In light of the growing number of undergraduates from racially minoritized backgrounds at newly emergent Minority-Serving Institutions and other colleges and universities, linguists have a special responsibility to engage such students, particularly through projects that connect to students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This article describes undergraduates’ learning experiences in a research collective committed to community-centered collaborative work to advance sociolinguistic justice for the Mexican Indigenous diasporic community in California. The discussion centers the voices of undergraduate team members to demonstrate the benefits of students’ learning with respect to the research process, linguistics as a discipline, and understanding of self, family, and community.

In acquiring a syntax, children must detect evidence for abstract structural dependencies that can be realized in variable ways in the surface forms of sentences. In What did David fix?, learners must identify a nonlocal relation between a fronted object of the verb (what) and the phonologically null ‘gap’ in canonical direct object position after the verb, where it is thematically interpreted. How do learners identify a nonadjacent dependency between an expression and something that has no overt phonological form? We propose that identifying abstract syntactic dependencies requires statistical inference over both overt linguistic material and unsatisfied grammatical expectations: noticing when a predicted argument for a verb is unexpectedly missing may serve as evidence for the gap of an argument movement dependency. We provide computational support for this hypothesis. We develop a learner that uses predicted but unexpectedly missing objects of verbs to identify possible gaps of object movement, and identifies which surface morphosyntactic properties of sentences are correlated with these possible movement gaps. We find that it is in principle possible for a learner using this mechanism to identify the majority of sentences with object movement in child-directed English, and that prior knowledge of which verbs require objects provides an important guide for identifying which surface distributions characterize object movement. This provides a computational account for why verb argument-structure knowledge developmentally precedes the acquisition of movement in a language like English. More broadly, these findings illustrate how statistical learning and learning from violated expectations can be combined to novel effect in the domain of language acquisition.

In many areas in linguistic study it is difficult to decide where the study of language ends and the study of other aspects of human cognition begins. In this article, we discuss a particularly striking case of this, the use of the signing space (loci) for marking linguistic relations. The use of loci in the nominal and verbal domains has received a wide range of analyses, from those considering loci to be abstract linguistic mechanisms such as semantic indices and syntactic agreement to those considering them to be making use of nonlinguistic mechanisms such as spatial cognition. We defend the view that the use of loci is both fundamentally linguistic (they are modifiers) and fundamentally spatial (they express an association with space), providing possible descriptive content in both the verbal and the nominal domain. This analysis allows for a uniform account of loci use in the two linguistic domains and accounts for an important, yet less noticed, property of loci, which is that their distribution is pragmatically conditioned for the purpose of disambiguation.