A comparison of speakers’ treatment of two categorically unattested phonotactic structures in Cochabamba Quechua reveals a stronger grammatical prohibition on roots with pairs of ejectives, *[k'ap'u], than on roots with a plain stop followed by an ejective, *[kap'u]. While the distribution of ejectives can be stated as a single restriction on ejectives preceded by stops (ejective or plain), *[-cont, -son][cg], speakers show evidence of having learned an additional constraint that penalizes cooccurring ejectives more harshly, *[cg][cg]. An inductive learning bias in favor of constraints with the algebraic structure of*[cg][cg] is hypothesized (Marcus 2001, Berent et al. 2002, Berent et al. 2012), allowing such constraints to be preferred by learners over constraints like *[-cont, -son][+cg], which penalize sequences of unrelated feature matrices.

I investigate patterns of preverbal fronting in Toba Batak, a predicate-initial Austronesian language of northern Sumatra. Contrary to the claims of previous work on the language, I show that multiple constituents can be simultaneously fronted, though only in limited configurations. I argue that the distinct heads C and T are present in Toba Batak, with their common division of labor, but extraction patterns are restricted by the limited means of nominal licensing (abstract Case) in the language. In addition, the features of C and T have the option of being bundled together on a single head, inheriting properties of both C and T and probing together for the joint satisfaction of their probes. This study sheds light on the relationship between western Austronesian voice system languages and the clause periphery in other language families.

A key notion in understanding language is ‘possible word (lexeme)’. While there are lexemes that are internally homogeneous and externally consistent, we find others with splits in their internal structure (morphological paradigm) and inconsistencies in their external behavior (syntactic requirements). I first explore the characteristics of the most straightforward lexemes, in order to establish a point in the theoretical space from which we can calibrate the real examples we find. I then schematize the interesting phenomena that deviate from this idealization, including suppletion, syncretism, deponency, and defectiveness. Next I analyze the different ways in which lexemes are ‘split’ by such phenomena. I set out a typology of possible splits, along four dimensions: splits that are (i) based on the composition/feature signature of the paradigm versus those based solely on morphological form; (ii) motivated (following a boundary motivated from outside the paradigm) versus purely morphology-internal (‘morphomic’); (iii) regular (extending across the lexicon) versus irregular (lexically specified); (iv) externally relevant versus irrelevant: we expect splits to be internal to the lexeme, but some have external relevance (they require different syntactic behaviors).

I identify instances of these four dimensions separately: they are orthogonal, and therefore not dependent on each other. Their interaction gives a substantial typology, and it proves to be surprisingly complete: the possibilities specified are all attested. The typology also allows for the unexpected patterns of behavior to overlap in particular lexemes, producing some remarkable examples. Such examples show that the notion ‘possible word’ is more challenging than many linguists have realized.

Although understanding the role of the environment is central to language acquisition theory, rarely has this been studied for children's phonetic development, and RECEPTIVE and EXPRESSIVE language experiences in the environment are not distinguished. This last distinction may be crucial for child speech production in particular, because production requires coordination of low-level speech-motor planning with high-level linguistic knowledge. In this study, the role of the environment is evaluated in a novel way—by studying phonetic development in a bilingual community undergoing rapid language shift. This sociolinguistic context provides a naturalistic gradient of the AMOUNT of children's exposure to two languages and the RATIO of expressive to receptive experiences. A large-scale child language corpus encompassing over 500 hours of naturalistic South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish speech was efficiently annotated for children's and their caregivers' bilingual language use. These estimates were correlated with children's patterns in a series of speech production tasks. The role of the environment varied by outcome: children's expressive language experience best predicted their performance on a coarticulation-morphology measure, while their receptive experience predicted performance on a lower-level measure of vowel variability. Overall these bilingual exposure effects suggest a pathway for children's role in language change whereby language shift can result in different learning outcomes within a single speech community. Appropriate ways to model language exposure in development are discussed.

