Quedar and quedarse form one of the pairs of a fairly large number of common intransitive verbs (caer, morir, ir, reír, venir, estar, parecer, salir, etc.) the uses of whose pseudo-reflexive and non-reflexive forms have traditionally been catalogued in that limbo category of constructions which can only be explained by the Sprachgefühl of the native. Information on the uses of these forms is, consequently, exceedingly scant. The Diccionario de la lengua espanola notes the presence of some of the most troublesome aspects of the problem only with its uncritical and ubiquitous ‘Úsase también como reflexivo.’ The one indexed reference to quedar in the Academy grammar is concerned with an unqualified, one-sentence statement indicating that quedar, like dejar, llevar, and estar, may be used as an auxiliary to form a compound with a past participle. Andrés Bello recognizes the problem but confines his explanation to the assertion that in the use of the reflexive form of intransitive verbs ‘percibiremos cierto color de acción que el sujeto parece ejercer en sí mismo.’ Bello also maintains that ‘estarse es permanecer voluntariamente en cierta situación o estaoo’ and that ‘la misma diferencia aparece entre quedar y quedarse, ir e irse.' On the American scene, M. M. Ramsey categorically states that quedar ‘may be used optionally with or without the reflexive., Hayward Keniston is more cautious. He includes quedar in the general group of intransitives sometimes used reflexively and affirms that ‘the use of the reflexive pronoun’ with intransitive verbs ‘is strongly affective in character and indicates that the speaker has some special interest in relating the action or state to the subject of the sentence.‘

This article is an analysis of the claim that a universal ban on certain (‘anti-markedness’) grammars is necessary in order to explain their nonoccurrence in the languages of the world. Such a claim is based on the following assumptions: that phonological typology shows a highly asymmetric distribution, and that such a distribution cannot possibly arise ‘naturally’—that is, without a universal grammar-based restriction of the learner’s hypothesis space. Attempting to test this claim reveals a number of open issues in linguistic theory. In the first place, there exist critical aspects of synchronic theory that are not specified explicitly enough to implement computationally. Second, there remain many aspects of linguistic competence, language acquisition, sound change, and even typology that are still unknown. It is not currently possible, therefore, to reach a definitive conclusion about the necessity, or lack thereof, of an innate substantive grammar module. This article thus serves two main functions: acting both as a pointer to the areas of phonological theory that require further development, especially at the overlap between traditionally separate subdomains, and as a template for the type of argumentation required to defend or attack claims about phonological universals.

The English past tense contains pockets of variation, where regular and irregular forms compete (e.g. learned/learnt, weaved/wove). Individuals vary considerably in the degree to which they prefer irregular forms. This article examines the degree to which individuals may converge on their regularization patterns and preferences. We report on a novel experimental methodology, using a cooperative game involving nonce verbs. Analysis of participants' postgame responses indicates that their behavior shifted in response to an automated co-player's preferences, on two dimensions. First, players regularize more after playing with peers with high regularization rates, and less after playing with peers with low regularization rates. Second, players' overall patterns of regularization are also affected by the particular distribution of (ir)regular forms produced by the peer.

We model the effects of the exposure on participants' morphological preferences, using both a rule-based model and an instance-based analogical model (Nosofsky 1988, Albright & Hayes 2003). Both models contribute separately and significantly to explaining participants' pre-exposure regularization processes. However, only the instance-based model captures the shift in preferences that arises after exposure to the peer. We argue that the results suggest an account of morphological convergence in which new word forms are stored in memory, and on-line generalizations are formed over these instances.

