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.

This article deals with the claim that the MAGNITUDE ESTIMATION (ME) method of gathering acceptability judgments produces data that are more informative for linguists than binary or n-point scale judgments. We performed three acceptability-rating experiments that directly compared ME data to binary and seven-point scale data. The results clearly falsify the hypothesis that data gathered by the ME method carry a larger amount of information about the acceptability of a given linguistic phenomenon. The three measures are largely equivalent with respect to informativity. Moreover, ME judgments are shown to be more liable to producing spurious variance under certain circumstances.

In this article we offer up a particular linguistic phenomenon, quantifier-variable binding in Kannada ditransitives, as a proving ground upon which competing claims about learnability can be evaluated with respect to the relative abstractness of children's grammatical knowledge. We first identify one aspect of syntactic representation that exhibits a range of syntactic, morphological, and semantic consequences both within and across languages, namely the hierarchical structure of ditransitive verb phrases (Barss & Lasnik 1986, Larson 1988, Harley 2002). Next we show that while the semantic consequences of this structure are parallel in English, Kannada, and Spanish, the word order and morphological reflexes of this structure diverge. Thus, although it is clear that the same structures are exhibited crosslinguistically, the evidence available to learners that would allow them to identify these structures is variable. We then turn to an examination of children learning Kannada, demonstrating that they have command of the relation between morphological form and semantic interpretation in ditransitives with respect to quantifier-variable binding. Finally, we offer a proposal on how a selective learning mechanism might succeed in identifying the appropriate structures in this domain despite the variability in surface expression.

The introduction of the psychophysical technique of MAGNITUDE ESTIMATION to the study of acceptability judgments (Bard et al. 1996) has led to a surge of interest in formal acceptability-judgment experiments over the past fifteen years. One of the primary reasons for its popularity is that it was developed as a tool to measure actual units of perception, offering the possibility of data that is inherently more informative than previous scaling tasks. However, there are several untested cognitive assumptions that must hold in order for ME to be the perceptual measurement test that it is purported to be. Building on the recent formalization of these assumptions in the psychophysics literature (Narens 1996, Luce 2002), this article presents two experiments designed to test whether these assumptions hold for acceptability-judgment experiments. The results suggest that the cognitive assumptions of magnitude estimation do not hold for participants in acceptability-judgment experiments, eliminating any reason to believe that ME could deliver inherently more meaningful data than other acceptability-judgment tasks.

Kerinci is a group of grammatically diverse Malayic varieties spoken in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. This article focuses on a previously undescribed dialect of Kerinci, spoken in the village of Tanjung Pauh Mudik (TPM). Many Kerinci dialects have developed a morphological alternation in root-final syllables as a result of stress-related diachronic changes. In TPM, as in Sungai Penuh Kerinci (described by Steinhauer and Usman (1978), inter alia), lexical roots surface in two forms, termed ‘absolute’ and ‘oblique’, which differ in the phonological shape of their final syllable. These forms exhibit a wide array of grammatical properties that differ considerably between dialects. We focus on the function of this unique marking in the verbal domain, and argue that the oblique form marks agreement with a nominal complement. Our analysis explains why TPM, a language that retains the morphological properties of the traditional Malay voice system, unexpectedly appears to permit the extraction of nonsubject arguments from active clauses, contradicting the predictions of theories that causally link symmetrical voice morphology and a ban on nonsubject extraction from vP (e.g. Keenan 1972, 1979, Rackowski & Richards 2005, Cole et al. 2008). We argue that apparent cases of nonsubject extraction do not involve movement, but that the apparently moved argument is generated outside of vP and binds a phonologically null pronoun licensed by the oblique morphology; thus, we are able to relate TPM's unexpected syntactic behavior to the availability of the absolute/oblique marking. This analysis has broader consequences for the theory of pro-drop. Neeleman and Szendrői's (2007) theory of radical pro-drop is unable to differentiate between syntactically projected pronouns (like null objects in TPM) and nonobject pro-dropped arguments in TPM that lack the behavior of a syntactically projected argument. In light of this inadequacy, we put forward an alternative proposal regarding the universal typology of pro-drop.

