Serial verb constructions have often been said to refer to single conceptual events. However, evidence to support this claim has been elusive. This article introduces co-speech gestures as a new way of investigating the relationship. The alignment patterns of gestures with serial verb constructions and other complex clauses were compared in Avatime (Ka-Togo, Kwa, Niger-Congo). Serial verb constructions tended to occur with single gestures overlapping the entire construction. In contrast, other complex clauses were more likely to be accompanied by distinct gestures overlapping individual verbs. This pattern of alignment suggests that serial verb constructions are in fact used to describe single events.

The author points out cases in which contiguous languages, though different in structure and vocabulary, exhibit in common striking morphologic peculiarities that must have spread by borrowing from language to language. A simple genealogical classification cannot therefore adequately represent the development, but ‘hybridization’ must also be taken into account.

This article investigates the role of situational context in differential case marking. Evidence from conversation data in Korean demonstrates that caseless subjects are predominantly found in event-reporting clauses that have an agent directly identifiable in the here and now, while case-marked subjects are not similarly restricted. Based on this evidence, I propose a new account of differential subject marking in terms of an efficiency principle of negative correlation between length/complexity and cue reliability. I argue that the association of caseless subjects with seemingly unrelated features such as grounding in the here and now, nonstativity, and definiteness follows from speakers' efficient use of case marking motivated by the availability of strong situational cues to the intended role interpretation of a subject referent.

The midpoint pathology (in the sense of Kager 2012) characterizes a type of unattested stress system in which the stressable window contracts to a single word-internal syllable in some words, but not others. Kager (2012) shows that the pathology is a prediction of analyses employing contextual lapse constraints (e.g. *ExtLapseR; no 000 strings at the right edge) and argues that the only way to avoid it is to eliminate these constraints from Con. This article explores an alternative: that systems exhibiting the midpoint pathology are unattested not because the constraints that would generate them are absent from Con, but because they are difficult to learn. This study belongs to a growing body of work exploring the idea that phonological typology is shaped by considerations of learnability.

Languages have several grammatical means of expressing the relation between speaker and addressee, including speech-style particles, politeness pronouns, allocutive marking, and honorifics. Despite the similarity in the meaning they convey, these politeness markers fall into two distributional classes: some ('content-oriented markers of politeness’) can occur in complement clauses, while others ('utterance-oriented markers of politeness’) are restricted to matrix contexts. Focusing on speech-style markers in Korean and second-person pronouns in Romance languages (especially Italian), we develop a dynamic pragmatics model of the distinct kind of meaning that they encode and provide an analysis that accounts for their distributional differences.

This article examines obligatory backward resumption in Karuk (kyh; isolate), a verb-final language of Northern California, and argues that it is the result of conflicting word-order requirements. This conceptual analysis is further developed within the chain-resolution framework of Landau 2006, in which resumption is the result of partial deletion. The Karuk facts indicate that partial deletion targets spellout domains and not phases, contra van Urk 2018. Examination of two case studies from the literature and a reinterpretation of the Dinka resumption data discussed in van Urk 2018 further demonstrate that partial deletion of spellout domains has broader empirical coverage than partial deletion of phases. The second part of the article pivots to the predictions made by the chain-resolution analysis about alternatives to backward resumption. These predictions are shown to be borne out in three other verb-final languages, namely Hindi-Urdu, Persian, and Turkish. The article closes with an examination of the parallels between backward resumption and regular forward resumption and concludes that both may be derived by movement or by base-generation of the proform.

This study provides two mathematical formalizations of borrowability. These operationalizations allow us to quantitatively evaluate the borrowability of phonological segments and to make predictions about the likelihood that speech sounds will be borrowed in language contact situations. Our approach departs from traditional borrowability hierarchies based on qualitative observations and instead provides empirically motivated models based on probability theory and statistics. Our study uses as input two large crosslinguistic segment inventory databases, and our results show that segments have markedly different borrowability profiles, highlighting their different diffusion patterns through space and time.

