This article is a case study in how quantitative-statistical and formal-theoretical (generative) approaches to language variation can be combined. We provide a quantitative analysis of word-order variation in verb clusters in 185 dialects of Dutch and map the results of that analysis against linguistic parameters extracted from the theoretical literature on verb clusters. Based on this novel methodology, we argue that verb cluster ordering in Dutch dialects can be reduced to three grammatical parameters (largely similar to the ones described in Barbiers et al. 2018), and we identify the dialect groups that correspond to the various settings of those parameters.

STYLISTIC FRONTING (SF) is an optional syntactic phenomenon whereby a lexical item that may belong to various syntactic categories fronts to a pre-finite-V position, if no subject is merged in SPECIP. The literature reports that SF is productive in Icelandic and Old Scandinavian, and it is also attested in some Old Romance languages (Old Catalan, Old French). This article presents a phase-based analysis of SF in Old Italian. In this language, SF has some previously undiscussed characteristics. A corpus study shows that Old Italian displays a root/nonroot asymmetry in the typology of fronting items. In root clauses, nominal elements, such as nominal predicates with a special semantics, front more frequently than verbal elements (infinitives, past participles), which most frequently front in nonroot clauses. Since fronting in root clauses is intrinsically ambiguous with topicalization and focalization, it is not considered SF and is not extensively discussed in this article. By contrast, I analyze as proper SF the fronting operation that occurs in nonroot clauses, and I argue that this is a movement anchoring the event-structure (VP) semantic content to the context (FINP). This type of movement is possible only if vP is not a phase and no intervening agentive external argument is merged in SPECVP. The fronted material is pragmatically presupposed and interpreted as the SUBJECT OF PREDICATION. Pragmatics tests corroborate the argument.

The structural focus of linguistics has led to a static and modular treatment of meaning. Viewing language as practice allows us to transcend the boundaries of subdisciplines that deal with meaning and to integrate the social indexicality of variation into this larger system. This article presents the expression of social meaning as a continuum of decreasing reference and increasing performativity, with sociolinguistic variation at the performative extreme. The meaning potential of sociolinguistic variables in turn is based in their form and their social source, constituting a cline of ‘interiority’ from variables that index public social facts about the speaker to more internal, personal affective states.

In Japanese linguistics and elsewhere, the particle wa in its thematic use has been widely regarded as a paradigmatic instance of a ‘topic marker’. This work aims to demonstrate that, contrary to this received wisdom, most often thematic wa merely indicates the groundhood (the status as a nonfocus) rather than the topichood (the status as a topic) of the marked constituent, although it serves as a marker of contrastive topic in some configurations. In a root clause, as a rule, an explicit argument must be marked by thematic wa if it (i) is nonfocal and (ii) does not cooccur with an explicit, nonfocal sister argument less oblique than it. This implies that an explicit, nonfocal subject must be wa-marked, given that a subject is by definition the least oblique argument. Arguments marked by thematic wa despite not meeting this condition (e.g. a wa-marked object cooccurring with a wa-marked subject), as well as at least some instances of wa-marked adjuncts, are interpreted as contrastive topics. It is further pointed out, based on corpus data, that it is much more common for wa to indicate mere groundhood than topichood.

In this response to commentators on our target article ‘Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn't help’, we argue that the fatal flaw in most UG-based approaches to acquisition is their focus on describing the adult end-state in terms of a particular linguistic formalism. As a consequence, such accounts typically neglect to link acquisition to the language that the learner actually hears, instead assuming that she is able, by means usually unspecified, to perceive her input in terms of high-level theoretical abstractions.

Final obstruent devoicing is common in the world's languages and constitutes a clear case of parallel phonological evolution. Final obstruent voicing, in contrast, is claimed to be rare or nonexistent. Two distinct theoretical approaches crystalize around obstruent voicing patterns. Traditional markedness accounts view these sound patterns as consequences of universal markedness constraints prohibiting voicing, or favoring voicelessness, in final position, and predict that final obstruent voicing does not exist. In contrast, phonetic-historical accounts explain skewed patterns of voicing in terms of common phonetically based devoicing tendencies, allowing for rare cases of final obstruent voicing under special conditions. In this article, phonetic and phonological evidence is offered for final obstruent voicing in Lakota, an indigenous Siouan language of the Great Plains of North America. In Lakota, oral stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ are regularly pronounced as [b], [l], and [ɡ] in word- and syllable-final position when phrase-final devoicing and preobstruent devoicing do not occur.

Most cases of long-distance consonant dissimilation can be characterized as local (occurring across a vowel) or unbounded (occurring at all distances). The only known exception is rhotic dissimilation in Sundanese (Cohn 1992; Bennett 2015a,b), which applies in certain non-local contexts only. Following a suggestion by Zuraw (2002:433), I show that the pattern can be analyzed in a co-occurrence-based framework (Suzuki 1998) by invoking two unbounded co-occurrence constraints, *[r],..[r] and *[l]…[1], whose effects in local contexts are obscured by a drive for identity between adjacent syllables. Statistical trends in the lexicon are consistent with this analysis. I compare the predictions of this analysis to those of Bennett's (2015a,b) and suggest that the present proposal is preferable.

Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (AP&L) claim that the knowledge attributed to children by the proponents of UG does not account for language acquisition, bringing evidence from several domains. In this response, we take issue with their claims with respect to two domains. In the case of categories, where distributional learning plays an important role, we argue that AP&L fail to recognize recent analyses showing that abstract representations yield better quantitative models for early child data. In the case of subjacency, we provide several empirical arguments against their claim that it can be reduced to some general discourse-pragmatic principles.

This article argues for a new theory of the origin of WH-correlatives from indefinite uses of WH-words in paratactic or asyndetic conditionals. We show that this theory predicts a generalization that has so far gone unnoticed: WH-based correlatives always have a universal reading; they may also have a definite reading, which may be morphologically marked. This is in contrast to correlatives where the relativizer originates from a demonstrative element: these always have a definite reading and may also have a universal reading. We demonstrate the validity of this generalization on a data set containing thirty-eight correlative structures from thirty-two languages, that is, all of the correlative structures that are sufficiently well described in the literature.

Sentence and construction types generally have more than one pragmatic function. Impersonal deontic declaratives such as ‘it is necessary to X’ assert the existence of an obligation or necessity without tying it to any particular individual. This family of statements can accomplish a range of functions, including getting another person to act, explaining or justifying the speaker's own behavior as he or she undertakes to do something, or even justifying the speaker's behavior while simultaneously getting another person to help. How is an impersonal deontic declarative fit for these different functions? And how do people know which function it has in a given context? We address these questions using video recordings of everyday interactions among speakers of Italian and Polish. Our analysis results in two findings. The first is that the pragmatics of impersonal deontic declaratives is systematically shaped by (i) the relative responsibility of participants for the necessary task and (ii) the speaker's nonverbal conduct at the time of the statement. These two factors influence whether the task in question will be dealt with by another person or by the speaker, often giving the statement the force of a request or, alternatively, of an account of the speaker's behavior. The second finding is that, although these factors systematically influence their function, impersonal deontic declaratives maintain the potential to generate more complex interactions that go beyond a simple opposition between requests and accounts, where participation in the necessary task may be shared, negotiated, or avoided. This versatility of impersonal deontic declaratives derives from their grammatical makeup: by being deontic and impersonal, they can both mobilize or legitimize an act by different participants in the speech event, while their declarative form does not constrain how they should be responded to. These features make impersonal deontic declaratives a special tool for the management of social agency.

This study investigates how listeners associate acoustically different vowels with a single linguistic vowel quality. Listeners were asked to identify vowel sounds as /æ/ or /ʌ/ and to indicate the size of the speaker that produced them. Results indicate that perceived vowel quality trades off with the perception of speaker size: different vowels can sound the same, and the same vowel can sound different when a different speaker is perceived. These findings suggest that vowel normalization is broadly similar to perceptual constancy in other domains, and that social, indexical, and linguistic information play an important role in determining even the most fundamental units of linguistic representation.

This study describes the nasal system in Ecuadorian Siona, an endangered Western Tukanoan language spoken in the Ecuadorian province of Sucumbíos, using the Earbuds Method to analyze nasal events acoustically. This method provides a visual representation of the timing and duration of velum gestures through intensity (dB) and amplitude (Pa) fluctuations in the nasal and oral cavities. The studied events include nasal spreading (nasal harmony), triggers, targets, blockers, and transparent segments. Meanwhile, differences between nasal phonemes and nasal allophones are also identified along with the effects of morpheme boundaries during nasal spreading events. Results reveal that, unlike many other Tukanoan languages. /m/ and /n/ function as individual phonemes independent of their oral counterparts ( & ). In addition nasal harmony was identified as predominantly rightward spreading apart from syllable-delimited leftward spreading to vocoid segments. Moreover, suffixes responsible for blocking nasal spreading appear to be reminiscent of oral suffixes in Eastern Tukanoan languages. Finally, more blockers were identified in Ecuadorian Siona than in most Eastern Tukanoan languages.

The year 2024 marks the Linguistic Society of America's centennial, dating from the founding of the Society at its first meeting, 28 December 1924, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Work on the LSA's journal, Language, began in 1924 as well, since a Committee on Publications was constituted at that meeting, with the express purpose, as reported in the Proceedings of that meeting, of overseeing ‘a regular independent publication, either quarterly or annually’. Thus, although the first issue of the journal appeared in March of 1925, it is appropriate to also celebrate the journal's centennial in 2024. Accordingly, the LSA's Centennial Planning Committee decided to do something special with the journal's 100th and 101st volumes: those eight issues of Language will include, in addition to the usual mix of original articles and book reviews, important articles from the past, one (or two, in some instances) from each decade since 1924—the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and so on, excluding the current still-emerging decade. Each reprinted article will be accompanied by a commentary that situates the paper in its own time and place and assesses its significance then and (in many cases) now. To fit all of the decades into eight issues of the journal, a few issues will have more than one reprinted article. Moreover, the first decade has more than one entry: the present issue, 100(1), contains, in addition to a reprinted research article from the 1920s (Boas 1929), Leonard Bloomfield's 1925 article ‘Why a linguistic society?‘, which appeared in Language 1(1).1–5. This article, the journal's very first, is included because of its status as the Society's foundational publication.