This ‘short shot’ article draws attention to an unresolved contradiction between fundamental assumptions of modern linguistics and economics. Endogenous growth theory has become the consensus explanation of the phenomenon of long-term economic growth. This theory makes an assumption that is not seen as controversial by economists, namely, that the supply of new, unanticipated ideas is limited only by the level of resources committed to idea generation. Much linguistic theorizing, by contrast, assumes that potential human cognitive products are tightly constrained by biology. Although linguists and economists are primarily interested in different kinds of ‘ideas’, there is a real contradiction between the respective assumptions. The article does not offer a resolution of the contradiction, but encourages members of our discipline to be aware of it as a problem needing to be resolved.

Jasmine was an American seventh grader whose first language (L1) is Punjabi and second language (L2) is English. A good speller, she tied for first place at her regional spelling bee. She maintains that she then correctly spelled the tie-breaking word: tomography. After requesting an instant video replay of her word, the judges declared Jasmine's spelling incorrect: <d-o-m-o-g-r-a-p-h-y>. We examine three questions: Is Jasmine's presumed-high word-recognition ability consistent with such an error? Did her L1 interfere with her L2 pronunciation? Did an L1-influenced pronunciation cause the judges to perceive her word-initial /t/ as [d]? After inquiring of Jasmine about the spelling event itself, we examined the considerable research on Indian English, spelling, speech production, and speech perception; we also audio-recorded Jasmine's spoken language at various style levels to assess the degree to which Punjabi may be influencing her English pronunciation. The first question remains without a confirmed answer, though our assumption is that it is ‘no’. Work on Indian English indicates a probable ‘yes’ to the latter two questions. Spectrographic analysis of Jasmine's word-initial English [th]-sounds demonstrates the shorter voice onset times associated with the nonaspirated /t/-sounds of Punjabi and Indian English. It is probable that Jasmine pronounced the ‘t’ [th] of tomography with little or no aspiration, and that the judges heard the near-unaspirated [t] as a [d]. Jasmine's experience demonstrates that the Scripps National Spelling Bee's sole reliance on dictionary pronunciations of Standard American English might well be adjusted to accommodate contestants who speak a nonstandard, or a standard but non-American, variety of English.

Sound symbolism is a phenomenon with broad relevance to the study of language and mind, but there has been a disconnect between its investigations in linguistics and psychology. This study tests the sound-symbolic potential of ideophones—words described as iconic—in an experimental task that improves over prior work in terms of ecological validity and experimental control. We presented 203 ideophones from five languages to eighty-two Dutch listeners in a binary-choice task, in four versions: original recording, full diphone resynthesis, segments-only resynthesis, and prosody-only resynthesis. Listeners guessed the meaning of all four versions above chance, confirming the iconicity of ideophones and showing the viability of speech synthesis as a way of controlling for segmental and suprasegmental properties in experimental studies of sound symbolism. The success rate was more modest than prior studies using pseudowords like bouba/kiki, implying that assumptions based on such words cannot simply be transferred to natural languages. Prosody and segments together drive the effect: neither alone is sufficient, showing that segments and prosody work together as cues supporting iconic interpretations. The findings cast doubt on attempts to ascribe iconic meanings to segments alone and support a view of ideophones as words that combine arbitrariness and iconicity. We discuss the implications for theory and methods in the empirical study of sound symbolism and iconicity.

Approximative numbers, like paucal and greater plural, can be characterized in terms of a feature, [±additive], concerned with additive closure. The two parameters affecting this feature (whether it is active and whether + and - values may cooccur) also affect the two features that generate nonapproximative numbers. All three features are shown to be derivative of concepts in the literature on aspect and telicity, to have a straightforwardly compositional semantics, and to eschew ad hoc stipulations on cooccurrence (such as geometries and filters). Thus, what is proposed is a general theory of number, free of extrinsic stipulations. Empirically, the theory yields a characterization of all numbers attested crosslinguistically, a combinatorial explanation of Greenberg-style implications affecting their cooccurrence, a natural account of morphological compositionality, and insight into their diachronic sources and trajectories.

According to Chomsky (2010, 2013) and Berwick and colleagues (2011), the structure-dependence principle suggests that linear order is a reflex of the sensory-motor system and plays no role in syntax and semantics. However, when these authors use the expression linear order, they seem to refer exclusively to the literal precedence/temporal relation among terminals in linguistic objects. This narrow use, which is very common within linguistics, differs from the technical use in a noninnocuous way and does not allow us to exploit the unificational force that the concept of order can have for minimalist investigations. Here I follow Fortuny and Corominas-Murtra's (2009) formal definition of the syntactic procedure, which capitalizes on the foundational set-theoretical concept of nest. I show how the structure-dependence principle can be derived from a local definition of syntactic domain while retaining the idea that central concepts of configurational and transformational syntactic theories are orders.

Object markers alternate between a prefix and a suffix position in the Thetogovela dialect of Moro, an underdocumented Kordofanian language of Sudan. Although the alternation appears to depend on the morphosyntactic category of verb forms, we show that it actually follows from the tonal properties of these verb forms. Verb stems that are usually marked with a default, phonologically predictable leftmost high tone select prefix object markers. The high-toned prefix object marker appears inside the stem, and its high tone serves as the default tone of the stem, obviating the need for inserted high tone. Verb stems that impose other tone patterns, either all high or all low, select suffix object markers, a fact that we attribute to the incompatibility of high-toned prefix object markers with all-high and all-low tone patterns. The data are analyzed as a case of phonology conditioning prefix placement and overriding standard suffix position. Although such phonologically determined mobile affixes are rare in the world’s languages, the Moro case provides a new example of affix mobility based on a novel property, tone, and it underscores the need to incorporate such cases into the architecture of grammatical systems.

