This article develops a formal semantic and syntactic analysis of distributive numerals in Tlingit, a highly endangered language of Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon. Such numerals enforce a ‘distributive reading’ of the sentence, and thus are one instance of the broader phenomenon of ‘distance distributivity’ (Zimmermann 2002). As in many other languages, a Tlingit sentence containing a distributive numeral can describe two distinct kinds of ‘distributive scenarios’: (i) a scenario where the distribution is over some plural entity (e.g. ‘My sons caught three fish each’), and (ii) one where the distribution is over some plural event (e.g. ‘My sons caught three fish each time’) (Gil 1982, Choe 1987, Zimmermann 2002, Oh 2005). Despite this apparent ambiguity, I put forth a univocal semantics for Tlingit distributive numerals, one whereby they consistently invoke quantification over events. Under this semantics, the ability of distributive numerals to describe both kinds of scenarios in (i) and (ii) is due not to an ambiguity, but instead to the sentences having relatively weak truth conditions. In contrast to prior analyses of distributive numerals and distance distributivity, the proposed semantics does not actually make use of distributive operators, but nevertheless retains a rather conservative picture of the syntax-semantics interface. The analysis can also account for certain locality effects noted for distance distributives in Korean and German (Zimmermann 2002, Oh 2005), as well as an intriguing puzzle regarding distributive numerals and pluractionality in Kaqchikel (Henderson 2011). Finally, I show how the analysis can be extended to the well-known case of English ‘binominal each’.*

This study is a prolegomenon to a formal theory of the natural growth of conceptual and lexical fields. Negation, in the various forms in which it occurs in language, is found to be a powerful indicator. Other than in standard logic, natural language negation selects its complement within universes of discourse that are, for practical and functional reasons, restricted in various ways and to different degrees. It is hypothesized that a system of cognitive principles drives recursive processes of universe restriction, which in turn affects logical relations within the restricted universes. This approach provides a new perspective in which to view the well-known clashes between standard logic and natural logical intuitions. Lexicalization in language, especially the morphological incorporation of negation, is limited to highly restricted universes, which explains, for example, why a dog can be said not to be a Catholic, but also not to be a non-Catholic. Cognition is taken to restrict the universe of discourse to contrary pairs, splitting up one or both of the contraries into further subuniverses as a result of further cognitive activity. It is shown how a logically sound Square of Opposition, expanded to a hexagon (Jacoby 1950, 1960, Sesmat 1951, Blanche 1952, 1953, 1966), is generated by a hierarchy of universe restrictions, defining the notion ‘natural’ for logical systems. The Logical Hexagon contains two additional vertices, one for ‘some but not all’ (the Y-type) and one for ‘either all or none’ (the U-type), and incorporates both the classic square and the Hamiltonian Triangle of Contraries. Some is thus considered semantically ambiguous, representing two distinct quantifiers. The pragmaticist claim that the language system contains only the standard logical ‘some perhaps all’ and that the ‘some but not all’ meaning is pragmatically derived from the use of the system is rejected. Four principles are proposed according to which negation selects a complement from the subuniverses at hand. On the basis of these principles and of the logico-cognitive system proposed, the well-known nonlexicalization not only of *nall and *nand but also of many other nonlogical cases found throughout the lexicons of languages is analyzed and explained.

Senegalese drummers often recite improvised texts while playing, considering the texts to reflect the rhythms’ meanings. Unlike in other African traditions, drums are rarely used as a speech surrogate. It is shown here that Senegalese rhythms involve language-like grammar rules, which are partly independent of the grammar of the players’ spoken language. The rhythms do not acoustically mimic speech, and the speech-drum matching is based on a lexicon of rhythms and their meanings. Players use this lexicon to produce an unlimited number of meaningful rhythms. The analysis of complex rhythms shows nonlinear alignments with spoken sentences containing plurals, definites, and negation. It is concluded that rhythms are generated by drum-specific grammatical rules. The musical functions of the drum grammar make it especially relevant to current work on language and music, and to ongoing debates between functionalist and formalist approaches to grammar.

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.

Two explanations are offered in the literature for the origin of lexical patterns of consonantal voicing cooccurrence: (i) speaker-oriented: a cooccurrence pattern may result from voicing assimilation under ease-of-articulation pressures, and (ii) listener-oriented: a cooccurrence pattern may result from systematic misperception by listeners. This article argues for a third possible origin of such patterns: (iii) lexical accumulation: a series of unrelated sound changes may conspire to create a lexical pattern of voicing cooccurrence. Once introduced into the lexicon of some language through any of these three routes, speakers can elevate such a pattern to a grammatical principle. A new voicing cooccurrence pattern in Afrikaans is presented as an example of a pattern that arose via this third route of lexical accumulation. Evidence is also presented that this pattern is being learned as a grammatical constraint by Afrikaans speakers.

In many different domains of language acquisition, there exists an apparent learnability problem to which innate knowledge of some aspect of Universal Grammar (UG) has been proposed as a solution. The present article reviews these proposals in the core domains of (i) identifying syntactic categories, (ii) acquiring basic morphosyntax, (iii) structure dependence, (iv) subjacency, and (v) the binding principles. We conclude that, in each of these domains, the innate UG-specified knowledge posited does not, in fact, simplify the task facing the learner.

