The German gender system is known for its complexity, and there is a persistent misconception that it is largely arbitrary, and hence a challenge for the typology of gender systems. In response, we construct a database of more than 30,000 German nouns and show that a boosting tree model achieves a predictive success of 96%. Even more surprising, the model performs at 87% when trained on just the 100 most frequent nouns. We thus demonstrate that the complex German system fits into a typologically well-known scheme, being a combination of semantic and formal assignment principles. In addition to our success with the specific problem, we show the value of statistical modeling for typologists and reflect on what exactly we can learn from these techniques.

Classical Sanskrit is well known for making extensive use of compounding. I argue, within a lexicalist framework, that the major rules of compounding in Sanskrit can be most appropriately characterized in syntactic, not morphological, terms. That is, Classical Sanskrit ‘compounds’ are in fact very often syntactic phrases. The syntactic analysis proposed captures the fact that compound formation is closer to a morphological process than other aspects of syntax, and so permits some acknowledgment of the gradient nature of the word-phrase divide, even within a strictly lexicalist theory.

Rejoining the arguments presented in Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz's (2020) target article responding to the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race, we affirm calls for increased participation from diverse scholars and underscore the need for attention to racial perspectives in linguistic research. We argue that beyond position statements on race and increased diversity, antiracist scholarship requires transparent research subjectivities and an acknowledgment of the traditional privileging of certain positionalities and methodologies. Through discussions of current linguistic debates, our research trajectories, and the race-based perspectives in our work, we advocate for collaborative research in the creation of more nuanced scholarship to challenge social injustices within the academy and within our society.

Orthographic representations are often derived from phonological analyses or representations, and can even lead to claims about phonological representations (Sproat 2000). In Armenian, many strings of orthographic consonants are broken up by schwas in pronunciation. As a grammatical process, this spelling-pronunciation mismatch is sensitive to a host of phonological, morphological, and morphophonological factors. I systematically catalog these factors, and this systematicity reinforces previous generative arguments that the orthographic form (without schwas) matches the underlying form (without schwas) (Vaux 1998). As for these factors, I argue that, phonologically, the epenthesis is triggered by directional syllabification and other syllabification-based constraints, including constraints on sibilant-stop contiguity (Itô 1989). Morphologically, epenthesis respects morpheme boundaries even when the boundary is semantically opaque, whether from prefixation, compounding, reduplication, or pseudo-reduplication. And from the morphophonology, there is evidence that epenthesis is simultaneously a phonological rule. It is an early lexical rule and it interacts opaquely with allomorphy and strata. Thus, this paper argues for a tight integration of orthographic, phonological, and morphological structures (cf. Boersma 2011; Hamann & Colombo 2017).

DiCanio et al. (2020) (this volume) argue that San Martin Itunyoso Triqui has a morphophonological exchange (also called ‘polarity’), where morphemes are realized by switching feature values: e.g. the bare root [anĩɦ] ‘get dirty’ is realized as [anĩ:] in the 1s, while the root [ani:] ‘stop’ is 1s [amĩɦ]. In this Reply, I seek to clarify how the descriptive use of ‘exchange’ relates to and differs from its meaning in phonological theories. I also show that the issue of whether exchanges exist is highly theory-dependent. For SPE, Lexical Phonology and Morphology, and single-level parallelist OT with opacity mechanisms, the IT forms do not provide evidence for exchange mechanisms. In contrast, a version of OT that lacks opacity mechanisms probably cannot generate the IT forms without an exchange mechanism. Issues facing the analyst, such as how to prove that exchanges exist, and which apparent exchanges one should expect to observe, are also discussed.

Since Aristotle first set out rules of natural priority, rhetoricians and linguists have sought to establish the ‘natural order’ of words, phrases, and clauses. Accounts of constituent order by classical rhetoricians and philologists and by modern linguists and psychologists have addressed word order within phrases and phrasal order within clauses. However, they have not tended to investigate clausal order within sentences, with the important but limited exception of NARRATION sequences (They had a baby and they got married), which—as recognized from Dionysius ('What is prior in time should also be prior in word order') to Grice ('Be orderly')—exhibit a robust but defeasible iconic link between order of events and order of mention. For clauses exhibiting the rhetorical relation of CONTRAST rather than narration, the literature is less perspicuous. It is on such cases that I focus here, inspired by BEHAGHEL'S SECOND LAW (1932:4): ‘That which is less important (or already known to the listener) is placed before that which is more important (or unknown) … Old concepts are placed before new'.

Previous research on the acquisition of noun classification systems (e.g. grammatical gender) has found that child learners rely disproportionately on phonological cues to determine the class of a new noun, even when competing semantic cues are more reliable in their language. Culbertson, Gagliardi, and Smith (2017) use artificial language learning experiments with adults to argue that this likely results from the early availability of phonological information during acquisition. Learners base their initial representations on formal features of nouns, only later integrating semantic cues from noun meanings. Here, we use these same methods to show that early availability affects cue use in children (six- to seven-year-olds) as well. However, we also find evidence of developmental changes in sensitivity to semantics; when both cue types are simultaneously available, children are more likely to rely on phonology than adults are. Our results suggest that both early availability and a bias favoring phonological cues contribute to children's overreliance on phonology in natural language acquisition.

Current theories of optionality often take a gradient view of grammaticality: unattested variants are not categorically excluded but rather highly improbable. Vowel harmony in Eastern Andalusian challenges this view. Unstressed vowels optionally harmonize in a coordinated fashion. For example, if one posttonic vowel harmonizes, they all must. Different implementations of NOISY HARMONIC GRAMMAR are tested for their ability to account for this pattern. Only the implementation that categorically excludes forms with uncoordinated harmony succeeds; other implementations, which can only make such forms unlikely outputs, provide inferior models. This contrast indicates that there remains a need for a categorical approach to (un)grammaticality alongside a gradient approach.

Computational probabilistic modeling is increasingly popular in linguistics, but its relationship with linguistic theory is ambivalent. We argue here for the potential benefit of theory-driven statistical modeling, based on a case study situated at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Using data from a novel experiment, we employ Bayesian model comparison to evaluate the predictive adequacy of four models that differ in the extent to and manner in which grammatically generated candidate readings are taken into account in four probabilistic pragmatic models of utterance and interpretation choice. The data provide strong evidence for the idea that the full range of potential readings made available by recently popular grammatical approaches to scalar-implicature computation might be needed, and that classical Gricean reasoning may help manage the manifold ambiguity introduced by grammatical approaches to these. The case study thereby shows a way of bridging linguistic theory and empirical data with the help of probabilistic pragmatic modeling as a linking function.