We examine a traditional Itelmen song type (itl; Chukotko-Kamchatkan) from the perspective of text setting: the phonological correspondence between spoken language and sung text. We suggest that the algorithm that relates spoken text to song in Itelmen is unlike the majority of examples considered in the literature on English and other languages, in that linguistic stress and metrical prominence play no discernible role, nor does syllable weight. Instead, the driving force appears to be matching word edges to (half-)measure boundaries, resulting in predictable anaptyxis (vowel epenthesis) and lengthening. The process is paraphonological in that it is related to, but distinct from, the regular phonology of the language, both in the quality of the epenthetic elements and in their placement. While the algorithm makes use of (and thus may inform us about) Itelmen phonotactics, the relationship is not readily characterizable as being phonotactically motivated but is instead controlled by a pattern of mapping linguistic syllables to musical beats.

There has been extraordinary attention devoted to the Celtic mutations over the years, with various authors arguing for phonological, morphological, or lexical treatments (and various blends thereof). Strikingly, this literature is virtually bereft of any mention of the phonological restrictions that can sometimes limit the applicability of mutation. In this article, we provide a detailed experimental and corpus-based investigation of the phonological restrictions on Scottish Gaelic mutation. Using both techniques, we show that the phonological restrictions are alive yet are in a state of flux. The continued productivity of these phonological aspects of the mutation system argues that any analysis of mutation must attend to them.

Podcasts are an immensely popular medium for news, documentaries, interviews, and many other genres. They are also an effective pedagogical tool, both as texts for learners to consume and as assignments for students to create. In this article we present findings from our students' experiences of creating podcasts in upper-level Language and Gender courses and reflect on the affordances and possible risks of this kind of project. We argue that podcasting projects, which center student learning and produce accessible, public-facing scholarship, can also provide a means of resisting injustice in linguistics, in the academy, and in the wider community.

This paper presents a formalized procedure for describing utterances directly in terms of sequences of morphemes rather than of single morphemes. It thus covers an important part of what is usually included under syntax. When applied in a particular language, the procedure yields a compact statement of what sequences of morphemes occur in the language, i.e. a formula for each utterance (sentence) structure in the language.

A bilingual's two languages can interact in their mind, but the mechanism of this interaction is still open to debate. In this article we employ a variant of GRADIENT SYMBOLIC COMPUTATION (GSC; Smolensky et al. 2014) to model the code-switched utterances of unbalanced Dutch-English bilinguals. We aimed to evaluate GSC as an appropriate architecture to model bilingual code-switching grammars, and to explore the extent of variability within and across individual bilingual speakers. The results indicate that the structure of individual grammars can vary widely from the structure of the grammar that emerges when the population is studied as a whole. We interpret these results as evidence that individual variation characterizes not only language processing (e.g. Fricke et al. 2019, Kidd et al. 2018), but also the structure of bilingual grammar itself.

The spatial affordances of the visual modality give rise to a high degree of similarity between sign languages in the spatial domain. This stands in contrast to the vast structural and semantic diversity in linguistic encoding of space found in spoken languages. However, the possibility and nature of linguistic diversity in spatial encoding in sign languages has not been rigorously investigated by systematic crosslinguistic comparison. Here, we compare locative expression in two unrelated sign languages, Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili, TİD) and German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS), focusing on the expression of FIGURE-GROUND (e.g. cup on table) and FIGURE-FIGURE (e.g. cup next to cup) relationships in a discourse context. In addition to similarities, we report qualitative and quantitative differences between the sign languages in the formal devices used (i.e. unimanual vs. bimanual; simultaneous vs. sequential) and in the degree of iconicity of the spatial devices. Our results suggest that sign languages may display more diversity in the spatial domain than has been previously assumed, and in a way more comparable with the diversity found in spoken languages. The study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of how space gets encoded in language.

