A prominent principle in explaining a range of word-order regularities is dependency locality, which minimizes the linear distances (dependency lengths) between a head and its dependents. However, it remains unclear to what extent language users in fact observe locality when producing sentences under diverse conditions of cross-categorical harmony (such as the placement of verbal and nominal heads on the same vs. different sides of their dependents), dependency direction (head-final vs. head-initial), and parallel vs. hierarchical dependency structures (e.g. multiple adjectives dependent on the same head vs. nested genitive dependents). Using forty-five dependency-annotated corpora of diverse languages, we find that after controlling for harmony and conditioning on dependency types, dependency-length minimization (DLM) is inversely correlated with the overall presence of head-final dependencies. This anti-DLM effect in sentences with more head-final dependencies is specifically associated with an accumulation of dependents in parallel structures and with disharmonic orders in hierarchical structures. We propose a detailed interpretation of these results and tentatively suggest a role for a probabilistic principle that favors embedding head-initial (e.g. VO) structures inside equally head-initial and thereby length-minimizing structures (e.g. relative clauses after the head noun), while head-final (OV) structures have a less pronounced preference for harmony and DLM. This is in line with earlier findings in research on the Greenbergian word-order universals and with a probabilistic version of what has been suggested more recently as the FINAL-OVER-FINAL CONDITION.

Distinguishing cognitive influences from historical influences on human behavior has long been a disputed topic in behavioral sciences, including linguistics. The discussion is often complicated due to empirical evidence being consistent with both the cognitive and the historical approach. This article argues that phonology offers a unique test case for distinguishing historical and cognitive influences on grammar, and it proposes an experimental technique for testing the cognitive factor which controls for the historical factor. The article outlines a model called CATALYSIS for explaining how learnability influences phonological typology and presents experiments that simulate this process. Central to this discussion are unnatural phonological processes, that is, those that operate against universal phonetic tendencies and require complex historical trajectories in order to arise. By using statistical methods for estimating historical influences, mismatches in predictions between the cognitive and historical approaches to typology can be identified. By conducting artificial grammar learning experiments on processes for which the historical approach makes predictions that differ from those of the cognitive approach, the experimental technique proposed in this article controls for historical influences while testing cognitive factors. Results of online and fieldwork experiments on two languages, English and Slovenian, show that subjects prefer postnasal devoicing over postnasal fricative occlusion and devoicing in at least a subset of places of articulation, which aligns with the observed typology. The advantage of the proposed approach over existing experimental work is that it experimentally confirms a link between synchronic preferences and typology that is most likely not influenced by historical biases. Results suggest that complexity avoidance is the primary influence cognitive bias has on phonological systems in human languages. Applying this technique to further alternations should yield new information about those cognitive properties of phonological grammar that are not conflated with historical influences.

Infixation and allomorphy have long been investigated as independent phenomena—see, for example, Ultan 1975, Moravcsik 1977, and Yu 2007 on infixation, and Carstairs 1987, Paster 2006, Veselinova 2006, and Bobaljik 2012 on allomorphy. But relatively little is known about what happens when infixation and allomorphy coincide. This article presents the results of the first crosslinguistic study of allomorphy involving infixation, considering fifty-one case studies from forty-two languages (fifteen language families). Allomorphy and infixation interact systematically, with distinct sets of behaviors characterizing suppletive and nonsuppletive allomorphy involving an infix. Perhaps most notably, suppletive allomorphy is conditioned only at/from the stem edge, while nonsuppletive allomorphy is conditioned only in the surface (infixed) environment. The robustness of these and related findings supports a universal serial architecture of the morphosyntax-phonology interface where: (i) infixation is indirect, involving displacement from a stem-edge position to a stem-internal one, counter to several influential theories of infixation (see especially McCarthy & Prince 1993a and Yu 2007); (ii) suppletive exponent choice is prior to (i.e. not regulated by) the phonological grammar (in line with Paster 2006, Pak 2016, Kalin 2020, Rolle 2021, and Stanton 2023, inter alia); and (iii) realization—including exponent choice and infixation—proceeds from the bottom of the morphosyntactic structure upward (à la Bobaljik 2000, Embick 2010, Myler 2017).

Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles while their eye movements were recorded. Speakers produced a large range of word orders, consistent with the language having flexible word order, with variation significantly influenced by agent and patient humanness. An analysis of eye movements showed that Murrinhpatha speakers' first fixation on an event character did not alone determine word order; rather, early in speech planning participants rapidly encoded BOTH event characters and their relationship to each other. That is, they engaged in Relational Encoding, laying down a very early conceptual foundation for the word order they eventually produced. These results support a Weakly Hierarchical account of sentence production and show that speakers of a free word order language encode the relationships between event participants during earlier stages of sentence planning than is typically observed for languages with fixed word orders.

