This article examines lexical conservatism (Steriade 1997), a phenomenon whereby the distribution of stem allomorphs in a morphological paradigm influences the way that paradigm accommodates derived members. Specifically, a phonological alternation applies in a derived member only if an existing form is present elsewhere in the paradigm that offers the needed phonological material. Thus illústrable undergoes stress shift because the existing word illústrative contains the illústr- stem allomorph. In contrast, *irrígable is judged worse than írrigable, since there is no existing form in *irríg-. In four experiments with speakers of English and Mexican Spanish, I demonstrate that this dependency between paradigm structure and application of phonological processes generalizes to entirely novel words in a probabilistic manner. Further, I find that a broad range of stem allomorphs in a paradigm play a role in determining the form of the novel word, rather than only those that could reduce the markedness of the novel form, contra previous studies. I propose a novel grammatical model where bases get to ‘vote’ on the shape of the novel form: all stem allomorphs in a lexical entry stand in a correspondence relation to the novel form and exert their influence via multiple faithfulness constraints, which compete with standard markedness constraints in a probabilistic phonological grammar.

In the verb-initial language Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands, WH-dependencies exhibit a special verbal inflection known as wh-agreement: verbs along the path of the wh-dependency are inflected for the grammatical relation of the gap and the intermediate landing sites of the filler. Two on-line comprehension experiments conducted in the Northern Mariana Islands reveal that the morphological paradigm of wh-agreement affects the timing of dependency formation and interpretation in this language. Overt wh-agreement facilitates the formation of a WH-dependency. When overt WH-agreement could occur but does not, however, its absence delays and attenuates WH-dependency formation. In short, morphological information exerts a powerful influence on the unfolding parse, one that has temporal priority over syntactic information, such as word order, and semantic information, such as argument structure.

The aim of the present work is to provide evidence for two debates in the formal literature on evidentiality: (i) whether the evidential content of evidential elements is in the scope of (certain) operators, and (ii) whether the evidential content can be directly assented/rejected or challenged. We argue, based on the main semantic and pragmatic properties of the Basque reportative particle omen, that, on the one hand, evidential content can have narrow scope within certain operators, and, on the other hand, it can be rejected (contrary to what is claimed to happen crosslinguistically). Based on these conclusions, we contend that the role of omen is best interpreted as contributing to the truth conditions or the propositional content of the utterance, and not to its illocutionary force or as a presupposition trigger. We argue that, by using omen, speakers assert that the reported proposition has been stated (or written) by someone other than themselves. Omen has no other semantic meaning. In our view, the speaker's expression of uncertainty often attributed to omen, if it is present, belongs to the pragmatic content of the utterance and, more precisely, is a generalized conversational implicature of the omen-utterance. Grice's (1989a [1975], 1989b [1978]) cancelability ‘test’ and the data from several corpora support our conclusion. The speaker's expression of uncertainty is explicitly or contextually cancelable, and we found many examples in which the speaker's certainty about either the truth or falsity of the reported proposition is clear. In addition, inspired by Korta & Perry 2011a, we distinguish between three contents, or sets of truth conditions, involved in an omen-utterance, relative to the possible status of the original speaker. Moreover, the results of another test (which can be called the reportability test) show that speakers tend not to use omen to report nonliteral contents (particularized conversational implicatures and presuppositions, at least).

This article looks at the correlation between the use of a langugage as L2 and the amount of lexical material borrowed from it. Our data come from the highlands of Daghestan. By matching loanword counts with data on multilingualism, the study quantitatively supports the suggestion that lexical borrowing from a lingua franca is more intense than from other languages in a multilingual repertoire (Brown 1996, 2011). Brown hypothesizes that the importance of lingua francas as lexical donors is linked to a high rate of bilingualism. In our data, knowledge of languages other than the lingua franca was high at some locations but did not lead to substantial borrowing. We discuss the social conditions of a lingua franca that make it a likely donor. Among other factors, a lingua franca might not be as strongly associated with an ethnic identity as languages that are used only in communicating with L1 speakers of that language, and lexical borrowing from it does not threaten anyone's identity (cf. Epps 2018, Vaughan 2019).

Mikhail Kissine's (2021) target article examines autism in order to mine questions about language use and its cognitive underpinnings. Among these, we focus on the question concerning the role of mind reading in language interpretation. Kissine claims that the selective pragmatic profile of highly verbal autistic individuals undermines the existence of an ‘intrinsic link’ between language interpretation and mind reading. We advocate for a more cautious approach based on both theoretical and empirical arguments. Theoretically speaking, data from autism are compatible with the view that language interpretation is the result of a special-purpose form of mind reading, dedicated to the domain of intentional communication. Empirically speaking, the data are neither clear nor consistent enough for making strong claims about what exactly are the communicative challenges of highly verbal autistic individuals.

The goal of this article is to analyze the semantic contribution of evaluative adverbs (EAs) such as unfortunately in several languages of the Romance family, namely French, Catalan, and Spanish. Following Bonami and Godard (2008), we propose to analyze EAs as items that convey projective meaning in order to explain their peculiar semantic behavior (they cannot be directly denied, do not change the truth conditions of the proposition they evaluate, and are not factive) and their unacceptability in negative assertions. Unlike what has been claimed for many other languages, French allows EAs in questions, and we show that Catalan and Spanish do too, as long as some conditions are met. We propose an account that derives their interpretation in both assertions and questions: integrated French EAs take the proposition to their right, and if they appear in a WH-question, their interpretation is similar to that of unconditionals. In contrast, nonintegrated EAs in Catalan and Spanish have scope over a set of propositions, and are acceptable in questions only if the speaker is biased toward one of the propositions in the set denoted by the question. The acceptability of EAs in such questions, rejected by previous literature, is confirmed by an experimental study.

