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.

While some accounts of syllable weight deny a role for onsets, onset-sensitive weight criteria have received renewed attention in recent years (e.g. Gordon 2005, Topintzi 2010). This article presents new evidence supporting onsets as factors in weight. First, in complex stress systems such as those of English and Russian, onset length is a significant attractor of stress both in the lexicon and in nonce probes. This effect is highly systematic and unlikely, it is argued, to be driven by analogy alone. Second, in flexible quantitative meters (e.g. in Sanskrit), poets preferentially align longer onsets with heavier metrical positions, all else being equal. A theory of syllable weight is proposed in which the domain of weight begins not with the rime but with the p-center (perceptual center) of the syllable, which is perturbed by properties of the onset. While onset effects are apparently universal in gradient weight systems, they are weak enough to be usually eclipsed by the structure of the rime under categorization. This proposal therefore motivates both the existence of onset weight effects and the subordination of the onset to the rime with respect to weight.

This is the first comparative analysis of prosody in deaf, native-signing children (ages 5;0-8;5) and adults whose first language is American Sign Language (ASL). The goals of this study are to describe the distribution of prosodic cues during acquisition, to determine which cues across age groups are most predictive in determining clausal and prosodic boundaries, and to ascertain how much isomorphy there is in ASL between syntactic and prosodic units. The results show that all cues are acquired compositionally, and that the prosodic patterns in child and adult ASL signers exhibit important differences regarding specific cues; however, in all groups the manual cues are more predictive of prosodic boundaries than nonmanual markers. This is evidence for a division of labor between the cues that are produced to mark constituents and those that contribute to semantic and pragmatic meaning. There is also more isomorphy in adults than in children, so these results add to the debates about isomorphy, suggesting that while there is clear autonomy between prosody and syntax, productions exhibiting nonisomorphy are relatively rare overall.

This study examines high school English teachers' beliefs about language as part of a project to align language teaching with contemporary linguistic understandings of language as a social process. The authors interviewed twenty-seven teachers from varied contexts across Missouri. Analysis shows that English teachers believe that (i) they are less judgmental about language than the rest of society, (ii) society discriminates against people who do not use Standardized English, (iii) students need Standardized English to be successful in school and work, and (iv) a teacher's job is to prepare students to conform to the expectations of society. As a whole, this chain of beliefs constitutes a dominant school language narrative that reproduces existing linguistic hierarchies. Teachers struggle to resolve the conflict between valuing diverse language practices and preparing students for a society that expects Standardized English. Implications suggest that supporting English teachers to take a critical stance, such as that embedded in critical language awareness, might provide teachers a new critical narrative that increases students' language knowledge while also disrupting social inequities tied to language use.

We investigate a noncanonical agreement pattern in American English in which a fronted WH-phrase appears to control agreement on an inflected auxiliary, as in Which flowers are the gardener planting? (Kimball & Aissen 1971). We explore this phenomenon with five acceptability- judgment experiments and interpret the resulting data with the aid of a quantitative model of the judgment process. Our study suggests that fronted WH-phrases interfere with agreement primarily as a function of their linear and structural position, and that this effect is not significantly modulated by overt case or thematic cues in off-line judgments. We suggest that our findings support a model of agreement processing in which syntactic phrases compete to control agreement on the basis of their structural and linear position with respect to the inflected verb.

This article proposes that at least two agent-backgrounding operations with different syntactic and semantic properties have to be distinguished in Catalan Sign Language (LSC): the HIGH-LOCUS CONSTRUCTION and the NONAGREEING CENTRAL CONSTRUCTION. We show that the high-locus construction is a transitive structure with a nonspecific subject. We propose to analyze this construction as involving a null pro-subject, licensed by agreement and interpreted as an impersonal third plural, as in other agent-backgrounding constructions with an impersonal third plural subject, which are crosslinguistically restricted to human interpretation. We propose that the nonagreeing construction is an intransitivized verb form that allows passive interpretations with agents and causes and anticausative interpretations comparable to middle voice.

A field-based ultrasound and acoustic study of Iwaidja, an endangered Australian Aboriginal language, investigates the phonetic identity of nonnasal velar consonants in intervocalic position, where past work has proposed a [+continuant] vs. [-continuant] phonemic contrast. We analyze the putative contrast within a continuous phonetic space, defined by both acoustic and articulatory parameters, and find gradient variation: from more consonantal realizations, such as [ɰ], to more vocalic realizations, such as [a]. The distribution of realizations across lexical items and speakers does not support the proposed phonemic contrast. This case illustrates how lenition that is both phonetically gradient and variable across speakers and words can give the illusion of a contextually restricted phonemic contrast.

