Play languages (also known as language games or ludlings) represent a special type of language use that is well known to shed useful light on linguistic structure. This paper explores a syllable transposition play language in Zenzontepec Chatino that provides evidence for the segmental inventory, syllable structure, the limits of the phonological word, the prosodic status of inflectional formatives, and the autonomy of tone, all of which aligns with independent phonological evidence in the language. While recent theoretical and cross-linguistic studies have questioned the nature, and even the validity, of constituents such as the phonological word, the syllable, and the onset, this study provides an example of a language with strongly manifested phonological constituents. Following the International Year of Indigenous Languages, the study also highlights the importance of in-depth analysis of less-studied languages for linguistic theory, typology, and language maintenance or reclamation for communities.

It is often claimed that conjuncts in coordinate structures must be alike in various ways, in particular, that they should have the same syntactic category and the same grammatical case, if any. This article aims to refute such claims. On the basis of data from Polish, Estonian, and other languages, it demonstrates that there is no universal requirement that conjuncts be alike. Any appearances of such a requirement result from the fact that each conjunct must satisfy all functional constraints on the coordinate structure. The article discusses ways of formalizing such distributive satisfaction of constraints within four major linguistic frameworks: lexical-functional grammar, categorial grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and minimalism.

We propose that contour nasals come from two principal sources. One source, articulatorily driven, comes from underlying voiced stops, as nasal venting in order to sustain voicing. The other, perceptually driven, comes from underlying nasal consonants, as shielding next to contrastively oral vowels. Although both processes are phonetically well motivated, we argue that the contoured allophones specifically arise in languages in which systemic or phonotactic restrictions allow for easy recoverability of the corresponding underlying segment. Finally, we present a few cases of contour nasals in preconsonantal contexts that seem to be neither venting nor shielding, and suggest that these arise due to place-of-articulation enhancement in clusters. We offer diagnostics for distinguishing nasal venting from shielding and present case studies from South American languages in which understanding such phenomena as enhancement involves analytical commitments to what is contrastive in the language.

A widespread assumption in the language contact literature is that affixes are never borrowed directly, but only indirectly, that is, as part of complex loanwords. From such complex loanwords, affixes may eventually spread to native stems, creating hybrid formations, in a process of language-internal analogical extension. Direct borrowing is the extraction of an affix based on knowledge of the donor language, without the mediation of complex loanwords within the recipient language. This article suggests that direct borrowing can also be the only or primary process leading to productive loan affixes. Criteria are provided to assess instances of direct and indirect borrowing on the basis of the distribution of borrowed affixes across complex loanwords and hybrid formations. These are applied to corpora of various languages. A scale of directness of affix borrowing is proposed, based on the extent to which speakers of the recipient language rely (i) on their knowledge of the donor language (direct borrowing) and (ii) on complex loanwords within their native language (indirect borrowing).

The English pronoun they is currently undergoing a rapid change, in that they is increasingly being used to refer to specific (named) individuals as a singular personal pronoun. Although it has been used with a singular, indefinite antecedent for centuries, singular specific they is relatively new and coincides with rising recognition of the fluidity of gender identity and expression. For many individuals, they/them pronouns fit their gender identity best. However, such individuals are at a high risk of being misgendered because this new usage of they is neither well established grammatically nor part of prescribed use. In two experiments, adults from across the United States created short written narratives about individuals of different gender presentations. We varied whether participants saw a pronoun in the stimuli and, if so, whether they saw they, he, or she. We found that singular specific they was used less than she/he and that they-usage increased for those who reported being more familiar with it and with the LGBTQ+ community more generally. We further found that images that appeared androgynous or nonbinary were more likely to elicit singular specific they than were images that appeared binary. Finally, we varied whether participants received brief information about the person that included singular specific they. This type of modeling led to dramatic increases in they-production overall, and increases were most robust for participants who reported higher familiarity. Overall, this research illustrates that characteristics tied to social experience, modeling, and visual cues to an individual's gender identity are highly informative for the production of singular specific they. More broadly, we illustrate that language-processing costs related to language production can be boosted for users and therefore can intervene in the likelihood of misgendering.

This article explores the relationship between salience, stereotypes, and cooccurring language variables in the social perception of language. Following previous work, we argue that sociolinguistic perception is dependent upon the ability of listeners to map the linguistic cues contained in a speech signal to stereotypes. However, we contend that the understanding of which language features contribute to those stereotypes, and how they do so in the specific context of talk, has been limited because of the tendency to focus on preselected variables and to control for the context in which they occur. We advance an account of the role of stereotypes in the social perception of language by using a new tool for capturing, visualizing, and querying listeners' real-time reactions to voice samples. Our survey instrument collects reactions to two topically distinct guises from the same speaker (taken from the Scilly Voices corpus), both of which contained a similar number of regionally distinctive accent features. As our survey instrument includes a review function enabling listeners to provide information on why certain features were notable to them, we are able to interrogate listeners' ability to respond to unspecified linguistic features. Ultimately, this enables us to build a more nuanced account of the interaction between a range of linguistic features and their relationship to message content, and allows us to demonstrate that both do evaluative and perceptual work.