The analysis of formulaic German binomial expressions of the form N und N reveals the following characteristics. The absence of determiners, along with other morphosyntactic and semantic anomalies, makes these phrases non-compositional and thus similar to idioms; but they differ from fixed idiomatic expressions in that their structural pattern can be productively used for the creation of new pairs. These bare binomials are not exhaustively listable lexical items, nor can they be generated by a syntactic conjunction rule. Their formal properties suggest that they are complex word-like expressions—comparable in many ways to nominal compounds and, like compounds, describable by lexical rules. Their creation and use is subject to semantic and pragmatic constraints which can be subsumed under a general principle of frame structure. They can be divided into three main types: (a) lexicalized and irreversible, (b) novel but semantically motivated, and (c) semantically unmotivated but pragmatically constrained. However, sharp lines between lexicalized and novel instances, or between semantically and pragmatically motivated types, cannot be drawn on principled grounds. Bare binomials lend support to a view of language in which the ‘generative’ and the ‘idiomatic’ components are two extremes on a continuum, rather than fundamentally distinct phenomena.

Language-contact studies have shown that the transfer of morphology from one language to another is relatively rare (Gardani 2008, Grant 2012, Matras 2015), and the copying of verbal inflectional morphology is particularly infrequent (Seifart 2017). Copied morphemes are frequently assumed to enter the recipient language via ‘indirect affix borrowing’, whereby complex lexemes are copied and subsequently analyzed into their component parts in the recipient language, thus enabling use of the copied affixes with native roots (Grant 2012, Seifart 2015, Evans 2016). Although ‘direct affix borrowing’, in which speakers of the recipient language identify the meaning of affixes in the model language and transfer them directly for use with native roots, is known to occur, it has until now been identified only for derivational morphemes (Seifart 2015). I here provide evidence that inflectional morphemes, namely four Sakha (Yakut) tense-aspect-mood markers plus associated subject agreement paradigms, were copied directly into the Lamunkhin dialect of Even by fully bilingual speakers. This argument is based on the absence of Sakha verbal roots found with these paradigms in a corpus of Lamunkhin Even recordings, as well as on patterns of cooccurrence of these morphemes in clauses with Even grammatical morphology.

One critical assumption that Salikoko Mufwene (2017) makes about the field of language endangerment and loss is that linguists engaged in language endangerment, documentation, and revitalization are concerned with indigenous languages, which naturally leaves out nonindigenous languages. This response concerns itself with addressing this assumption, with a focus on a particular group of nonindigenous languages. It provides insight on the levels of endangerment of pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages for which we have information, and considers some reasons why it is important to focus on the endangerment and loss of these types of nonindigenous languages.

Arabic has a construction that expresses a UNIVERSAL PERFECT interpretation. It is here argued that this construction, which is widespread across the different vernaculars, can be analyzed as a possessive perfect construction, a structure thought to be rather rare beyond Indo-European languages spoken in Europe. I further argue that the grammaticalization path differs from that of well-known possessive perfect structures across European languages. I hypothesize that the structure which paved the way for the grammaticalization of a universal perfect construction across Arabic was a possessive structure, originally headed by a preposition, which eventually developed into a transitive verbal predicate taking an interval-denoting object as its possessum, and which subsequently grammaticalized into a construction expressing the universal perfect.

The purpose of this paper is to test the validity of the oft-repeated proposition that we can not handle meaning linguistically, by attempting to evolve an empirical procedure for the processing of semantic field data, which can then be evaluated in terms of the criteria of consistency, exhaustiveness, and simplicity. This procedure will be applied to a minimum semantic contrast in grammar—the difference in grammatical meaning correlated with the presence or the absence of a single paradigmatic morpheme. I shall call this correlation a GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY, and the contrasting morphemic units the GRAMMATICAL FORMS of this category.

Albanian appears as an orderly and consistent derivative of the Indo-European system in spite of Latin and other penetrations, which have an interest of their own. The linguistic picture is more difficult to reconstruct than that of Slavonic or Baltic, owing to the large amount of borrowing from Latin, Greek, Venetian, Slavonic, and other sources, the remarkable absence of the usual terms of kinship and farming in this language of a hill-dwelling shepherd people, and the fact that, as in Armenian, phonological breakdown has given rise to greater ambiguity of interpretation.