Our understanding of human sound systems is increasingly shaped by experimental studies. What we can learn from a single study, however, is limited. It is of critical importance to evaluate and substantiate existing findings in the literature by directly replicating published studies. Our publication system, however, does not reward direct replications in the same way as it rewards novel discoveries. Consequently, there is a lack of incentives for researchers to spend resources on conducting replication studies, a situation that is particularly true for speech production experiments, which often require resourceful data collection procedures and recording enviromnents. In order to sidestep this issue, we propose to ran direct replication studies with our students in the classroom. This proposal offers an easy and inexpensive way to conduct large-scale replication studies and has valuable pedagogical advantages for our students. To illustrate the feasibility of this approach, we report on two classroom-based replication studies on incomplete neutralization, a speech phenomenon that has sparked many methodological debates in the past. We show that in our classroom studies, we not only replicated incomplete neutralization effects, but our studies yielded effect magnitudes comparable to laboratory experiments and meta analytical estimates. We discuss potential challenges to this approach and outline possible ways to help us substantiate our scientific record.

Calvert Watkins, a towering figure in historical and Indo-European linguistics and president of the LSA in 1988, died unexpectedly in Los Angeles on March 20, 2013, a week after his eightieth birthday. At the time of his death he was Distinguished Professor in Residence of the Department of Classics and the Program in Indo-European Studies at UCLA. He had moved to UCLA after a long career at Harvard, where he retired as Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics in 2003.

The 1968 Fair Housing Act protects consumers from discrimination based on membership in protected classes, such as their gender, race, and ability. There is a large gap, however, between what this policy seeks to protect and the lived experiences of certain individuals, since many listeners continue to link the production of non-Standard speech varieties with social stereotypes. In light of the findings of Purnell et al. (1999), who demonstrated that such judgments negatively affect housing access, this study was designed to determine if linguistic profiling remains observable in the contemporary housing market. Through an audit of ninety publicly listed rental properties in three demographically heterogeneous Knoxville, TN, neighborhoods, the study analyzed the effects of using three different American dialects: African American Language (AAL), Mainstream US English (MUSE), and Southern American (SA). A single, multidialectal speaker asked property managers questions about each unit and neighborhood. The outcomes were assessed in terms of (i) the caller's success in gaining an appointment to view the property and (ii) the relation of dialect and neighborhood to the phenomenon of local prestige.

A key finding is that using non-Standard voices produces significantly better outcomes in neighborhoods with demographics that match those of the indexed social characteristics of the given non-Standard speech variety (e.g. Blackness with AAL in zip code 37914). Results from an attribute assessment are also reported, revealing how general listeners categorize and respond to speech used in the audit study. Analyses of attribute assessments reveal that three very different character profiles emerge from a single person's speech varieties. These results have stark policy implications, as these linguistic profiles develop without listeners having made accurate or consistent identification of social information—like the race of the speaker—in their percepts. Federal antidiscrimination policy must be adjusted to protect individuals who experience voice-based oppression—in the housing market and across institutions. This study adds to the growing evidence such individuals can use to challenge FHA violations in voice-only contexts.

This study investigates the linguistic outcome of migration-induced dialect contact in contemporary urban settings by tracking the development of the variable deletion of /w/ in Seoul Korean. The results from apparent-time and real-time analyses reveal that the rate of postconsonantal /w/-deletion, which previously had been rising, has begun to fall. In addition, the strong effect of the preceding consonant on this deletion has weakened significantly. Meanwhile, the rate of non-postconsonantal /w/-deletion has continued to rise, and, for younger speakers, non-postconsonantal /w/-deletion now patterns similarly with postconsonantal /w/-deletion. I argue that the dilution of the original pattern of the deletion rule is the result of the interplay between linguistic diffusion induced by a massive influx of migrants into Seoul and phonological restructuring by subsequent generations.

Understanding the relation between speech production and perception is foundational to phonetic theory, and is similarly central to theories of the phonetics of sound change. For sound changes that are arguably perceptually motivated, it is particularly important to establish that an individual listener's selective attention—for example, to the redundant information afforded by coarticulation—is reflected in that individual's own productions. This study reports the results of a pair of experiments designed to test the hypothesis that individuals who produce more consistent and extensive coarticulation will attend to that information especially closely in perception. The production experiment used nasal airflow to measure the time course of participants' coarticulatory vowel nasalization; the perception experiment used an eye-tracking paradigm to measure the time course of those same participants' attention to coarticulated nasality. Results showed that a speaker's coarticulatory patterns predicted, to some degree, that individual's perception, thereby supporting the hypothesis: participants who produced earlier onset of coarticulatory nasalization were, as listeners, more efficient users of nasality as that information unfolded over time. Thus, an individual's perception of coarticulated speech is made public through their productions.