch than fully modal utterances, but not for speakers with lower modal pitch. These results are consistent with studies showing that pitch perception interacts with nonmodal phonation, and they relate to previous observations that speakers may utilize nonmodal phonation to manipulate their intended habitual pitch.

In May 2016, the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America approved formation of an ad hoc AP Linguistics Committee (APLC) to study the creation of an Advanced Placement Linguistics course and examination for US high schools. In January 2017, the APLC convened and voted to proceed with the drafting of a formal AP Linguistics proposal to the College Board and to take whatever preparatory steps were required in that process. In this paper we sketch the AP Linguistics initiative, describing the potential benefits of linguistics for American high schools and their students, the attractions of high school linguistics for the field of Linguistics itself, the motivations for an AP Linguistics course in this context, the formal requirements of an AP Linguistics proposal to the College Board, and the steps being taken to meet those requirements.

Indicating verbs can be directed toward locations in space associated with their arguments. The primary debate about these verbs is whether this directionality is akin to grammatical agreement or whether it represents a fusion of both morphemic and gestural elements. To move the debate forward, more empirical evidence is needed. We consider linguistic and social factors in 1,436 indicating-verb tokens from the BSL Corpus. Results reveal that modification is not obligatory and that patient modification is conditioned by several factors, such as constructed action. We argue that our results provide some support for the claim that indicating verbs represent a fusion of morphemic and gestural elements.

Since Du Bois's (1987b) seminal paper, ergative alignment in morphosyntax has been claimed to correlate with a characteristic constellation of argument realization in discourse: both intransitive subjects (S) and transitive objects (P) serve to introduce new referents via full noun phrases (NPs), while transitive subjects (A) are dispreferred for this function and are thus mostly realized as pronouns or zero (e.g. Dixon 1995, Du Bois et al. 2003, Goldberg 2004). This ergative patterning in discourse is generally accounted for in terms of information-management strategies employed by speakers in dealing with the cognitive demands of introducing and monitoring referents in discourse. These claims have recently been questioned by Everett (2009), whose data (English and Portuguese) show no support for the claimed ergative bias in discourse and raise doubts about explanations in terms of information management. The present article subjects the claims of an ergative bias in discourse to more rigorous testing, drawing on the largest database compiled to date (nineteen spoken-language corpora from fifteen typologically diverse languages), and assesses the explanatory frameworks. We find that, with the exception of Du Bois's original Sakapultek data, there is very little evidence for the postulated ergative pattern in natural spoken-language discourse crosslinguistically. Although our findings do confirm low levels of full NPs in the A role (Du Bois's ‘Non-lexical A’ constraint), we concur with Everett (2009) that the semantic feature [±human] provides an empirically more sound and conceptually more economical account than earlier explanations framed in terms of information management. Finally, we address the plausibility of emergentist claims for a diachronic link between ergative alignment in morphosyntax and information flow in discourse. The raw data used in this article and extensive exemplification of the methodology employed are available as online supplementary materials.

This article presents a computational analysis of the 185 dissimilation patterns in the typological surveys by Suzuki (1998) and Bennett (2013), and shows that dissimilation is computationally less complex than has been previously shown. Dissimilation patterns are grouped into three general types (basic, blocking, and polarity), each of which can be modeled with a subsequential finite-state transducer. This lends support to the claim that phonological patterns are not only regular, but in fact subsequential, which is a more restrictive class of patterns computationally and provides a stronger bound on the types of processes expected in natural language phonology.