In this commentary, we focus on the linking problem Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven identify. Instead of taking a stance on the issue of universal grammar itself, we adopt an epistemological and methodological perspective on language acquisition research. We argue that the problem, linking the input to preexisting representations, constitutes just a small part of a larger methodological problem, namely how to link the input a learner receives, through a set of learning mechanisms and possibly innate representations, to the behavior the learner is producing, whether in spontaneous production or in laboratory experiments. Currently, none of the existing proposals provide an evaluated, or even a testable, account of the full process, that is, an input-output model of linguistic ontogeny. Although the focus on phenomena in isolation, probably an effect of the prevalence of the experimental method, allows the researcher some degree of control, it also distracts from the understanding of how the different mechanisms behave and interact. Our proposed solution is a more Holistic approach to the problem in which the learning mechanisms and their interaction are made fully Explicit, and in which the predicted behavior of the learner is (more) Globally evaluated. Computational modeling provides exactly the tools appropriate for this task, thereby furthering more precise and testable theories of the learning mechanisms involved.

Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven could have provided a stronger argument for their conclusion, which postulated that innate universal-grammar-specified knowledge does not simplify the language learning task, had they not paid so much attention to the Chomskyan paradigm. I argue that poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments do not take into account that children are opportunistic learners employing multiple strategies, that they do not accomplish individual tasks sequentially but acquire (partial) knowledge about multiple domains simultaneously, and that they do not acquire perfect knowledge of language. Furthermore, work in formal linguistics suggests that the Chomskyan paradigm is internally incoherent and that the formalism of the Chomskyan framework lacks mathematical precision, making it difficult to evaluate its predictions. Given that linguistics ought to provide crucial input for language acquisition research, more attention needs to be paid to non-Chomskyan work in linguistics.

I completely agree with Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (AP&L) that anyone proposing a learning-strategy component needs to demonstrate precisely how that component helps solve the language acquisition task. To this end, I discuss how computational modeling is a tool well suited to doing exactly this, and that it has the added benefit of highlighting hidden assumptions underlying learning strategies. I also suggest general criteria relating to utility and usability that we can use to evaluate potential learning strategies. As a response to AP&L's request for Universal Grammar (UG) components that actually do work, I additionally provide a review of one potentially UG component that is part ofa successful learning strategy for syntactic islands, and that satisfies the evaluation criteria I propose.

Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (AP&L) claim that the knowledge attributed to children by the proponents of UG does not account for language acquisition, bringing evidence from several domains. In this response, we take issue with their claims with respect to two domains. In the case of categories, where distributional learning plays an important role, we argue that AP&L fail to recognize recent analyses showing that abstract representations yield better quantitative models for early child data. In the case of subjacency, we provide several empirical arguments against their claim that it can be reduced to some general discourse-pragmatic principles.

Two weaknesses of Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven's (AP&L) argument against Universal Grammar are discussed in this commentary. First, their article treats the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis (PBH) as a nativist theory, but PBH is entirely neutral with respect to the nativism-empiricism debate. Additional discussion of the plausibility of PBH is presented. Second, the rigor that AP&L direct toward nativist ideas must also be directed at empiricist claims. An understanding of how children acquire language will require nativist ideas, empiricist ideas, and ideas that are neutral on this dimension.

Although theories of specific language impairment grounded in Universal Grammar (UG) have advanced the description of SLI considerably, they provide limited utility as far as treatment is concerned. Because UG assumes deficits in language principles and parameter setting, remediation of the difficulty is not possible; rather, reliance on compensatory mechanisms is recommended. Compensatory mechanisms rely on the same learning principles as are adopted by theorists that adopt a more Emergentist view. Thus, we agree with Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven that a UG-based approach is redundant and recommend focusing efforts on identifying and strengthening treatment strategies associated with general learning principles instead.

This ‘short shot’ article draws attention to an unresolved contradiction between fundamental assumptions of modern linguistics and economics. Endogenous growth theory has become the consensus explanation of the phenomenon of long-term economic growth. This theory makes an assumption that is not seen as controversial by economists, namely, that the supply of new, unanticipated ideas is limited only by the level of resources committed to idea generation. Much linguistic theorizing, by contrast, assumes that potential human cognitive products are tightly constrained by biology. Although linguists and economists are primarily interested in different kinds of ‘ideas’, there is a real contradiction between the respective assumptions. The article does not offer a resolution of the contradiction, but encourages members of our discipline to be aware of it as a problem needing to be resolved.

The processing load of sentences with three different word orders (VOS, VSO, and SVO) in Kaqchikel Maya was investigated using a sentence-plausibility judgment task. The results showed that VOS sentences were processed faster than VSO and SVO sentences. This supports the traditional analysis in Mayan linguistics that the syntactically determined basic word order is VOS in Kaqchikel, as in many other Mayan languages. More importantly, the result revealed that the preference for subject-object word order in sentence comprehension observed in previous studies may not be universal; rather, the processing load in sentence comprehension is greatly affected by the syntactic nature of individual languages.

Negative structures are generally assumed to be maximally accessible for verbal predicates, as evidenced by the requirement in many languages that nonverbal predicates be supported by a verb when negated. Indeed, the term ‘standard negation’ is used to refer to the negation of a declarative verbal clause, and yet this is at best highly restricted in Kusunda. We discuss the mood and nominalizing strategies that are employed to escape from the restrictions imposed by such a system.

In this short report, we show that some elements usually deemed as obligatory DE SE anaphors may be interpreted as NON-DE SE in certain contexts. We argue that this non-de se reading cannot be subsumed under the category of DE RE, and suggest extending Kuno and Kaburaki's Theory of Empathy (Kuno & Kaburaki 1977, Kuno 1987) to interpret these readings as Indirect De Se: namely, that the speaker empathizes with the attitude holder, helping the latter to do self-reference. Applying this idea to other anaphoric expressions like personal pronouns, we obtain a TRICHOTOMY of attitude reports—de se, de re, and indirect de se, contra the traditional de se and de re distinction. Our proposal can also help to account for Anand's (2006) observation that only firstperson attitude reports in the Past Tense may have the non-de se reading.