Discussion of Indo-European origins and dispersal focuses on two hypotheses. Qualitative evidence from reconstructed vocabulary and correlations with archaeological data suggest that Indo-European languages originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and spread together with cultural innovations associated with pastoralism, beginning c. 6500-5500 bp. An alternative hypothesis, according to which Indo-European languages spread with the diffusion of farming from Anatolia, beginning c. 9500-8000 bp, is supported by statistical phylogenetic and phylogeographic analyses of lexical traits. The time and place of the Indo-European ancestor language therefore remain disputed. Here we present a phylogenetic analysis in which ancestry constraints permit more accurate inference of rates of change, based on observed changes between ancient or medieval languages and their modern descendants, and we show that the result strongly supports the steppe hypothesis. Positing ancestry constraints also reveals that homoplasy is common in lexical traits, contrary to the assumptions of previous work. We show that lexical traits undergo recurrent evolution due to recurring patterns of semantic and morphological change.

This article examines how conversational repair is organized in the reduced communicative channel of whistled speech in San Pedro Sochiapam Chinantec of Oaxaca, Mexico. It argues that studies oflanguage channeled through different modalities affect our understanding of human language more generally. While repair in whistled speech shares the same universal sequence organization as repair in spoken speech, there are noteworthy differences in the preference organization and the typology of repair in whistled speech: a reduction in the types of repair initiations; a lack of preference for self-initiated repair; and an inversion of the frequency relation of OPEN and RESTRICTED repairs to favor open formats. I propose that these patterned differences are motivated by a reduced semiotic carrying capacity of the whistled channel.

Listeners have a remarkable ability to adapt to novel speech patterns, such as a new accent or an idiosyncratic pronunciation. In almost all of the previous studies examining this phenomenon, the participating listeners had reason to believe that the speech signal was produced by a human being. However, people are increasingly interacting with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) devices that produce speech using text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Will listeners also adapt to novel speech input when they believe it is produced by a device? Across three experiments, we investigate this question by exposing American English listeners to shifted pronunciations accompanied by either a ‘human’ or a ‘device’ guise and testing how this exposure affects their subsequent categorization of vowels. Our results show that listeners exhibit perceptual learning even when they believe the speaker is a device. Furthermore, listeners generalize these adjustments to new talkers, and do so particularly strongly when they believe that both old and new talkers are devices. These results have implications for models of speech perception, theories of human-computer interaction, and the interface between social cognition and linguistic theory.

The verbal suffixes of Seri (a language isolate of Sonora, Mexico) divide the lexicon into classes of unparalleled complexity. The paradigm has only four forms, which mark subject number and aspect (or event number), yet there are over 250 distinct types in a corpus of just under 1,000 verbs. This relation of forms to types means that by information-theoretic measures this is among the most complex inflection class systems yet studied. In part this complexity is due to the sheer wealth of allomorphs and the freedom with which they combine within the paradigm; however, these properties can be found in all inflection class systems of any complexity. The unique property of Seri is that although the suffix morphology and the morphosyntactic paradigm have the same featural content, the two systems are not directly coordinated. Both suffix morphology and verbal morphosyntax are based on the concatenation of markers of plurality, and an increase in the morphological marking of plurality reflects a morphosyntactic accumulation of subject and predicate plurality (i.e. aspect). In this sense, morphology is a direct exponent of featural content. But there is no consistent mapping between the two systems, and the precise calibration between morphological form and morphosyntactic function must be lexically specified; it is this specification that increases dramatically the number of inflectional types. Seri therefore represents a middle ground between the conceptual extremes of morphosyntactically motivated and morphologically autonomous morphology that serve as a basis for much of our theory building.

Using a very large lexical database and generalized additive modeling, this article reveals that labial-velar (LV) stops are marginal phonemes in many of the languages of Northern Sub-Saharan Africa that have them, and that the languages in which they are not marginal are grouped into three compact zones of high lexical LV frequency. The resulting picture allows us to formulate precise hypotheses about the spread of the Niger-Congo and Central Sudanic languages and about the origins of the linguistic area known as the Sudanic zone or Macro-Sudan belt. It shows that LV stops are a substrate feature that should not be reconstructed into the early stages of the languages that currently have them. We illustrate the implications of our findings for linguistic prehistory with a short discussion of the Bantu expansion. Our data also indirectly confirm the hypothesis that LV stops are more recurrent in expressive parts of the vocabulary, and we argue that this has a common explanation with the well-known fact that they tend to be restricted to stem-initial position in what we call C-emphasis prosody.

We offer experimental data from Colloquial German that involve imperative morphology in speech reports and in the scope of WH-elements. We confirm two independent restrictions on these phenomena, whose statistical significance provides evidence for the existence of embedded imperatives in Colloquial German in general.

In this paper, I propose an updated analysis of the tone system of Paicî, one of the rare tonal Oceanic languages. Building on Jean-Claude Rivierre's (1974) work, I show that the tonal system of Paicî is best described with three underlying primitives: a High tone, a Low tone, and a downstep /↓/ analyzed as a register feature independent of tone. Paicî is particularly interesting for the empirical documentation as well as the typological and theoretical understanding of downstep, because it combines many rare properties: (i) only downstepped ↓L is attested; (ii) downstep is incompatible with H tones within the prosodic word (*↓H, *H…↓L); (iii) it is realized utterance-initially; (iv) it has accentual properties, and very likely derives from a former accentual system. The paper also provides an acoustic description of tone and downstep in Paicî, an important step toward filling a serious gap in the documentation of downstepped ↓L tones and their properties.