In many cases of stress-dependent harmony the trigger is associated with a morpheme. We examine two instances of morphemic harmony where the triggering morpheme is mixed, that is, it consists of segmental material and floating features. The floating features cause stepwise raising of the stressed vowel, /a/ → [e], and /e/ → [i], /o/ → [u]. We examine in particular Felechosa Asturian, where the triggering masculine singular count morpheme usually has the exponent /-o/ and the floating features [+high] and [–low]. When the stressed vowel is mid, /-o/ raises it to high (/negɾ-o/ → [‘niƔɾ-o]). When the stressed vowel is /a/, the suffix raises this vowel to [e] as predicted, but at the same time the triggering morph /-o/ raises to [u] (/blank-o/ → [‘bleŋk-u]). This phenomenon, which we call harmony in situ, derives from the fact that, because raising is stepwise, one of the floating features cannot link to the stressed vowel, and thus it has to be realized on the trigger itself. Felechosa Asturian is compared to Ḷḷena Asturian, which does not present harmony in situ, and an optimality-theoretic analysis is provided.

The question of whether Irrealis is a meaningful concept in crosslinguistic comparison has been the subject of long-standing controversy. In this article, we argue that the semantic domain of irreality is split into two domains—the possible and the counterfactual—and that an ‘irrealis’ marker in a given language may refer either to only one of these domains or to both. A significant part of the crosslinguistic variation in what is referred to by the term irrealis can be traced back to this distinction. Other factors that obscure the realis/irrealis divide include functional subdivisions of the irrealis domain and paradigmatic competition within the TAM system of a language. We conclude that ‘irrealis’ is a crosslinguistically meaningful notion.

Precision turn-taking may constitute a crucial part of the human endowment for communication. If so, it should be implemented similarly across language modalities, as in signed vs. spoken language. Here, in the first experimental study of turn-end prediction in sign language, we find support for the idea that signed language, like spoken language, involves turn-type prediction and turn-end anticipation. In both cases, turns like questions that elicit specific responses accelerate anticipation. We also show remarkable cross-modality predictive capacity: nonsigners anticipate signed turn ends surprisingly well. Finally, we show that despite nonsigners' ability to intuitively predict signed turn ends, early native signers do it much better by using their access to linguistic signals (here, question markers). As shown in prior work, question formation facilitates prediction, and age of sign language acquisition affects accuracy. The study thus sheds light on the kinds of features that may facilitate turn-taking universally, and those that are language-specific.

Much progress has been made in the last 200 years with regard to understanding the origins and mechanisms of sound change. It is hypothesized that many sound changes originate in biomechanical constraints on speech production or in the misperception of sounds. These production and perception pressures explain a wide range of sound changes across the world's languages, yet we also know that sound change is not inevitable. For example, similar phonological structures have undergone change in many languages yet remained stable in others. In this study, we examine how typologically unusual contrasts are maintained in the face of intense pressures, in order to uncover the potential biomechanical, perceptual, and sociolinguistic factors that facilitate the maintenance of typologically unusual contrasts. We focus on secondary articulation contrasts in Scottish Gaelic rhotics, triangulating auditory, acoustic, and articulatory data in order to better understand the maintenance of contrast in the face of multidimensional typological challenges. Here, individual-level articulatory strategies are combined with contextual prosodic information in order to maintain acoustic and auditory distinctiveness across three rhotic phonemes. We highlight the need to more comprehensively consider typologically unusual and minority languages in order to test the limits of generalizations about crosslinguistic phonetic typology.

Although understanding the role of the environment is central to language acquisition theory, rarely has this been studied for children's phonetic development, and RECEPTIVE and EXPRESSIVE language experiences in the environment are not distinguished. This last distinction may be crucial for child speech production in particular, because production requires coordination of low-level speech-motor planning with high-level linguistic knowledge. In this study, the role of the environment is evaluated in a novel way—by studying phonetic development in a bilingual community undergoing rapid language shift. This sociolinguistic context provides a naturalistic gradient of the AMOUNT of children's exposure to two languages and the RATIO of expressive to receptive experiences. A large-scale child language corpus encompassing over 500 hours of naturalistic South Bolivian Quechua and Spanish speech was efficiently annotated for children's and their caregivers' bilingual language use. These estimates were correlated with children's patterns in a series of speech production tasks. The role of the environment varied by outcome: children's expressive language experience best predicted their performance on a coarticulation-morphology measure, while their receptive experience predicted performance on a lower-level measure of vowel variability. Overall these bilingual exposure effects suggest a pathway for children's role in language change whereby language shift can result in different learning outcomes within a single speech community. Appropriate ways to model language exposure in development are discussed.

