We report an experiment eliciting ordering preferences for BINOMIAL EXPRESSIONS (e.g. bread and butter vs. butter and bread) in order to investigate the respective influences of productive and item-specific knowledge in language processing. Binomial ordering preferences reflect both (i) productive constraints involving phonological, semantic, and lexical properties, and (ii) item-specific relative frequencies. Bayesian and exemplar-based computational models of acquisition and use predict influences of both productive and item-specific knowledge on ordering preferences, with item-specific knowledge playing a smaller role the lower the expression's overall frequency. Our results confirm this prediction, but also reveal a role of item-specific knowledge even for binomials with overall frequency less than one in ten million. These findings bring a quantitative perspective to the debate over the roles of productive and item-specific knowledge in language.

Natural human languages often contain variation (sociolinguistic or Labovian variation) that is passed from one generation of speakers to the next, but studies of acquisition have largely ignored this, instead focusing on aspects of language that are more deterministic. Theories of acquisition, however, must be able to account for both. This article examines variation from the perspective of the statistical learning framework and explores features of variation that contribute to learnability. In particular, it explores whether conditioning variables (i.e. where the pattern of variation is slightly different in different contexts) lead to better learning of variation as compared to when there are no conditioning variables, despite the former being conceptually more difficult. Data from two experiments show that adult learners are fairly good at learning patterns of both conditioned and unconditioned variation, the latter result replicating earlier studies. Five-to-seven-year-old children, in contrast, had different learning outcomes for conditioned versus unconditioned variation, with fewer children regularizing or imposing deterministic patterns on the conditioned variation. However, the children who did not impose deterministic patterns did not necessarily acquire the variation patterns the adults did.

This article illustrates two-verb clusters in Viscri Saxon, a dialect of Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax) spoken in Viscri, Romania, along with Romanian and Standard German. The orders found in Viscri Saxon verb clusters are encountered in West Germanic varieties related to TrSax (e.g. Moselle Franconian, Luxembourgish), but the distributions differ from the ones discussed in other varieties (Dubenion-Smith 2010, Wurmbrand 2017). I argue that word-order variation in Viscri Saxon is the result of syntactic transfer from Standard German, and show that there is flexible distribution between possible word orders. Furthermore, speakers with different linguistic profiles use the available constructions to different degrees, thus illustrating the roles of German and Romanian in the progression of contact-induced changes in Viscri Saxon.

The field of linguistic typology has made great strides in mapping the structures to be found across languages. We can now ask whether speakers of all languages distribute their ideas over such structures in the same ways. This question is explored here by examining complement constructions in three genealogically and areally unrelated languages. Each offers glimpses into some factors that shape grammar over time. Crosslinguistic differences in grammar arise from what speakers have chosen to say over millennia, but even languages spoken today can provide snapshots of moments in such processes, if we care to listen to their speakers.

This paper presents maxent.ot, a package for doing phonological analysis using Maximum Entropy Optimality Theory written in the statistical programming language R. R has become the de facto standard for doing statistical analysis in linguistic research, and this package allows phonologists to create and disseminate MaxEnt OT analyses in R. A central goal of the package is to support reproducible research and to allow the crucial components of a MaxEnt analysis to be performed conveniently and with only a basic knowledge of R programming. The paper first presents a tutorial on MaxEnt constraint grammars and how to use maxent.ot to perform a simple analysis. We then turn to more advanced features of the package, including model comparison, regularization, and cross-validation.

This article follows a change in pronunciation of word-medial intervocalic /t/ in New Zealand English, as it unfolds over 120 years. Data are analyzed in the context of questions about the role of experience-based lexical representations and their potential impact on the time course of sound change in progress. Three major results are reported. First, frequent words lead the change. Second, the distributions of individual words affect their participation in the change: words favored by younger speakers are produced with newer variants. Finally, the topic of conversation affects which variant is favored: older topics elicit older variants. Together, these findings provide evidence that phonetic distributions of word-level representations are implicated in the course of sound change.

We present the results of a study on whether writing-intensive learning techniques can assist beginner students in learning linguistic argumentation. The analysis is based on student submissions (eighty submissions from twenty students, 22,328 words) from a typical Introduction to Linguistics course, which were analyzed with the Coh-Metrix tool (McNamara et al. 2014), a suite of tests that measures cohesion of the linguistic formulation of the text and coherence of the mental representation. The essays show improvement in descriptive measures (lexical diversity, use of content words) and greater simplicity in terms of readability, suggesting a growth in the sophistication of the students' argumentation and disciplinary knowledge.

This article analyzes a certain class of misalignments found in contemporary Irish in the relation between syntactic and phonological representations. The mismatches analyzed turn on the phonological requirements of focus (VERUM FOCUS, in particular) and of ellipsis and on how the two sets of requirements interact. It argues that the phonological mechanisms of ellipsis can be overridden when the phonological requirements of F-marking need to be satisfied. The analysis requires a theoretical framework in which the postsyntactic computation is characterized by parallel and simultaneous optimization. In particular, it is argued that certain facets of ellipsis, morphophonology, and prosody are computed in parallel, as in classic optimality theory. The analysis also relies crucially on a kind of head movement (from specifier to a commanding head position) whose existence is predicted by current conceptions of phrase structure but which seems to be little documented.

This article revives old descriptive data on Awa, a Papuan language of the Kainantu group. The tonal system was described in detail in a paper by Loving (1973), where he reports a series of toneless noun suffixes, falling into six classes depending on their tonal alternations when combined with a noun root. This article demonstrates that the suffixes are best understood as carrying lexical tone; the alternations in form arise from the interaction of typologically natural tonotactic constraints. While the system can be described in autosegmental terms without much difficulty, a formal constraint-based analysis is less straightforward. I show that strict ranking, as in optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004 [1993]), fails to capture the data patterns due to cumulativity effects, some of which cannot be naturally captured even with local constraint conjunction (Smolensky 2006). The data are successfully modeled in harmonic grammar (Legendre et al. 1990).

Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Rarámuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesize a probabilistic universal of CATEGORY CLUSTERING, with two effects: (i) markers in paradigmatic opposition tend to be placed in the same morphological position (‘paradigmatic alignment’; Crysmann & Bonami 2016); (ii) morphological positions tend to be categorically uniform (‘featural coherence’; Stump 2001). We first show in a corpus study that category clustering drives the distribution of agreement prefixes in speakers' production of Chintang, a language where prefix placement is not constrained by any categorical rules of sequential ordering. We then show in a typological study that the same principle also shapes the evolution of morphological structure: although exceptions are attested, paradigms are much more likely to obey rather than to violate the principle. Category clustering is therefore a good candidate for a universal force shaping the structure and use of language, potentially due to benefits in processing and learning.