In Spanish, the element todo ‘all’ agrees in gender and number with the noun it quantifies over (todas las ventanas ‘all.F.PL the.F.PL windows.F.PL'). In this article I discuss a novel construction in Rioplatense Spanish, restricted to existentials and possessives, in which todo agrees in gender and number with a given nominal in the structure but is neither syntactically nor semantically related to it (e.g. Hay toda agua en el baño (have.PRS all.F.SG water.F.SG in the bathroom) ‘There's water over the whole bathroom floor'). I argue that the syntax and the interpretation of this construction can be explained only if todo ‘all’ is understood to be modifying a silent element (in the sense of Kayne 2004). In particular, I propose that todo is the modifier of a PP headed by the silent preposition WITH, and that the nominal that agrees with todo is the complement of this silent P. This analysis sheds light on the structure of existential sentences and supports the view put forth in Levinson 2011, contra Freeze 1992, that a single underlying structure for possessive structures cannot be maintained.

It is standardly assumed that the German declarative dass-complementizer evolved from the demonstrative pronoun (Old High German thaz) used cataphorically. On this analysis, the source structure would be a paratactic sequence of two sentences in which thaz occurred in the final position of the first clause and pointed forward to the content of the second clause. Out of this structure, thaz developed into a subordinate conjunction/complementizer via a shift of the clause boundary (as in Mary knows that: Peter is lying → Mary knows that Peter is lying). This article takes issue with the standard assumption and puts forward an alternative account in which the declarative complementizer developed from a correlative construction (as in Mary knows that, that Peter is lying). The correlative construction (arguably also with an optionally silent correlative) is robustly attested in the old Germanic and old Indo-European languages. The source structure was thus not a sequence of syntactically independent clauses, but a hypotactic structure with an explicative relative clause associated with a silent correlative element in the main clause. In line with the hypothesis currently under discussion—that apparent noun-complement clauses are in fact relative clauses—it is argued that the explicative clause in the correlative structure was a relative clause, and thus the declarative complementizer developed from the relative complementizer thaz. The syntactic reanalyses involved in this new scenario are far less radical than in the traditional one. The new scenario is furthermore supported by crosslinguistic evidence: the development of relativizers into complementizers is a frequently attested grammaticalization path.

We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third-person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit associativity, a cluster of interpretive properties that have been argued also to characterize first- and second-person plural pronouns. Building on Kratzer's (2009) and Harbour's (2016) theories of person, I propose a plurality-based semantics for animacy that captures their shared properties. The compositional mechanism underlying this semantics ties person and animacy features to a single syntactic position inside the noun phrase. This enables an understanding of these features' shared relevance to syntactic operations, including those underlying pronoun cliticization. In these Zapotec varieties, it is constrained both by person (in the well-known person-case constraint) and by animacy.

I completely agree with Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (AP&L) that anyone proposing a learning-strategy component needs to demonstrate precisely how that component helps solve the language acquisition task. To this end, I discuss how computational modeling is a tool well suited to doing exactly this, and that it has the added benefit of highlighting hidden assumptions underlying learning strategies. I also suggest general criteria relating to utility and usability that we can use to evaluate potential learning strategies. As a response to AP&L's request for Universal Grammar (UG) components that actually do work, I additionally provide a review of one potentially UG component that is part ofa successful learning strategy for syntactic islands, and that satisfies the evaluation criteria I propose.

The nominal anaphoric element one has figured prominently in discussions of linguistic nativism because of an important argument advanced by C. L. Baker (1978). His argument has been frequently cited within the cognitive and linguistic sciences, and has provided the topic for a chain of experimental and computational psycholinguistics papers. Baker's crucial grammaticality facts, though much repeated in the literature, have not been critically investigated. A corpus investigation shows that his claims are not true: one does not take only phrasal antecedents, but can also take nouns on their own, including semantically relational nouns, and can take various of-PP dependents of its own. We give a semantic analysis of anaphoric one that allows it to exhibit this kind of freedom, and we exhibit frequency evidence that goes a long way toward explaining why linguists have been inclined to regard phrases like the one of physics or three ones as ungrammatical when in fact (as corpus evidence shows) they are merely dispreferred relative to available grammatical alternatives. The main implication for the acquisition literature is that one of the most celebrated arguments from poverty of the stimulus is shown to be without force.

Uspanteko is an endangered Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. Unstressed vowels in Uspanteko often delete, though deletion is variable within and across speakers. Deletion appears to be phonological: it is sensitive to foot structure, morphology, and certain phonotactics, and it occurs in slow, careful speech. But deletion also has characteristics more typical of a phonetic process: it is intertwined with a pattern of gradient vowel reduction and is insensitive to most phonotactics. Electroglottography data shows that even ‘deleted’ vowels may contribute voicing to intervals when flanked by voiceless consonants. This suggests that ‘deleted’ vowels are represented in the input to speech production, even when they are acoustically masked by articulatory overlap with adjacent segments. We conclude that vowel deletion is grammatically controlled gestural overlap, consistent with the claim that phonological representations encode information about the relative timing and coordination of articulatory gestures (e.g. Browman & Goldstein 1986, Gafos 2002). At a minimum, language-specific phonetic processes must have access to more fine-grained, abstract grammatical information than is usually assumed.

A 3D/4D ultrasound study of Russian stressed vowels in the context of ‘soft’ (phonetically palatalized or palatal) versus ‘hard’ consonants reveals that vowels in these two contexts differ systematically in terms of the position of the tongue root while the tongue dorsum is less consistently modified depending on the speaker, vowel or consonant context. This paper proposes that the observed vowel allophony, as well as the softness contrast in Russian consonants, and the contrast between /i/ and /ɨ/, are all defined in tenns of the feature [ATR].

This article provides an argument for Hong Kong English being a tonal language and informs the growing literature on word- and phrase-level prosody interactions. By teasing apart tonal effects that come from intonation and those that come from the word boundary, a clear picture emerges that H tones are assigned in all combinations to HKE di- and trisyllabic words. Tone spreading and blocking across words can also be seen in HKE, but syllables lexically specified for H never give up their tones. Complexity in HKE tone patterns arises when the H tones interact with boundary tones, such as the declarative final L% and the word-initial M.

Comprehending and producing words is a natural process for human speakers. In linguistic theory, investigating this process formally and computationally is often done by focusing on forms only. By moving beyond the world of forms, we show in this study that the discriminative lexicon (DL) model—operating with word comprehension as a mapping of form onto meaning, and word production as a mapping of meaning onto form—generates accurate predictions about what meanings listeners understand and what forms speakers produce. Furthermore, we show that measures derived from the computational model are predictive for human reaction times. Although mathematically very simple, the linear mappings between form and meaning posited by our model are powerful enough to capture the complexity and productivity of a Semitic language with a complex hybrid morphological system.

One critical assumption that Salikoko Mufwene (2017) makes about the field of language endangerment and loss is that linguists engaged in language endangerment, documentation, and revitalization are concerned with indigenous languages, which naturally leaves out nonindigenous languages. This response concerns itself with addressing this assumption, with a focus on a particular group of nonindigenous languages. It provides insight on the levels of endangerment of pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages for which we have information, and considers some reasons why it is important to focus on the endangerment and loss of these types of nonindigenous languages.