Hindi and several other Indo-Aryan languages contain a discourse marker that has been described as having a wide range of functions, including topic marking, intensive, emphatic, contrastive, and assertive. In Hindi, this function is realized by the enclitic =to. Possible translational equivalents for =to include expressions like in fact, sure, you know, well, as for, at least, finally, and but. This article investigates the diverse uses of =to and argues that the full range can be uniformly accounted for only if =to is taken to be a particle that signals that the question resolved by its prejacent is weak. The analysis treats =to as a generalized downtoner that comments on the strength of the question the prejacent addresses, relative to the speaker's information state, prior discourse moves, and assumptions about the common ground.

This article examines the role of sociolinguistic expectations in linguistic convergence, using glide-weakened /aɪ/—a salient feature of Southern US English—as a test case. I present the results of two experiments utilizing a novel experimental paradigm for eliciting convergence—the WORD-NAMING GAME task—in which participants read aloud (baseline) or hear (exposure) clues describing particular words and then give their guesses out loud. Participants converged toward a Southern-shifted model talker by producing more glide-weakened tokens of /aɪ/, without ever hearing the model talker produce this vowel. Participants in the control (Midland talker) condition exhibited no such response. Convergence was facilitated by both living in the South and producing less-weakened baseline /aɪ/ glides, but attitudinal and domain-general individual-differences measures did not reliably predict convergence behaviors. Results are discussed in terms of implications for the cognitive mechanisms underlying convergence behaviors and the mental representations of sociolinguistic knowledge.

Phonetic realization is highly variable and highly structured within and across talkers. We examine three constraints that could structure the phonetic space of related speech sounds: target, contrast, and pattern uniformity. Target uniformity requires a uniform mapping from distinctive features to their corresponding phonetic targets within a talker, contrast uniformity requires a consistent difference in the phonetic targets that realize featural contrasts across talkers, and pattern uniformity requires a uniform template of phonetic targets across talkers. Focusing on American English sibilant fricatives, we measure and compare each constraint's influence on the phonetic targets corresponding to place of articulation. We find that target uniformity is the strongest constraint: each talker realizes a given distinctive feature value in highly similar ways across related sounds. Together with similar findings for other sound classes, this result reveals fine-grained systematicity in the mapping from phonology to phonetics and has implications for theories of speech production and speech perception.

Social category information plays a central role in speech perception and processing. To date, research on this topic has struggled to model how social category perceptions evolve over the time course of an interaction. In this article, we build on recent methodological developments to investigate trajectories of listener perceptions, focusing on how impressions change as linguistic, social, and contextual details emerge. We base our arguments on an analysis of listeners' real-time evaluations of the perceived competence of speakers of two British regional accents during a mock interview for a job in a law firm. Results indicate a need to move away from the view, predominant in sociolinguistics, of category perception as a discrete phenomenon and toward a model of perception as inference under uncertainty. We discuss implications for theories of sociolinguistic cognition and for understandings of accent bias.

The mechanisms underlying linguistic change are well documented for adolescent and adult speech, but much less is known about how such change emerges in the childhood years. In this article we address this gap by conducting a real-time analysis of the acquisition of a rapidly expanding variable in young speakers, first in preschool and later in preadolescence. By tracking a variable undergoing change at two key stages of sociolinguistic development, transmission and incrementation, we observe directly the processes operating on individual and community grammars as children shift to the leading edge of change.

In Spanish, the element todo ‘all’ agrees in gender and number with the noun it quantifies over (todas las ventanas ‘all.F.PL the.F.PL windows.F.PL'). In this article I discuss a novel construction in Rioplatense Spanish, restricted to existentials and possessives, in which todo agrees in gender and number with a given nominal in the structure but is neither syntactically nor semantically related to it (e.g. Hay toda agua en el baño (have.PRS all.F.SG water.F.SG in the bathroom) ‘There's water over the whole bathroom floor'). I argue that the syntax and the interpretation of this construction can be explained only if todo ‘all’ is understood to be modifying a silent element (in the sense of Kayne 2004). In particular, I propose that todo is the modifier of a PP headed by the silent preposition WITH, and that the nominal that agrees with todo is the complement of this silent P. This analysis sheds light on the structure of existential sentences and supports the view put forth in Levinson 2011, contra Freeze 1992, that a single underlying structure for possessive structures cannot be maintained.

