The birthdate of both generative linguistics and neural networks can be taken as 1957, the year of the publication of foundational work by both Noam Chomsky and Frank Rosenblatt. This article traces the development of these two approaches to cognitive science, from their largely autonomous early development in the first thirty years, through their collision in the 1980s around the past-tense debate (Rumelhart & McClelland 1986, Pinker & Prince 1988) and their integration in much subsequent work up to the present. Although this integration has produced a considerable body of results, the continued general gulf between these two lines of research is likely impeding progress in both: on learning in generative linguistics, and on the representation of language in neural modeling. The article concludes with a brief argument that generative linguistics is unlikely to fulfill its promise of accounting for language learning if it continues to maintain its distance from neural and statistical approaches to learning.

Drawing extensively from Indigenous scholarship, I argue for more holistic and inclusive notions of LANGUAGE and LANGUAGE VITALITY. This enables a better understanding of language revitalization's role as a protective factor, as well as how to evaluate its success. I present data from the Indigenous communities of the United States and Canada showing that language shift correlates with a host of negative outcomes: educational, economic, and well-being. In contrast, language revitalization may confer protective effects, suggesting that it is better understood through RESILIENCE. A more holistic framework also provides an intellectually coherent integration of language revitalization, language documentation, and language itself.

The quantifiers most and more than half pose a challenge to formal semantic analysis. On the one hand, their meanings seem essentially the same, prompting accounts that treat them as logically equivalent. On the other hand, their behavior diverges in a number of interesting ways. This article draws attention to some previously unnoticed contrasts between the two and develops a novel semantic analysis of them, based on principles of measurement theory. Most and more than half have logical forms that are superficially equivalent (per Hackl 2009), but that place different requirements on the structure of the underlying measurement scale: more than half requires a ratio scale, while most can be interpreted relative to an ordinal scale or one with a semiordered structure. The latter scale type is motivated by findings from psychophysics and by psychological models of humans’ approximate numerical abilities. A corpus analysis is presented that confirms the predictions of the present account.

Salikoko Mufwene raises significant questions about how and why languages become endangered (and die). The purpose of this reply is to provide additional perspective on what goes into answering these questions. Several of Mufwene's claims are responded to. Questions are raised concerning what the theorizing about language endangerment and loss (LEL) that Mufwene calls for would be like. Many causal factors associated with LEL are mentioned, advances in understanding are pointed out, and the roles of language documentation and language revitalization are clarified.

This list acknowledges recent works (except offprints of single articles) that appear to bear on the scientific study of language. The receipt of individual books cannot be separately acknowledged and no book can be returned to the publisher. Note especially that by accepting a book the Editor implies no promise that it will be reviewed in this journal. Reviews are printed as circumstances permit.

A major argument against the feasibility of reconstructing syntax for proto-stages is the widely discussed lack of directionality of syntactic change. In a recent typology of changes in argument structure constructions based on Germanic (Barödal 2015), several different, yet opposing, changes are reported. These include, among others, processes sometimes called dative sickness, nominative sickness, and accusative sickness. In order to tease apart the roles of the different processes, we have carried out a phylogenetic trait analysis on a predefined data set of twelve predicates found across the Germanic phyla using the MULTISTATE method. This is, as far as we are aware, the first application of the MULTISTATE method (Pagel et al. 2004) in historical syntax. The results clearly favor one of the models, the dative sickness model, over any other model, as this model is the only one that can accurately account for both the observed diversity of case frames and the independently proposed philological reconstructions. Methods of evolutionary trait analysis can be used to model evolutionary paths of argument structure constructions, and they provide the perfect testing ground for hypotheses arrived at through philological reconstruction, based on classical historical-comparative methods.

It has generally been assumed that after nonlow vowels in English, hiatus is resolved by inserting a homorganic glide (e.g. seeing [sijip], Itô & Mester 2009). However, despite suspicions that inserted glides may be fundamentally different from lexical glides (e.g. Cruttenden 2008), a systematic phonetic investigation of the purported glide is lacking. We examine the nature of hiatus resolution by comparing three environments: (i) vowel-vowel sequences within words (VV: kiosk), (ii) vowel-vowel sequences across word boundaries (VBV: see otters), and (iii) vowel-glide-vowel sequences across word boundaries (VGV: see yachts). The first finding is that a glottal stop produced between the vowels accounts for nearly half of the responses for VBV phrases, whereas glottal stops are present in less than 5% of the VV and the VGV conditions. Second, an acoustic comparison of VV, VBV, and VGV phrases not produced with glottal stops shows significant differences between the vowel-glide-vowel and the vowel-vowel sequences on all measures, including duration, intensity, and formants. These results indicate that American English speakers tend to resolve hiatus at word boundaries with glottal stop insertion, whereas there is no hiatus resolution at all within words. A brief optimality-theoretic analysis sketches out the phonological differences between hiatus at word boundaries and word-medially.

Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz's (2020) target article details the urgent need for linguistics as a field to develop its theoretical, analytical, and political engagement with issues of race and racism. We agree with Charity Hudley et al.'s assertion that the ‘hegemonic whiteness’ of linguistics as a field ‘has been profoundly damaging both for linguistic scholarship and for linguistics as a profession’ (p. e211). In this response, we wish to expand upon this point specifically in regard to how linguists and linguistics relate to Indigenous peoples and their languages. We outline key respects in which academic linguistics has, or might be seen to have, perpetuated harm against Indigenous peoples. We also outline strategies for mitigating harm and supporting the language work done by members of Indigenous communities.

As basic as the phonemic principle is to linguistic science, it is only quite recently that it has had the serious attention of linguists. In studying the phonemes of Chitimacha (an Indian language of Louisiana) I knew of no single source from which I could learn to understand all the phenomena that I observed. There seemed to be a need for an adequate and complete exposition of the phonemic principle including, especially, an account of how it applies to the more marginal and difficult types of phenomena. I at first intended to include this discussion in my paper on the Chitimacha phonemes, but the wider interest of the general discussion makes it more appropriate that it be published separately. The specific treatment of Chitimacha, which can now appear without theoretical digressions, will serve to illustrate many of the points discussed here. I do not attempt to cite previous authors on all of the points treated in this paper, though I recognize fully my dependence on them. On a few points my treatment attempts to avoid weaknesses in previous treatments, and a point or two are perhaps introduced here for the first time. However, the chief ideals of this paper are theoretical comprehensiveness, consistency of treatment, and brevity.

This article reports on the beginning of a new pan-European enterprise called pedagogical linguistics, which can be distinguished from related approaches on several grounds. Crucially, pedagogical linguistics centers on teaching structural properties of ‘language’, not just properties of specific languages. Although this crosslinguistic perspective on language is already part of language practitioners' training, student teachers are often not able to draw the connection between formal linguistic training and their teaching in a multilingual classroom. Pedagogical linguistics addresses this lack of awareness and therefore aims at raising ‘linguistic’ awareness (in addition to language awareness) by highlighting the relevance of formal structural concepts for language pedagogy.

Many languages of the Mayan family restrict the extraction of transitive (ergative) subjects for focus, WH-questions, and relativization (Ā-extraction). We follow Aissen (2017b) in labeling this restriction the ERGATIVE EXTRACTION CONSTRAINT (EEC). In this article, we offer a unified account of the EEC within Mayan languages, as well as an analysis of the special construction known as AGENT FOCUS (AF) used to circumvent it. Specifically, we propose that the EEC has a similar source across the subset of Mayan languages that exhibit it: INTERVENTION. The intervention problem is created when an object DP structurally intervenes between the Ā-probe on C0 and the ergative subject. Evidence that intervention by the object is the source of the problem comes from a handful of exceptional contexts that permit transitive subjects to extract in languages which normally ban this extraction, and conversely, a context that exceptionally bans ergative extraction in a language which otherwise allows it. We argue that the problem with Ā-extracting the ergative subject across the intervening object connects to the requirements of the Ā-probe on C0: the probe on C0 is bundled to search simultaneously for [Ā] and [D] features. This relates the Mayan patterns to recent proposals for extraction patterns in Austronesian languages (e.g. Legate 2014, Aldridge 2017b) and elsewhere (van Urk 2015). Specifically, adapting the proposal of Coon & Keine 2020, we argue that in configurations in which a DP object intervenes between the probe on C0 and an Ā-subject, conflicting requirements on movement lead to a derivational crash. While we propose that the EEC has a uniform source across the family, we argue that AF constructions vary Mayaninternally in how they circumvent the EEC, accounting for the variation in behavior of AF across the family. This article contributes both to our understanding of parametric variation internal to the Mayan family and to the discussion of variation in Ā-extraction asymmetries and syntactic ergativity crosslinguistically.