Anaphoric pronouns such as ‘it’ are referentially underspecified and therefore depend on prior context for interpretation. The factors influencing their interpretation are a long-standing topic of research in syntactic and pragmatic literature. We present a novel study of pronoun resolution in the ergative-absolutive Polynesian language Niuean, investigating whether Niuean exhibits the same subject preference found for nominative-accusative languages (e.g. Chafe 1976) or whether, alternatively, the absolutive argument is preferred as a referent. Niuean also exhibits split ergativity, allowing for isolation of further effects of case (wherein listeners show a preference for antecedents that bear the same case as the pronoun) and transitivity (wherein direct objects are preferred as antecedents as compared with adjuncts). Most importantly, we observe that ergative arguments are consistently preferred as referents over clause-mate absolutive arguments, providing evidence that ergative arguments exhibit behavior parallel to that of ‘subjects’ in nominative-accusative languages.

Eckert (2008) rightly points out that context, variation, and indexicality are inextricably bound. This work—an in-depth case study of the social significance of the English definite article—presents a picture whereby semantic meaning is part of that same web of interrelations. The primary empirical claim of this work is that using the with a plural NP (e.g. the Americans) to talk about all or typical members of a group of individuals tends to depict that group as a monolith separate from the speaker, and to an extent that using a bare plural (e.g. Americans) does not. I present two variationist, corpus-based studies that provide clear evidence of this effect. I then provide a principled account of the effect, building on the insights of sociolinguistic and pragmatic research and extending their collective reach. As I show, the effect is largely rooted in crucial differences between the semantic meaning of the-plurals and that of related alternative expressions. As with a broad range of associated phenomena, the exact interpretation of a particular the-plural on a given occasion of use depends importantly upon its indexical character, the beliefs of the speech participants, and myriad other contextual factors, but is nonetheless constrained in a principled way.

This study attempts to answer a perennial question asked of and by every student of linguistics: ‘What can you do with this degree?’. We address the question through an in-depth analysis of administrative and tax data from Statistics Canada (2009–2018). Specifically, this article (i) maps out educational and employment pathways of linguistics graduates in Canada, (ii) compares their earnings to graduates from other ‘competitor’ programs that future linguists consider as viable alternatives, and (iii) verifies the range of careers advertised by linguistics departments against the reality of the industries in which graduates from those departments are employed. These findings enable us to draw conclusions about the optimal and suboptimal educational and career pathways that involve a linguistics degree. Linguistics graduates tend to earn less than their peers in comparable programs, unless they pursue a lengthy educational path. The findings also point to a partial mismatch between potential careers advertised by Canadian linguistics departments and actual areas of employment after graduating with a linguistics degree. We provide suggestions for linguistics departments on how best to align the policies and practices of these programs with the ground truth of the labor market.

In this short report, we show that some elements usually deemed as obligatory DE SE anaphors may be interpreted as NON-DE SE in certain contexts. We argue that this non-de se reading cannot be subsumed under the category of DE RE, and suggest extending Kuno and Kaburaki's Theory of Empathy (Kuno & Kaburaki 1977, Kuno 1987) to interpret these readings as Indirect De Se: namely, that the speaker empathizes with the attitude holder, helping the latter to do self-reference. Applying this idea to other anaphoric expressions like personal pronouns, we obtain a TRICHOTOMY of attitude reports—de se, de re, and indirect de se, contra the traditional de se and de re distinction. Our proposal can also help to account for Anand's (2006) observation that only firstperson attitude reports in the Past Tense may have the non-de se reading.

Projective contents, which include presuppositional inferences and Potts's (2005) conventional implicatures, are contents that may project when a construction is embedded, as standardly identified by the family-of-sentences diagnostic (e.g. Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet 1990). This article establishes distinctions among projective contents on the basis of a series of diagnostics, including a variant of the family-of-sentences diagnostic, that can be applied with linguistically untrained consultants in the field and the laboratory. These diagnostics are intended to serve as part of a toolkit for exploring projective contents across languages, thus allowing generalizations to be examined and validated cross-linguistically. We apply the diagnostics in two languages, focusing on Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupí-Guaraní), and comparing the results to those for English. Our study of Paraguayan Guaraní is the first systematic exploration of projective content in a language other than English. Based on the application of our diagnostics to a wide range of constructions, four subclasses of projective contents emerge. The resulting taxonomy of projective content has strong implications for contemporary theories of projection (e.g. Karttunen 1974, Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992, Potts 2005, Schlenker 2009), which were developed for the projective properties of particular subclasses and fail to generalize to the full set of projective contents.