In this commentary, we focus on the linking problem Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven identify. Instead of taking a stance on the issue of universal grammar itself, we adopt an epistemological and methodological perspective on language acquisition research. We argue that the problem, linking the input to preexisting representations, constitutes just a small part of a larger methodological problem, namely how to link the input a learner receives, through a set of learning mechanisms and possibly innate representations, to the behavior the learner is producing, whether in spontaneous production or in laboratory experiments. Currently, none of the existing proposals provide an evaluated, or even a testable, account of the full process, that is, an input-output model of linguistic ontogeny. Although the focus on phenomena in isolation, probably an effect of the prevalence of the experimental method, allows the researcher some degree of control, it also distracts from the understanding of how the different mechanisms behave and interact. Our proposed solution is a more Holistic approach to the problem in which the learning mechanisms and their interaction are made fully Explicit, and in which the predicted behavior of the learner is (more) Globally evaluated. Computational modeling provides exactly the tools appropriate for this task, thereby furthering more precise and testable theories of the learning mechanisms involved.

[The following is a slightly modified version of the annual report about Language for 2014 submitted by the editor, Greg Carlson, to the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America for its consideration at its January meeting.]

Although Cherokee is known to show highly flexible clausal word order, the principles that predict speakers' preferences among possible orders are not extensively described. This article presents a new description of the grammatical properties that predict clausal word order in spoken Cherokee, based on a corpus study of word-order variation. Our results show that the placement of nominal expressions relative to verbs, and the relative order of nominal expressions within a clause, are determined in a probabilistic way by the cumulative interaction of several factors: REFERENTIAL ACCESSIBILITY, CONTRAST, AND THEMATIC ROLE. The findings suggest that thematic properties may have a greater word-order role than generally assumed in languages with nonconfigurational and/or polysynthetic properties.

Erosion of DIFFERENTIAL OBJECT MARKING (DOM)—the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects—has been observed in Spanish heritage speakers who are second-generation immigrants in the United States (Montrul 2004, Montrul & Bowles 2009). We investigated whether DOM is similarly vulnerable in heritage speakers of Hindi and Romanian, two other languages that also exhibit DOM, as well as in first-generation immigrants, adults who are presumably the main source of input to heritage speakers. We report the results of three experimental studies testing acceptability of DOM through a bimodal judgment task in first- and second-generation Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian speakers in the US and native speakers in Mexico, India, and Romania matched for age and socioeconomic status. Our results show structural changes with DOM in all of the heritage speaker groups to different degrees. Acceptance of nontarget DOM omission was more extensive in Spanish than in Hindi and Romanian. First-generation Hindi and Romanian immigrants did not differ in their grammatical proficiency and acceptance of DOM omission from the Hindi and Romanian speakers tested in India and in Romania. However, the first-generation Mexican immigrants displayed similar performance to the Spanish heritage speakers, suggesting that Spanish DOM is prone to L1 attrition in the first generation as well. We discuss linguistic and experiential factors relevant to the three languages and the three immigrant communities to explain these findings.

Properties of the content of the clausal complement have long been assumed to distinguish factive predicates like know from nonfactive ones like think (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970, inter alia). There is, however, disagreement about which properties define factive predicates, as well as uncertainty about whether the content of the complement of particular predicates exhibits the properties attributed to the content of the complement of factive predicates. This has led to a lack of consensus about which predicates are factive, a troublesome situation given the central role that factivity plays in linguistic theorizing. This article reports six experiments designed to investigate two critical properties of the content of the complement of clause-embedding predicates, namely projection and entailment, with the goal of establishing whether these properties identify a class of factive predicates. We find that factive predicates are more heterogeneous than previously assumed and that there is little empirical support from these experiments for the assumed categorical distinction between factive and nonfactive predicates. We discuss implications of our results for formal analyses of presuppositions, one area where factivity has played a central role. We propose that projection is sensitive to meaning distinctions between clause-embedding predicates that are more fine-grained than factivity.

When a language provides multiple syntactic options for conveying the same semantic content, these options generally serve distinct discourse functions. In some cases, however, they serve the same discourse function while being in complementary distribution syntactically. This article argues that in these instances, the syntactic variants constitute Alloforms of a single, more abstract construction. Pairs of such alloforms include inversion and long passives in English and two forms of postposing in Italian. Moreover, English inversion is argued to be an alloform of both preposing and postposing. This account explains the distributional difference between alloforms of a single construction and complex structures built up of multiple distinct constructions. Finally, the report considers the ramifications of this account for linguistic theory in general and the notion of a ‘construction’ in particular.

This report describes a new research resource: a searchable database of 4,700 naturally occurring instances of sluicing in English, annotated so as to shed light on the questions that have shaped research on ellipsis since the 1960s. The paper describes the data set and how it can be obtained, how it was constructed, how it is organized, and how it can be queried. It also highlights some initial empirical findings, first describing general characteristics of the data, then focusing more closely on issues concerning antecedents and possible mismatches between antecedents and ellipsis sites.