Batsbi has multiple exponence (redundant marking) in gender-number agreement, and in this article we explore the question of whether marking of this kind is functional. In a series of three experiments, we compare verbs that have no agreement marker with ones that have a single marker, and we compare verbs with one agreement marker with ones that have two. We find that word recognition is slower with agreement than without it; and words with two agreement markers are recognized more slowly and with more errors relative to verbs with a single marker. For grammaticality judgments, subjects were generally slower to respond when the verb carried more markers. For verbs with no marker versus verbs with one marker, this extra cognitive effort yielded improved accuracy; however, this advantage did not extend to multiple exponence, as the extra processing time did not produce much improvement in accuracy. In cued recall, the presence of one marker conferred a clear advantage in accuracy, but the presence of two agreement markers actually resulted in decreased accuracy. Overall, multiple exponence was found not to confer a functional advantage in these experiments.

In contemporary spoken European French, on meaning ‘we’ is the predominant first-person plural variant, having largely supplanted its competitor, nous. There is, however, considerable debate as to whether the domination of on is the result of fairly rapid change in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries or whether there is actually a robust tradition of on usage going back several centuries. In this article, we trace the trajectory of first-person plural pronominal variation over four centuries of usage and investigate the role of both linguistic and extralinguistic conditioning factors, an analysis based on data from plays and parodic dialogues, metalinguistic commentary (by grammarians, lexicographers, and philologists), and naturalistic data (sociolinguistic interviews). The study not only involves quantitative and qualitative analysis of on and nous usage, the variants typically considered in the literature, but also focuses on the use of je in combination with the first-person plural ending -ons, a lower-class variant not sufficiently taken into account in earlier studies. We show that a shift toward dominant on does take place in the latter half of the nineteenth century in lower-class speech, but on is not adopted by the upper classes until the twentieth century. Further, the lower class does not move directly from je to on but rather passes through an intermediate stage wherein nous is the dominant variant, a transition interpreted as part of a general shift toward greater analycity in the pronominal system. We show that for much of the period under study, on is primarily associated with unrestricted reference, taking over in restricted reference contexts only as the change accelerates. We then compare variation and change in European French to what has obtained in both conservative and innovative New World varieties, varieties with closely related grammars but that differ with regard to their history and to the sociolinguistic settings in which they are spoken. This comparison allows further testing and confirmation of the analyses put forward for European French.

One of the most enduring problems in Spanish phonology has been the appearance of unstressed diphthongs in words with derivational suffixes. Despite robust conditioning of the diphthong alternation by stress, which predicts monophthongs in such words, derivational suffixes exhibit gradient tolerance for diphthongs. Moreover, speakers' intuitions appear to be keenly sensitive to this variability among suffixes. In this article we present corpus data identifying productivity as a crucial property of suffixes predicting the occurrence of diphthongs in extant Spanish derivations. This finding allows us to link the distribution of diphthongs to a more general, crosslinguistic tendency for words with productive morphology to be phonologically marked. We then present experimental results from lexical decision showing that this relationship between phonology and morphology drives not only Spanish speakers' intuitions but also their real-time processing of novel derivations. In addition to offering a solution to a long-standing problem in Spanish phonology, these findings have profound implications for our understanding of the phonology-morphology interface. Our corpus and experimental results conceptually motivate an argument that the contrasting demands of compositional and holistic processing of polymorphemic words play a crucial role in the increased incidence of marked phonology in particular morphological contexts.

This article is a crosslinguistic investigation of the hypothesis that the average information rate conveyed during speech communication results from a trade-off between average information density and speech rate. The study, based on seven languages, shows a negative correlation between density and rate, indicating the existence of several encoding strategies. However, these strategies do not necessarily lead to a constant information rate. These results are further investigated in relation to the notion of syllabic complexity.

Some natural languages do not lexically distinguish between modals of possibility and modals of necessity. From the perspective of languages like English, modals in such languages appear to do double duty: they are used both where possibility modals are expected and where necessity modals are expected. The Nez Perce modal suffix o'qa offers an example of this behavior. I offer a simple account of the flexibility of the o'qa modal centered on the absence of scalar implicatures. O'qa is a possibility modal that does not belong to a Horn scale; its use is never associated with a scalar implicature. Accordingly, in an upward-entailing environment, φ-o'qa is appropriate whenever there are accessible φ-worlds, even if indeed all accessible worlds are φ-worlds. In a downward-entailing environment, the flexibility of the o'qa modal is seen no more. Here, neither o'qa nor English possibility modals are associated with scalar implicatures, and the use of o'qa exactly parallels the use of English modals of possibility.

Given that o'qa is a possibility modal that does not contrast with a modal of necessity, just how do you talk about necessities in Nez Perce? Speakers translating into Nez Perce rely on a variety of techniques to paraphrase away expressions of simple necessity. Their strategies highlight an area where Nez Perce and English plausibly differ in the range of propositions they convey. The data cast doubt on any strong form of effability as a language universal.

In addition to providing an account of the empirical facts of language, a theory that aspires to account for language as a biologically based human faculty should seek a graceful integration of linguistic phenomena with what is known about other human cognitive capacities and about the character of brain computation. The present discussion note compares the theoretical stance of biolinguistics (Chomsky 2005, Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011) with a constraint-based parallel architecture approach to the language faculty (Jackendoff 2002, Culicover & Jackendoff 2005). The issues considered include the necessity of redundancy in the lexicon and the rule system, the ubiquity of recursion in cognition, derivational vs. constraint-based formalisms, the relation between lexical items and grammatical rules, the roles of phonology and semantics in the grammar, the combinatorial character of thought in humans and nonhumans, the interfaces between language, thought, and vision, and the possible course of evolution of the language faculty. In each of these areas, the parallel architecture offers a superior account both of the linguistic facts and of the relation of language to the rest of the mind/brain.