The world's languages exhibit striking diversity. At the same time, recurring linguistic patterns suggest the possibility that this diversity is shaped by features of human cognition. One well-studied example is word order in complex noun phrases (like these two red vases). While many orders of these elements are possible, a subset appear to be preferred. It has been argued that this ordering reflects a single underlying representation of noun phrase structure, from which preferred orders are straightforwardly derived (e.g. Cinque 2005). Building on previous experimental evidence using artificial language learning (Culbertson & Adger 2014), we show that these preferred orders arise not only in existing languages, but also in improvised sequences of gestures produced by English speakers. We then use corpus data from a wide range of languages to argue that the hypothesized underlying structure of the noun phrase might be learnable from statistical features relating objects and their properties conceptually. Using an information-theoretic measure of strength of association, we find that adjectival properties (e.g. red) are on average more closely related to the objects they modify (e.g. wine) than numerosities are (e.g. two), which are in turn more closely related to the objects they modify than demonstratives are (e.g. this). It is exactly those orders which transparently reflect this—by placing adjectives closest to the noun, and demonstratives farthest away—that are more common across languages and preferred in our silent gesture experiments. These results suggest that our experience with objects in the world, combined with a preference for transparent mappings from conceptual structure to linear order, can explain constraints on noun phrase order.

This paper addresses language vitality from an Africanist perspective. I identify central components for the paradigm Mufwene (2017) invites us to conceive: the investigation of communicative practices in language ecologies (rather than the study of a language), of fluid speech and its relation to imaginary reifications, of indexical functions of speech and language, and of language ideologies and the perspectives contained in them. I argue that the study of small-scale multilingual ecologies driven by adaptivity, rather than by fixed ethnolinguistic identities and ancestral languages, and the recognition of small languages as causally related to language vitality, not to endangerment, are crucial for a rethinking of linguistic vitality and diversity.

This paper presents rhythmic syncope in Mojeño Trinitario, an Arawak language spoken in lowland Bolivia. In this language, every vowel that is in a weak prosodic position can syncopate. The syncope pattern of Mojeño Trinitario is remarkable for several reasons. First, it involves a regular, categorical and complete deletion rather than a statistical reduction of vowels. Second, it applies similarly to words with either of two stress patterns: iambic words, which make up the great majority of words, and trochaic ones, much less numerous. Third, a great variety of consonant sequences are the result of syncope, and syllabification applies again after syncope. Fourth, rhythmic syncope actually underapplies: almost half of the vowels that are in a position to syncopate are maintained, and vowel quality plays a statistical role in immunity to syncope. Fifth, due to a rich morphology and a set of complex phonotactic rules applying sequentially, syncope leads to extreme opacity. The data presented in tins paper in a theory-neutral way contribute to the typology of rhythmic syncope. It will also be of interest to phonologists considering constraint-based vs. derivational models of phonology.

We report on the rapid birth of a new language in Australia, Gurindji Kriol, from the admixture of Gurindji and Kriol. This study is the first investigation of contact-induced change within a single speaker population that uses multiple variants. It also represents an innovative modification of the Wright-Fisher population genetics model to investigate temporal change in linguistic data. We track changes in lexicon and grammar over three generations of Gurindji people, using data from seventy-eight speakers coded for their use of Gurindji, Kriol, and innovative variants across 120 variables (with 292 variants). We show that the adoption of variants into Gurindji Kriol was not random, but biased toward Kriol variants and innovations. This bias is not explained by simplification, as is often claimed for contact-induced change. There is no preferential adoption of less complex variants, and, in fact, complex Kriol variants are more likely to be adopted over simpler Gurindji variants.

This paper offers a novel analysis of the complex patterns of exponence exhibited by the Somali subject marker (MRK). Somali subject marking presents a typologically rare case of subtractive grammatical tone, and one in which an otherwise predictable process of High tone loss is sometimes impeded by factors related to word structure. In the simplest instances, MRK is realized only tonally by the loss of High tone from the last word in a DP. Under some conditions, however, it is realized only segmentally, with no High tone loss. Still other times, both exponents appear, and even in a few instances, neither is realized. These outcomes are predictable, but analyzing them presents several challenges. One of these is motivating the outcomes from a single underlying form given the apparent independence of the tonal and segmental exponents. Others concern defining the trigger of subtraction and the domain or valuation window in which subtraction occurs. We propose a formal account of these outcomes within Cophonologies by Phase (Sande & Jenks 2018; Sande, Jenks & Inkelas 2020), whose division of vocabulary items into three types of phonological content is uniquely suited to addressing these analytical hurdles.