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.

This article uses formal and usage-based data and methods to argue for a hybrid model of English tensed auxiliary contraction combining lexical syntax with a dynamic exemplar lexicon. The hybrid model can explain why the contractions involve lexically specific phonetic fusions that have become morphologized and lexically stored, yet remain syntactically independent, and why the probability of contraction itself is a function of the adjacent cooccurrences of the subject and auxiliary in usage, yet is also subject to the constraints of the grammatical context. Novel evidence includes a corpus study and a formal analysis of a multiword expression of classic usage-based grammar.

This article examines the English phrase-as-lemma (PAL) construction, which treats phrases syntactically as if they were words (e.g. a don't-mess-with-me driver). We argue that it is important to acknowledge and represent the construction's unique syntax directly rather than trying to shoehorn it into a more familiar grammatical category such as Noun or Adjective. PALs do not share the same distribution as other categories, and critically, their unique syntax influences their interpretation in predictable ways, which we demonstrate with survey data (N = 685). In particular, PALs convey the type of meaning associated with individual English words—lemmas—and thus evoke semantic frames that are presumed shared common knowledge. We further predict that the shared common knowledge and the use of quotes encourages PALs to be interpreted as witty and sarcastic. We show that a full analysis of PALs requires a family of constructions that includes certain conventional instances and productive subtypes. Because the construction's special form and function are intimately related, we predict that comparable PAL constructions should appear in other, unrelated languages. While the PAL construction is not terribly frequent in any language, the implications we draw are quite broad: our knowledge of language is rich and complex, providing subtle means for language users to indicate familiarity with listeners while conveying their message.

An indisputable fact of life and of nature is that humans and human institutions necessarily both exist in and live through time. The importance of this fact and the conscious recognition of it is reflected in the concern for the passage of time and for humans' place vis-à-vis time observable in various sorts of artistic expression, from the visual arts such as sculpture and painting to various reflections in literary and even musical sources. Taking the arts as my point of departure, I first outline here and then contrast different views of time from within different domains and disciplines and from different vantage points, discussing in turn the artist's, the physicist's, the linguist's, and, ultimately, the ordinary speaker's view of time. I then contrast continuity across time with change across time, and illustrate continuity amidst change through an extended case study of the past-tense marker in Indo-European languages known as the ‘augment’, examining its stability and change throughout all of attested Greek, from Mycenaean Greek of the second millennium BC up through Modern Greek of the present day, with particular focus on its realization in certain regional dialects of the modern language. The augment thus provides an important object lesson in linguistic continuity and change, as it proves to be a remarkably durable but at the same time intriguingly elastic morpheme, at least as far as Greek is concerned. Since the view of time that I ultimately dwell on leads me to a consideration of time and history, I end with some observations on both the history of the field and my own personal history.

A previously unnoticed puzzle is presented concerning the distribution of wh-determiners in free relative clauses in Romanian: while care ‘which’ + NP can never introduce free relative clauses, ce ‘what’ + NP does so productively, as do all other wh-words. New evidence is provided showing that care ‘which’ + NP in interrogative clauses in Romanian exhibits strong discourse-anaphoric requirements, unlike ce ‘what’ + NP. This feature of care ‘which’ + NP is suggested to be responsible for the puzzle by triggering a clash with the basic set-denoting function of a free relative clause, along the lines of what is observed in light-headed relative clauses.

In this article, we analyze the syntax of sentences such as Here is my daughter, which we refer to as presentatives. Presentatives turn out to have a wide range of properties that distinguish them sharply from ordinary declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, and exclamatives. Drawing on recent work on the left periphery, we develop a novel account of their syntactic structure that uses only independently proposed syntactic primitives. We argue that English presentatives involve an ordinary DP combined with two left-peripheral heads, encoding the time and location of the speaker, along with an anaphoric T head and a light verb. The resulting structure is a triple consisting of the speech time, speech location, and an entity denoted by a DP. The overall picture that emerges suggests that presentatives may constitute their own minor clause type, one that we might expect to be widely available crosslinguistically, since it is built from a particular combination of these widely available primitives. A brief survey of presentatives in languages other than English suggests that they are indeed widely available, and our analysis provides an explicit framework for detailed investigations of presentatives in other languages, which may use an overlapping, but not necessarily fully identical, set of primitives.

The constructionist approach argues that communication is central to language learning, language use, and language change. We argue that the approach provides a useful perspective on how autistic children learn language, as it anticipates variable outcomes and suggests testable predictions. First, a reduced ability and interest in tracking the attention and intentions of others should negatively impact early language development, and a wealth of evidence indicates that it does. Second, and less discussed until recently, a hyperfocus on specifics at the expense of generalizations, common among people on the spectrum, should also negatively impact language development, and recent evidence suggests this is also the case. Pace Kissine's 2021 target article, it is unsurprising that children can learn some second language from watching videos, and it is unclear how an appeal to ‘innate’ language-specific knowledge could explain the range of outcomes of individuals on the autism spectrum.