Our findings have important implications for those interested in understanding the situated meaning of linguistic features and, in particular, how researchers might continue to develop exemplar models of the ways in which social information is indexed to linguistic features. We argue that no experiment can be context-free and, as a result, researchers must consider ways of modeling the effects of co-present variants on a given exemplar, not just the social indices of specific exemplars themselves.

Prefixes and suffixes display distinctive linguistic behaviors. Not only does a crosslinguistic asymmetry exist between them in terms of structural properties, combinatorial constraints, and frequency, but there is also extensive evidence that prefixes and suffixes are processed differently. To further investigate the differences in how prefixes and suffixes are processed, we conducted five crossmodal priming experiments in Bengali, a language rich in derivational morphology. Although all combinations of stems, prefixes, and suffixes provided facilitation, we found that stems primed related prefixed forms to a greater degree than they primed related suffixed forms. Furthermore, morphologically related prefixed forms primed other prefixed forms more than suffixed forms primed related suffixed forms. On the basis of these findings, we propose that the asymmetry in how prefixes and suffixes are processed is due not only to differences in perception, reading, and inhibition from the phonological cohort, but also to the salience of the morpheme boundaries in affixed word representations during recognition.

Abawiri (Indonesia: Lakes Plain) is a previously undescribed Papuan language. Two level tones (/L/ and /H/) combine into eight tone melodies on nouns (/L/, /H/, /LH/, /HL/, /LH/, /LHL/, //, and ) and five on verbs (/L/, /H/, /LH/, /LH/, and ). The default pitch of tonelessness is L. Several phonological processes involve tone. /H/ is lowered to M tone after a floating /L/. A polar (H) is linked to the final syllable of a non-/H/ word previous to an /L/-toned word. Utterance-final boundary tone L% is linked to all utterance-final syllables. /H/ spreads to the end of nouns but does not spread on verbs. A final section discusses typological characterization of the Abawiri tone system.

This article describes a pedagogical innovation implemented in our introductory linguistics course. We supplement classic theory building with a series of labs, deployed through a co-requisite ‘lab’ course that meets weekly. This builds on two previously established teaching strategies: the implementation of hands-on activities in linguistics classrooms, and the lab sections traditionally utilized in the natural sciences. The labs aim to fulfill three goals: (i) to better represent the field of linguistics in our introductory course, (ii) to help students solidify theories and connect them to the real world, and (iii) to teach practical skills for linguistics research and more broadly.

This article explores the relationship between linguistic tone and musical melody in Tommo So, a Dogon language of Mali. Most fundamentally, contrary mappings (rising tone on falling music, or vice versa) are strongly penalized, while oblique mappings (flat tone on changing music, or vice versa) are largely tolerated. Strictness of mapping is further modulated by several factors, including whether the tones straddle a word boundary, whether their source is lexical or grammatical, what the position is in the line, and so forth. We model these conditions using weighted, stringent constraints and conclude that tone-tune setting bears more in common with metrics than previously recognized, setting the groundwork for a more general theory of phonological mapping across modalities.

There is evidence to suggest that finiteness marking on verbs and subject-auxiliary inversion are related phenomena in English. In contrast, in Spanish there is evidence consistent with finiteness marking on verbs and the apparently similar phenomenon of subject-verb inversion being unrelated. In both cases, most of the evidence adduced comes from adult acceptability judgments and other adult psycholinguistic work. In the present article, we present evidence from child English and Spanish that supports the interrelatedness of finiteness and inversion in English, but not Spanish. Specifically, we show that child English speakers who are in the optional infinitive stage have variable judgments of finiteness that are predictive of their independently measured inversion judgments. In contrast, no such relationship appears to hold between the variance in finiteness and the variance in inversion judgments of child Spanish speakers of the same preschool age. We take this to be novel confirmation of the hypothesis that subject-auxiliary inversion in English takes finite tense as a necessary condition. In Spanish, in contrast, it appears that it is not necessary for a finite verb to move to the left periphery for subject-verb inversion.

Perlmutter and Postal (1977 and subsequent) argued that passives cannot passivize. Three prima facie counterexamples have come to light, found in Turkish, Lithuanian, and Sanskrit. We reexamine these three cases and demonstrate that rather than counterexemplifying Perlmutter and Postal's generalization, these confirm it. The Turkish construction is an impersonal of a passive, the Lithuanian is an evidential of a passive, and the Sanskrit is an unaccusative with an instrumental case-marked theme. We provide a syntactic analysis of both the Turkish impersonal and the Lithuanian evidential. Finally, we develop an analysis of the passive that captures the generalization that passives cannot passivize.