The literature on what we call AB constructions (freezes, irreversible binomials), such as odds and ends and copy paste, attributes the fixed word order to both phonological and nonphonological, mostly semantic constraints. However, some researchers attribute a prominent role to phonology, while others view semantics as the major contributor to word order of AB constructions. In this paper we evaluate the role of phonology in Hebrew AB constructions with reference to a harmonic grammar with weighted constraints, where constraint weight is calculated on the basis of its effect in our corpus. The grammar reveals that semantic constraints weigh more than phonological constraints in both the cumulative weight and the average weight. Nevertheless, phonology affects a great number of data items, in particular those where semantic constraints are mute. We thus conclude that although syntax and semantics are responsible for word order, phonology determines word order when the other modules do not have a say.

An automated sound correspondence-recognition program developed by the authors is applied to a data set consisting of standardized word lists for over half of the world's languages. Online appendices present the results in a compendium of 692 recurrent sound correspondences that contains information about the frequency of occurrence of each correspondence. Applications of the compendium to historical linguistics are proposed. For example, the catalog of correspondences and frequencies facilitates objective assessment of the commonness or rarity of shared phonological innovations cited as evidence for language-family subgrouping. In another analysis, correspondence frequency is used to measure the degree of similarity between different sounds, yielding models for classifying consonants and vowels that substantially agree with articulatory properties. Correspondence-based similarities are also compared with measurements of sound similarity involving factors such as perceptual confusions, speech errors, and cooccurrence patterns in synchronic phonological rules. Sound similarity discerned from both the perception and production of speech is found to correlate to about the same extent with correspondence-based similarities.

To mitigate systemic culturally and linguistically rooted barriers to STEM achievement, particularly for African-American students, implementing linguistically and culturally sustaining approaches to STEM education is critically relevant. This article presents an engagement model for using sociolinguistics to enhance K–12 STEM education, drawing upon research carried out with K–12 STEM educators who attended workshops on language variation and subsequently participated in semi-structured interviews and a focus group. Findings indicate the centrality of integrating linguistics into K–12 STEM teacher preparation, in order to advance educational equity for all culturally and linguistically diverse students.

This article presents novel data from Uzbek, an under-investigated Turkic language, in support of two claims. The first claim is that, despite superficial appearances, Uzbek sluicing-like constructions are not instantiations of genuine sluicing at all. Instead, they are derived from two possible sources—copular clauses and clefts—by reduction strategies that are shown to be independently available in Uzbek (subject drop and copula drop). This result supports a prediction of Merchant's (2001) theory of sluicing: languages with no left-peripheral WH-movement or focus-movement strategy should not exhibit genuine sluicing. The second claim is that Uzbek cleft structures (which may give rise to the sluicing-like construction under reduction) can be subdivided into two types, corresponding to two prominent lines of analysis in preexisting explorations of clefts (descending from Jespersen 1927 and Jespersen 1937). The results support Pinkham and Hankamer's (1975) claim that both analyses may be applicable to subtly distinct structures within one language.

The received wisdom is that word-order alternations in Slavic languages arise as a direct consequence of word-order-related information-structure constraints such as ‘Place given expressions before new ones’. In this article, we compare the word-order hypothesis with a competing one, according to which word-order alternations arise as a consequence of a prosodic constraint: ‘Avoid stress on given expressions’. Based on novel experimental and modeling data, we conclude that the prosodic hypothesis is more adequate than the word-order hypothesis. Yet we also show that combining the strengths of both hypotheses provides the best fit for the data. Methodologically, our article is based on gradient acceptability judgments and multiple regression, which allows us to evaluate whether violations of generalizations like ‘Given precedes new’ or ‘Given lacks stress’ lead to a consistent decrease in acceptability and to quantify the size of their respective effects. Focusing on the empirical adequacy of such generalizations rather than on specific theoretical implementations also makes it possible to bridge the gap between different linguistic traditions and to directly compare predictions emerging from formal and functional approaches.