This article is a critical analysis of principles for the provision of translanguaging in the language policy of North-West University. It draws on the conceptualization of translanguaging as a transformative, inclusive, and empowering practice (Cenoz & Gorter 2022a,b, Kleyn & García 2019, Tai 2022) and attempts to uncover the mood and dispositions of the university toward main-streaming this practice for the inclusion of indigenous African languages in teaching and learning. We discuss how the wording of the provisions reveals the language policy to be power-inflected, reproducing contestations between indigenous and ex-colonial languages. The article ends by suggesting a continuous review of the language policy to eliminate vague and escapist policy provisions.

This article analyzes the changes in subject position in Portuguese between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in terms of the loss of verb-second grammar properties and the rise of an SVO grammar. Our analysis is based on the survey of an unprecedented amount of data for sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Portuguese in a syntactically annotated corpus. We argue that in Classical Portuguese (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries) the verb moves to C(omp), there is no preverbal position reserved for subjects, and all of the preverbal phrases are discourse-prominent constituents—which characterizes Classical Portuguese as a V2-type grammar. In Modern European Portuguese (from the eighteenth century on), in contrast, the verb does not move as high as C(omp), and there is a preverbal position reserved for subjects—in other words, this is an SVO grammar. We suggest that this change from a verb-movement, V2-type grammar to an SVO grammar derived from a prosodic change that happened in the seventeenth century, which also affected clitic placement.

The article being reprinted in this issue, Swadesh 1934a (initially a paper presented at the December 1933 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America), is generally considered one of the foundational works in the development of the American theory of the phoneme. Joos (1957:37) describes its significance thus:

At this time the only Americans who had a fair chance to learn linguistic method were apprentices under one of the few leaders in anthropological linguistics: there were no textbooks. The appearance of this paper by one of [Edward] Sapir's most noted pupils therefore meant a very great advance in public knowledge of its subject.

One of the key elements of constraint-based formalisms is their ability to derive a variety of effects from the interaction of general constraints. As for vowel harmony, one persistent question within Optimality Theory is how to encode directionality - directly through directional harmony-driving constraints, or indirectly through asymmetric prominence patterns. This paper presents a typologically unusual case of progressive harmony triggered by prefixes in Tutrugbu. We compare analyzing harmony as purely progressive in a direct sense with an indirect analysis that motivates harmony from initial-syllable prominence. Based on both language-internal and typological evidence, we argue that the prominence-based analysis is superior. We generalize to suggest that progressive harmony should always be reducible to independent factors, and as a result, formalized indirectly through prominence.

The present study uses naturally occurring conversational data from various dialects of Spanish to examine the role of second-person (T/V) reference forms in the accomplishment of social action in interaction. I illustrate how the turn-by-turn progression of talk can occasion shifts in the linguistic means through which speakers refer to their hearers, an interactional commonality between dialects (and possibly languages) that are otherwise pronominally dissimilar. These shifts contribute to the action of an utterance by mobilizing the semantic meaning of a pronominal form in order to recalibrate who the interactants project they are, and who they project they are to one another—not in general, but rather at that particular moment in the ongoing interaction. The analysis posits a distinction between identity status and identity stance to argue in favor of a more microlevel conceptualization of identities and contexts as emergent features of moment-by moment discourse, co-constructed through the deployment of grammatical structure.

The lexicon divides into parts of speech (or lexical categories), and there are cross-cutting regularities (features). These two dimensions of analysis take us a long way, but several phenomena elude us. For these the term ‘split’ is used extensively (‘case split’, ‘split agreement’, and more), but in confusingly different ways. Yet there is a unifying notion here. I show that a split is an ADDITIONAL PARTITION, whether in the part-of-speech inventory or in the feature system. On this base an elegant typology can be constructed, using minimal machinery. The typology starts from four external relations (government, agreement, selection, and anti-government), and it specifies four types of split within each (sixteen possibilities in all). This typology (i) highlights less familiar splits, from diverse languages, and fits them into the larger picture; (ii) introduces a new relation, anti-government, and documents it; (iii) elucidates the complexities of multiple splits; and (iv) clarifies what exactly is split, which leads to a sharpening of our analyses and applies across different traditions.

An issue that is actively explored in the contemporary linguistics literature is how to account for probabilistic generalizations, for which there are currently various competing theories. To bear on this debate, Hayes (2021) proposes that we examine a grammatical framework in terms of its QUANTITATIVE SIGNATURE, typical probabilistic patterns that the framework is predicted to generate. In this research report, I zoom in on the quantitative signature of MAXIMUM ENTROPY HARMONIC GRAMMAR (MaxEnt HG), because this framework has proven useful in modeling probabilistic generalizations across different linguistic domains. Given a linear scale of violations of one constraint, MaxEnt yields a sigmoid curve. When another constraint is relevant and can be violated multiple times, this sigmoid curve can be shifted, yielding multiple sigmoid curves, which results in a STRIPY WUG-SHAPED CURVE. Expanding upon a previous study (Kawahara 2020b), the current experiment demonstrates that we observe a stripy wug-shaped curve in a particularly clear manner in patterns of sound symbolism, systematic associations between sounds and meanings. Concretely, the experiment with Japanese speakers shows that the judgment of Pokémons' evolution status is affected by the mora counts of nonce names, resulting in a sigmoid curve, and that this sigmoid curve is shifted according to the number of voiced obstruents contained in the names. The overall results suggest that MaxEnt is a useful tool for modeling systematic sound-meaning correspondences.

This discussion note reviews responses of the linguistics profession to the grave issues of language endangerment identified a quarter of a century ago in the journal Language by Krauss, Hale, England, Craig, and others (Hale et al. 1992). Two and a half decades of worldwide research not only have given us a much more accurate picture of the number, phylogeny, and typological variety of the world's languages, but they have also seen the development of a wide range of new approaches, conceptual and technological, to the problem of documenting them. We review these approaches and the manifold discoveries they have unearthed about the enormous variety of linguistic structures. The reach of our knowledge has increased by about 15% of the world's languages, especially in terms of digitally archived material, with about 500 languages now reasonably documented thanks to such major programs as DoBeS, ELDP, and DEL. But linguists are still falling behind in the race to document the planet's rapidly dwindling linguistic diversity, with around 35–42% of the world's languages still substantially undocumented, and in certain countries (such as the US) the call by Krauss (1992) for a significant professional realignment toward language documentation has only been heeded in a few institutions. Apart from the need for an intensified documentarist push in the face of accelerating language loss, we argue that existing language documentation efforts need to do much more to focus on crosslinguistically comparable data sets, sociolinguistic context, semantics, and interpretation of text material, and on methods for bridging the ‘transcription bottleneck’, which is creating a huge gap between the amount we can record and the amount in our transcribed corpora.

Social category information plays a central role in speech perception and processing. To date, research on this topic has struggled to model how social category perceptions evolve over the time course of an interaction. In this article, we build on recent methodological developments to investigate trajectories of listener perceptions, focusing on how impressions change as linguistic, social, and contextual details emerge. We base our arguments on an analysis of listeners' real-time evaluations of the perceived competence of speakers of two British regional accents during a mock interview for a job in a law firm. Results indicate a need to move away from the view, predominant in sociolinguistics, of category perception as a discrete phenomenon and toward a model of perception as inference under uncertainty. We discuss implications for theories of sociolinguistic cognition and for understandings of accent bias.