A [+round] or [labial] feature is traditionally viewed as an elementary phonological unit that has different phonetic realizations depending on the height and backness of the segment that realizes it (McCarthy 1988, Clements & Hume 1995, Halle 1995, Kaun 1995, among others). In this article, I make two claims: (i) qualitatively different lip gestures are phonological in some languages, and (ii) there is more faithfulness to more extreme lip gestures.

Drawing from decolonizing and Indigenous research methodologies, I examine field linguistic training in US linguistics programs and how it approaches collaborative language research. I argue that the current praxis still reflects a linguist-focused model resulting in linguistic extraction (Davis 2017). I provide three recommendations for transforming linguistic field methods training: (i) the recognition of linguistics as a discipline rooted in colonization and the implications of this for speakers/community members, (ii) the incorporation and explicit discussion of language research frameworks that include Indigenous research methodologies, and (iii) the recognition and valorization of Indigenous epistemologies via decolonizing ‘language’ (Leonard 2017).

The processing load of sentences with three different word orders (VOS, VSO, and SVO) in Kaqchikel Maya was investigated using a sentence-plausibility judgment task. The results showed that VOS sentences were processed faster than VSO and SVO sentences. This supports the traditional analysis in Mayan linguistics that the syntactically determined basic word order is VOS in Kaqchikel, as in many other Mayan languages. More importantly, the result revealed that the preference for subject-object word order in sentence comprehension observed in previous studies may not be universal; rather, the processing load in sentence comprehension is greatly affected by the syntactic nature of individual languages.

This article reports on patterns in the production and perception of New Zealand English r-sandhi. We report on two phoneme-monitoring experiments that examine whether listeners from three regions are sensitive to the distribution of r-presence in linking and intrusive environments. The results provide evidence that sound perception is affected by a listener's experience-driven expectations: greater prior experience with a sound in a given context increases the likelihood of perceiving the sound in that context, regardless of whether the sound is present in the stimulus. For listeners with extremely limited prior exposure to a variant, the variant is especially salient and we also observe an experiment-internal effect of experience. We argue that our results support models that incorporate both word-specific and abstract probabilistic representations.

This paper establishes the lexical tone contrasts in the Nigerian language Izon, focusing on evidence for floating tone. Many tonal languages show effects of floating tone, though typically in a restricted way, such as occurring with only a minority of morphemes, or restricted to certain grammatical enviromnents. For Izon, the claim here is that all lexical items sponsor floating tone, making it ubiquitous across the lexicon and as common as pre-associated tone. The motivation for floating tone comes from the tonal patterns of morphemes in isolation and within tone groups. Based on these patterns, all lexical morphemes are placed into one of four tone classes defined according to winch floating tones they end in. Class A morphemes end in a floating ( ‘wife’), class B in ( ‘salt’), class C in ( ‘sand’), and class D in ( ‘him’). This paper provides extensive empirical support for tins analysis and discusses several issues which emerge under ubiquitous floating tone. Issues include the principled allowance of OCP(T) violations, and the propensity for word-initial vowels and low tone to coincide.

In this paper, I provide a new type of evidence for sub-tonal features (Yip 1980, 2002; Bao 1999) from the Eastern Sudanic language Gaahmg (Stirtz 2011): Gestalt contour formation where specific morphological categories change the tone of a base word to a falling contour, but with different absolute tone values (High-Mid, Mid-Low, and High-Low) depending on the input tone. I show that the three different Gestalt contours in Gaahmg can be captured succinctly via feature affixation using Register Tier Theory (Snider 1990, 1998, 1999), and that this analysis receives independent support by other general patterns in the morphophonology of the language. Thus, following McPherson (2017) and Meyase (2021), the paper undermines the major objection against tonal feature geometries that they lack broad support in language-specific tonal grammars (Hyman 2010; Clements, Michaud & Patin 2011). By developing a virtually complete tone-affixation analysis of Gaahmg's tonal morphology in Autosegmental Colored Containment Theory (Trommer 2015; Zaleska 2020; Paschen 2021), the paper also provides evidence for the viability of this formalism in the context of the Generalized Nonlinear Affixation (GNA) program to reduce all productive non-concatenative morphology to affixation of partial phonological representations (Bermúdez-Otero 2012).