Although the Inuit language is generally characterized as ergative, it has been observed that the ergative case patterning is relatively weaker in certain Eastern Canadian varieties, resulting in a more accusative appearance (e.g. Johns 2001, 2006, Carrier 2017). This article presents a systematic comparison of ergativity in three Inuit varieties, as a lens into the properties of case alignment and clause structure in Inuit more broadly. Building on the previous insight that ergativity in Inuit is tied to object movement to a structurally high position (Bittner 1994, Bittner & Hale 1996a,b, Woolford 2017), I demonstrate that the relative robustness of the ergative patterning across Inuit is tightly correlated with the permissibility of object movement—and not determined by the morphosyntactic properties of ERG subjects, which are uniform across Inuit. I additionally relate this correlation to another point of variation across Inuit concerning the status of object agreement as affixes vs. pronominal clitics (Yuan 2021). These connections offer testable predictions for the status of ergativity across the entire Inuit dialect continuum and yield crosslinguistic implications for the typology of case alignment, especially in how it interacts with the syntactic position of nominals.

I argue that the phenomenon of ‘extra be’ (e.g. That's the thing, is we lost) can be analyzed in terms of specifying coordination. Specifically, ‘extra be’ derives from a ‘colon phrase’ (:P) structure, where Spec-:P is a host sentence and Comp-:P is a pseudocleft adding information to the host. ‘Extra be’ arises when the head T of the pseudocleft raises to :0, an operation that is possible only under specific circumstances involving ellipsis in the pseudocleft. I motivate this analysis by first considering a set of syntactic, prosodic, and semantic properties exhibited by extra be sentences, including properties of ‘extra be’ itself, properties of the post-copular specificational phrase, and locality conditions in the construction. I then develop the analysis described above, emphasizing in particular the assignment of a uniform structure to both extra be sentences and their ‘extra be'-less counterparts (compare: That's the thing {: / is} we lost). Finally, I compare key features of the new analysis with those of previous proposals.

We investigate the role of two possible sets of factors, cognitive and social, in modulating an individual's linguistic context-sensitivity: the capacity of a neurocognitive system to identify information in a communicative context that satisfies the meaning requirements of a given expression in that context. We assess whether the degree of contextual facilitation of an otherwise dispreferred reading of an English have-sentence is correlated with domain-general cognitive factors—by using the AUTISM-SPECTRUM QUOTIENT (AQ) to index an individual's ‘autistic-like’ traits—and/or with social factors associated with gender expression—by using participants' gender group.

Acceptability ratings (n = 271) for a dispreferred but plausible locative reading were significantly higher only after the facilitatory context, suggesting that relevant context can modulate the acceptability of different readings of a have-sentence. Crucially, the degree of facilitation correlates with participants' AQ scores, but not gender group, directly implicating cognitive variability in linguistic context-sensitivity differences, and leaving open the question of individual-level variability arising from social factors. Our findings are consistent with a model of language variation in which individuals with certain cognitive styles implement their grammatical knowledge at a larger ‘communicative scope’ than others, thereby inducing novel usage patterns of existing variants in their speech community.

We question the commonly accepted assumption that American Sign Language (ASL) has no overt copula. We present evidence that one of the functions of the sign Self in present-day ASL is as a copula. This sign evolved into its current function by way of a grammaticalization process called the ‘copula cycle’ (Katz 1996). The copula cycle consists of a deictic item transforming into a demonstrative pronoun and then into a copula by means of a series of syntactic reanalyses. We present corpus evidence from Old French Sign Language (LSF) in the 1850s, Old ASL in the 1910s, and present-day ASL dating to the 2000s and the late 2010s, and with these data analyze ASL examples of syntactic structures outlined by Li and Thompson (1977) that led to the increased use of Self as a copula. We also find that Self, which is not generally regarded as a pointing sign, follows the grammaticalization scheme for pointing signs outlined by Pfau and Steinbach (2006), indicating that the scheme may be used for signs that are derived from demonstratives. Ultimately, we conclude that ASL undergoes the same grammaticalization processes as spoken languages.

Properties of the content of the clausal complement have long been assumed to distinguish factive predicates like know from nonfactive ones like think (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1970, inter alia). There is, however, disagreement about which properties define factive predicates, as well as uncertainty about whether the content of the complement of particular predicates exhibits the properties attributed to the content of the complement of factive predicates. This has led to a lack of consensus about which predicates are factive, a troublesome situation given the central role that factivity plays in linguistic theorizing. This article reports six experiments designed to investigate two critical properties of the content of the complement of clause-embedding predicates, namely projection and entailment, with the goal of establishing whether these properties identify a class of factive predicates. We find that factive predicates are more heterogeneous than previously assumed and that there is little empirical support from these experiments for the assumed categorical distinction between factive and nonfactive predicates. We discuss implications of our results for formal analyses of presuppositions, one area where factivity has played a central role. We propose that projection is sensitive to meaning distinctions between clause-embedding predicates that are more fine-grained than factivity.