Are syntactic choices influenced by the need to avoid ambiguity? Studies of the use of that with English embedded clauses have reached negative conclusions on this point. It is argued here that these conclusions may be premature. Statistical analysis of another phenomenon of English—use of the optional relative pronoun or complementizer with object relative clauses—in written text suggests that both ambiguity avoidance and anaphoricity contribute to syntactic choices. Ambiguity avoidance is shown to operate at a ‘strategic’ level, influenced by general considerations of syntactic structure, but not by lexical distinctions or pragmatic factors.

Most approaches to spatial language have assumed that the simplest spatial notions are (after Piaget) topological and universal (containment, contiguity, proximity, support, represented as semantic primitives such as in, on, under, etc.). These concepts would be coded directly in language, above all in small closed classes such as adpositions—thus providing a striking example of semantic categories as language-specific projections of universal conceptual notions. This idea, if correct, should have as a consequence that the semantic categories instantiated in spatial adpositions should be essentially uniform crosslinguistically. This article attempts to verify this possibility by comparing the semantics of spatial adpositions in nine unrelated languages, with the help of a standard elicitation procedure, thus producing a preliminary semantic typology of spatial adpositional systems. The differences between the languages turn out to be so significant as to be incompatible with stronger versions of the universal conceptual categories hypothesis. Rather, the language-specific spatial adposition meanings seem to emerge as compact subsets of an underlying semantic space, with certain areas being statistical attractors or foci. Moreover, a comparison of systems with different degrees of complexity suggests the possibility of positing implicational hierarchies for spatial adpositions. But such hierarchies need to be treated as successive divisions of semantic space, as in recent treatments of basic color terms. This type of analysis appears to be a promising approach for future work in semantic typology.

Our intent here, in the face of a persistent tradition of studying control in purely syntactic terms, is to reiterate the fundamental importance of semantics in the control problem, and to articulate some of the semantic factors more precisely than has heretofore been possible. After presenting familiar obstacles to a theory of control based on syntactic binding, we make a three-way distinction between ‘unique control’ (usually called obligatory control), ‘free control’, and ‘nearly free control’ (the last two falling under traditional nonobligatory control). We show that in a very large class of cases of unique control, the controlled vp denotes an action and the controller is the character who has the onus for that action. This analysis is applied to four major classes of control verbs and their nominals, as well as a class of adjectives, showing that semantic role reliably identifies the controller, and syntactic position does not. Through a formalization in terms of conceptual structure, we begin to be able to explain much of control directly from the lexical decomposition of the matrix verb. Several classes of exceptions to the conditions on unique control are treated as cases of coercion, in which extra conventionalized semantic material is added that is not present in syntax.

The process of documenting and describing the world's languages is undergoing radical transformation with the rapid uptake of new digital technologies for capture, storage, annotation, and dissemination. While these technologies greatly enhance our ability to create digital data, their uncritical adoption has compromised our ability to preserve this data. Consequently, new digital language resources of all kinds—lexicons, interlinear texts, grammars, language maps, field notes, recordings—are proving difficult to reuse and less portable than the conventional printed resources they replace. This article is concerned with the portability of digital language resources, specifically with their ability to transcend computer environments, scholarly communities, domains of application, and the passage of time. We review existing software tools and digital technologies for language documentation and description, and analyze portability problems in the seven areas of content, format, discovery, access, citation, preservation, and rights. We articulate the values that underlie our intuitions about good and bad practices, and lay out an extensive set of recommendations to serve as a starting point for the community-wide discussion that we envisage.