The CARTOGRAPHIC PROGRAM has investigated interesting crosslinguistic linear orderings among various sentence constituents. Its signature technical move is to postulate HIERARCHIES OF FUNCTIONAL PROJECTIONS related by functional selection. I note three problems that functional hierarchies encounter in capturing linear order: ‘explanation’, ‘plenitude’, and ‘rigidity’. I compare linearity in cartography with linearity in the integers, which involves a single relation (<) ordering the domain. I consider work by Scontras et al. (2017) arguing for a single ‘inequality relation’ underlying the ordering of attributive adjectives in nominals and show how this result can be incorporated into a feature-driven theory of syntactic projection. This captures crosslinguistic linear orderings without appeal to functional selection or functional hierarchies.

In many Indigenous languages of the Americas, demonstratives are said to encode whether the referent is visible. Some scholars, however, argue that all visibility meanings in demonstratives are epiphenomenal on spatial, epistemic modal, or nonvision evidential content. Drawing on elicitation, experimental data, and corpus data collected in fieldwork, I argue that two demonstratives of Ticuna (isolate; Brazil, Colombia, Peru) do display visibility meanings. These meanings are encoded and concern the SENSE OF VISION—not space, epistemic modality, or nonvisual forms of evidentiality. These findings support a view of demonstrative meaning as grounded in the perceptual capacities of the human body.

An OPTIMALITY-THEORETIC (ОТ) system is specified by defining its constraints and the structures they evaluate. These give rise to a set of grammars, the TYPOLOGY of the system, which emerges from the often complex interactions among constraints and structures. Every typology is determined by a finite collection of candidate sets (csets). How do we know that we have assembled a UNIVERSAL SUPPORT, a collection of csets sufficient to distinguish all grammars of the system? Lacking a universal support, we do not have the typology and we cannot deal systematically with its structure and consequences.

This concrete question can be answered in terms of an enhanced abstract understanding of typological structure. Under PROPERTY THEORY (Alber & Prince 2015a,b), a typology is resolved into a set of PROPERTIES: ranking conditions that have mutually exclusive VALUES. When the structural correlates of each value are determined, the ranking values defining a grammar also determine the extensional TRAITS exhibited in its optima. Suppose we have the property analysis of a typology derived from a proposed support for an OT system. If every consistent choice of values ensures that a single optimum is chosen in every cset admitted by the system, then no grammar derived from the proposed support can be split by consideration of further csets, and that support must be universal for the system. This method of proof is applicable to any OT system. Here we use it to analyze the prosodic system nGX (Alber & Prince 2015b), determining its universal supports and the shape of the forms made optimal by its grammars.

Studies on language contact suggest that cross-language interactions in individual language use may lead to contact-induced change at the community level. We propose that the phenomenon of crosslinguistic structural priming may well drive this process. We investigated this by focusing on dative sentence production by Papiamento speakers in Aruba and in the Netherlands. In experiment 1, Papiamento speakers in Aruba and in the Netherlands described dative events. The speakers in the Netherlands produced more Dutch-like structures than the speakers in Aruba, especially younger speakers. In experiment 2, speakers from the same populations heard a Dutch prime sentence before describing a dative event in Papiamento. Syntactic choices were influenced by the Dutch prime sentences, and, again, especially younger speakers in the Netherlands produced more Dutch-like dative structures. This combination of results suggests that Papiamento syntactic preferences in the Netherlands are changing as a function of contact with Dutch, and that crosslinguistic structural priming is a likely mechanism underlying this change.

This article addresses the German conjunction zumal ‘the more so as’ from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. On the basis of historical corpus data, I trace the uses and meaning development of the lexical item zumal, from a temporal adverb to a conjunction. I argue that it acquired its current syntactic and interpretive features from the final step in this development: the focus particle zumal adopted some syntactic features and meaning components from the subordinate causal conjunctions da and weil, with which it frequently cooccurred in the historical data. In the current language it is thus best analyzed as a subordinate causal conjunction with focus-marking properties, similar to the combination besonders weil ‘especially since’.

A certain class of English adjectives known as a-adjectives resist appearing attributively as prenominal modifiers (e.g. ??the afraid boy, ??the asleep man). Boyd & Goldberg 2011 had offered experimental evidence suggesting that the dispreference is learnable on the basis of categorization and STATISTICAL PREEMPTION: repeatedly witnessing predicative formulations in contexts in which the attributive form would otherwise be appropriate. The present reply addresses Yang's (2015) counterproposal for how a-adjectives are learned and his instructive critique of statistical preemption. The counterproposal is that children receive evidence that a-adjectives behave like locative particles in occurring with certain adverbs such as far and right. However, in an analysis of the 450-million-word COCA corpus, the suggested adverbial evidence is virtually nonexistent (e.g. *far alive, * straight afraid). In fact, these adverbs occur much more frequently with typical adjectives (e.g. far greater, straight alphabetical). Furthermore, relating a-adjectives to locative particles does not provide evidence of the restriction, because locative particles themselves can appear as prenominal modifiers (the down payment, the outside world). The critique of statistical preemption is based on a 4.3-million-word corpus analysis of child-directed speech that suggests that children cannot amass the requisite evidence before they are three years old. While we clarify which sorts of data are relevant to statistical preemption, we concur that the required data is relatively sparsely represented in the input. In fact, recent evidence suggests that children are not actually cognizant of the restriction until they are roughly ten years old, an indication that input of an order of magnitude more than 4.3 million words may be required. We conclude that a combination of categorization and statistical preemption is consistent with the available evidence of how the restriction on a-adjectives is learned.

Old English *motan and Middle English *moten, the ancestors of modern must, are commonly described as ambiguous between a possibility and a necessity reading. I argue instead that in the Alfredian Old English prose, *motan was a nonambiguous ‘variable-force’ modal, with the modal force different from both possibility and necessity. I propose that *motan's variable-force effect was due to the presupposition of a collapse between possibility and necessity. Informally, motan(p) presupposed ‘if p gets a chance to actualize, it will’. I then trace the development of *motan into a modal genuinely ambiguous between necessity and possibility in Early Middle English.

This article studies the relationship between prosody and desemanticization in grammaticalization processes by means of a well-described phenomenon, the grammaticalization of ‘type’ nouns (type, kind, sort) in present-day English. To this end, 1,155 tokens of the three nouns, retrieved from the ICE-GB corpus, were semantically classified and prosodically analyzed. Our main result is that different synchronically coexisting prosodic patterns correspond to different degrees of grammaticalization. This result provides evidence that desemanticization and erosion proceed hand in hand. Their parallel development is attributed to the demands of iconicity rather than to frequency effects.