Grano et al. (2024, henceforth Grano et al.) present original data from Lutuv in order to explore the relationship of the irrealis category to notions of possibility and necessity. They make the following argument: possibilities and necessities of the past and the present can indeed involve quantification over both the actual and the counterfactual branches. Markers of typical irrealis contexts (future and counterfactual domains) are often found in expressions of necessity and possibility of the past and present. Grano et al. conclude that any statement that includes a reference to any index of the irrealis domain should qualify as an irrealis statement, even if the tense-aspect-mood (TAM) marker involved also includes a reference to actual indices.

This study uses a generalized additive mixed-effects regression model to predict lexical differences in Tuscan dialects with respect to standard Italian. We used lexical information for 170 concepts used by 2,060 speakers in 213 locations in Tuscany. In our model, geographical position was found to be an important predictor, with locations more distant from Florence having lexical forms more likely to differ from standard Italian. In addition, the geographical pattern varied significantly for low-versus high-frequency concepts and older versus younger speakers. Younger speakers generally used variants more likely to match the standard language. Several other factors emerged as significant. Male speakers as well as farmers were more likely to use lexical forms different from standard Italian. In contrast, higher-educated speakers used lexical forms more likely to match the standard. The model also indicates that lexical variants used in smaller communities are more likely to differ from standard Italian. The impact of community size, however, varied from concept to concept. For a majority of concepts, lexical variants used in smaller communities are more likely to differ from the standard Italian form. For a minority of concepts, however, lexical variants used in larger communities are more likely to differ from standard Italian. Similarly, the effect of the other community- and speaker-related predictors varied per concept. These results clearly show that the model succeeds in teasing apart different forces influencing the dialect landscape and helps us to shed light on the complex interaction between the standard Italian language and the Tuscan dialectal varieties. In addition, this study illustrates the potential of generalized additive mixed-effects regression modeling applied to dialect data.

This article proposes that patterns of phonological contrast should be added to the list of factors that influence sound change. It adopts a hierarchically determined model of contrast that allows for a constrained degree of crosslinguistic variation in contrastive feature specifications. The predictions of this model are tested against a database comprising the set of vowel changes in the Al-gonquian languages. The model reveals striking commonalities in the underlying sources of these changes and straightforwardly predicts the previously unrecognized patterning of the languages into two groups: (i) those in which */ε/tends to merge with */i/and palatalization is triggered by */i/, and (ii) those in which */ε/tends to merge with */a/and palatalization is triggered by */ε/. In addition to providing a new argument for the relevance of contrast to phonology, the model also gives us a way to import traditional philological findings into a framework that brings them to bear on theoretical questions.

This article illustrates how a student-centered, culturally responsive pedagogical approach to teaching History of the English Language (HEL) to community college students from diverse ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds promotes self-knowledge and academic confidence. I outline how several areas—including language theory, etymology of names, language policy, varieties of English, and language identity—can be effectively taught at an introductory HEL level through ethnographic research and multiple-draft writing assignments. Throughout the article, excerpts of student writing demonstrate their engagement in ethnographic research with a focus on their own communities, revealing their experience-based knowledge and their viewpoints on language-equality issues.

Currently, linguistics (LING) courses are underrepresented in general education at most US universities. As general education requirements undergo reform in higher education, the field of linguistics has an opportunity to assume a more central role. We argue that linguistics courses aligned with the key competencies of critical thinking, information literacy, and inquiry and analysis are well positioned to augment general education curricula, particularly at institutions that utilize common student learning objectives. An innovative The Language of Now core course and its signature assignment, a learner-centered research project on the use of the text-messaging discourse marker lol, illustrate how the methods used in linguistic inquiry are amenable to a range of standards that support general education goals.

This article provides an account of the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles in responses, starting with yes and no in English, and then extending the coverage to their crosslinguistic kin. Polarity particles are used in responses to both declarative and interrogative sentences, and thus provide a window onto the semantics and discourse effects of such sentences. We argue that understanding the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles requires a characterization of declaratives and interrogatives that captures a series of challenging similarities and differences across these two sentence types. To meet this challenge we combine and extend insights from inquisitive semantics, dynamic semantics, and commitment-based models of discourse. We then provide a full account of the English data that leads to a typology of polarity particles and a series of crosslinguistic predictions. These predictions are checked against data from Romanian, Hungarian, French, and German, languages that contrast with English in that they have ternary polarity particle systems, and contrast with one another in further subtle ways.

Students of language do not need to ask Why a linguistic society? but many laymen have asked this question. The answer, to be sure, lies really in our work and in its results; but, for this very reason, it is desirable that our motives be understood.

This article is an analysis of the claim that a universal ban on certain (‘anti-markedness’) grammars is necessary in order to explain their nonoccurrence in the languages of the world. Such a claim is based on the following assumptions: that phonological typology shows a highly asymmetric distribution, and that such a distribution cannot possibly arise ‘naturally’—that is, without a universal grammar-based restriction of the learner’s hypothesis space. Attempting to test this claim reveals a number of open issues in linguistic theory. In the first place, there exist critical aspects of synchronic theory that are not specified explicitly enough to implement computationally. Second, there remain many aspects of linguistic competence, language acquisition, sound change, and even typology that are still unknown. It is not currently possible, therefore, to reach a definitive conclusion about the necessity, or lack thereof, of an innate substantive grammar module. This article thus serves two main functions: acting both as a pointer to the areas of phonological theory that require further development, especially at the overlap between traditionally separate subdomains, and as a template for the type of argumentation required to defend or attack claims about phonological universals.