We argue that DISTRIBUTIONAL MODIFICATION is one strategy that language affords for composing propositions about the quantity of entities that participate in a given situation. Distributional modifiers apply to kind descriptions, contributing the entailment that the kind is instantiated by a SET of tokens with a particular distribution. As a case study, we analyze frequency adjectives (FAs, e.g. occasional). We show that previous work, including our own, has suffered for focusing on the paraphrases of FAs rather than on their morphosyntax. We argue for two subclasses of FAs: those that are intersective modifiers sortally restricted to events, and those that are not. The study reinforces two novel theoretical claims in Gehrke & McNally 2011: sometimes kinds are realized by sets of tokens, rather than individual tokens; and some clauses constitute descriptions of EVENT KINDS, rather than EVENT TOKENS.

Indexical associations are a crucial construct in third-wave variationist work, but little is understood about how perceivers incorporate indexical information over the course of sociolinguistic perception. In classic speaker evaluation, participants listen to a stimulus and report evaluations after listening, limiting our access to the moment-to-moment process of updating social percepts. Studies developing in-the-moment tools have combined methods development with substantive theoretical questions, hindering assessment. We test a continuous evaluation tool using a gestalt style shift and the English variables (ING) and like. The tool captures the expected reactions but has poor time granularity and very high variability. Divergence between slider responses and after-the-fact ratings suggests that the tasks may depend on a different mix of processes, underlining the multiplicity of sociolinguistic cognition processes.

We present evidence from experiments on novel blend formation showing that adult English speakers have access to constraints that give phonological privilege to HEADS, NOUNS, and PROPER NOUNS, even though the nonblend phonology provides no evidence that such constraints are generally active in the grammar of English. Our results (i) demonstrate that these positional constraints are universally available; (ii) confirm that the lexical category ‘proper noun’ has the status of a strong position, which has broader implications for the role of lexical categories in positional privilege effects; and (iii) confirm that strong positions based on salience from nonphonetic sources (such as morphosyntactic, semantic, or psycholinguistic salience) participate in position-specific phonological phenomena.

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.

This study investigates the source and status of a recent sound change in Shanghainese (Wu, Sinitic) that has been attributed to language contact with Mandarin. The change involves two vowels, /e/ and /ε/, reported to be merged three decades ago but produced distinctly in contemporary Shanghainese. Results of two production experiments show that speaker age, language mode (monolingual Shanghainese vs. bilingual Shanghainese-Mandarin), and crosslinguistic phonological similarity all influence the production of these vowels. These findings provide evidence for language contact as a linguistic means of merger reversal and are consistent with the view that contact phenomena originate from cross-language interaction within the bilingual mind.

This article describes how students can be introduced to the basics of linguistic analysis using personal, product, and place names as data. I outline several areas of linguistics that can be effectively taught at an introductory level through name data and provide examples of accompanying in-class and take-home exercises. Throughout the article, I demonstrate that the everyday familiarity of names and the ready availability of name data combine to create a class that not only engages students but also teaches them practical data-analysis skills.

Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (2014; AP&L) identify three problems with universal grammar (UG), namely: linking, data coverage, and redundancy, and argue for an alternative approach to child language acquisition. Behme (2014) aims to make a stronger case against UG. She attempts to show, by combining AP&L’s arguments with evidence from developmental psychology and formal linguistics, that UG should be rejected. In this commentary, I argue that Behme’s article does not present strong enough evidence to reject UG. Although Behme has pointed out some problems for UG theorists to consider, she fails to pinpoint where UG has really gone wrong. I then try to make clear what the fatal problem with UG is.

In some languages, such as Hebrew and German, a D-PRONOUN (a pronominal demonstrative form) may refer to a human. When it does, the use of the d-pronoun may be associated with a pejorative effect, implying a negative evaluation of the denoted individual (henceforth N(EGATIVE)-EFFECT). The N-effect is triggered, however, only under certain conditions. For example, when the d-pronoun is modified, no N-effect arises. This article examines the syntactic and pragmatic conditions under which this meaning emerges, and develops an account that integrates pronominal markedness and competition into the fold of conversational implicatures. The study addresses two questions: (i) What is the distribution of the N-effect? (ii) How is it linguistically encoded? Regarding (i), it is shown that the N-effect is triggered only when a personal pronoun could also have been used. This suggests that, everything else being equal, a personal pronoun is preferred over a d-pronoun; it also suggests that the N-effect is not intrinsically, or lexically, encoded. Regarding (ii), the N-effect must derive from the nonuse of a personal pronoun, and in this sense, it is related to markedness, and to systems that derive conversational implicatures. We argue that the use of a d-pronoun when a personal pronoun could also have been used gives rise to an implicature that the d-pronoun is associated with [–person], and we substantiate a theory of PERSON as a contentful category that marks discourse participation.