Scalar additive operators, such as Engl. even, Fr. même, Germ, sogar, Sp. aun, and so forth, vary crosslinguistically in terms of their distributional behavior, in particular with respect to semantic and pragmatic properties of the sentential environment (scale-reversing vs. scale-preserving, negative vs. nonnegative). This article proposes a semantic framework for the crosslinguistic analysis of scalar additive operators and a typology based on that framework. Five major types of operators are distinguished and the distribution of these types in forty European languages is surveyed. The synchronic patterns found in the languages of the sample are interpreted in the light of historical developments in the domain of investigation, and implications for the division of labor between lexical meaning and sentential context are discussed.

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.

A persistent mystery in language acquisition is how speakers are able to learn seemingly arbitrary distributional restrictions. This article investigates one such case: the fact that speakers resist using certain adjectives prenominally (e.g. ??the asleep man). Experiment 1 indicates that speakers tentatively generalize or CATEGORIZE the distributional restriction beyond their previous experience. Experiment 2 demonstrates that speakers are sensitive to STATISTICAL PREEMPTION—that is, speakers learn not to use a formulation if an alternative formulation with the same function is consistently witnessed. Moreover, they are able to generalize the restriction to apply to other members of the category as well. Finally, experiment 3 finds evidence that speakers DISCOUNT a pseudo-preemptive context, rationally ignoring it as uninformative.

This article presents the results of an acoustic study of nasal assimilation and gestural overlap at word boundaries in Korean and Korean-accented English. Twelve speakers of Seoul Korean recorded phrases containing obstruent#nasal and obstruent#obstruent sequences in both Korean and English. Nasalization of the word-final obstruent, predicted by the rules of Korean phonology, occurred in 93% of obstruent#nasal sequences in Korean and in 32% of such sequences in Korean-accented English, a rate of application higher than that reported in most other studies of external sandhi alternations in nonnative speech. Acoustic analysis found categorical nasalization in the L1 Korean productions, but both categorical and gradient nasalization, along with a high degree of inter- and intraspeaker variation, in the L2 English productions. For a subset of speakers, there was a significant correlation between quantitative measures of nasalization in English and measures of consonant overlap in the English obstruent#obstruent sequences. An analysis in terms of articulatory gestures and the coupled-oscillator model of speech planning is supported. The analysis is based on the ARTICULATORY PHONOLOGY model (Browman & Goldstein 1990a,b, 1992, 2000, Goldstein et al. 2006), though with modifications. Implications for phonetic and phonological representations, and for speech planning in both L1 and L2, are explored.

I present evidence from Navajo and English that weaker, gradient versions of morpheme-internal phonotactic constraints, such as the ban on geminate consonants in English, hold even across prosodic word boundaries. I argue that these lexical biases are the result of a maximum entropy phonotactic learning algorithm that maximizes the probability of the learning data, but that also contains a smoothing term that penalizes complex grammars. When this learner attempts to construct a grammar in which some constraints are blind to morphological structure, it underpredicts the frequency of compounds that violate a morpheme-internal phonotactic. I further show how, over time, this learning bias could plausibly lead to the lexical biases seen in Navajo and English.

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.

In an experimental task with novel words, we find that some lexical statistical regularities of Turkish phonotactics are productively extended in nonce words, while others are not. In particular, while laryngeal alternation rates in the lexicon can be predicted by the place of articulation of the stem-final stop, by word-length, and by the preceding vowel quality, this laryngeal alternation is only productively conditioned by place of articulation and word-length. Speakers' responses in a novel word task demonstrate that although they are attuned to the place of articulation and size effects, they ignore preceding vowels, even though the lexicon contains this information in abundance. We interpret this finding as evidence that speakers distinguish between phonologically motivated generalizations and accidental generalizations. We propose that universal grammar (UG), a set of analytic biases, acts as a filter on the generalizations that humans can make: UG contains information about possible and impossible interactions between phonological elements. Omnivorous statistical models that do not have information about possible interactions incorrectly reproduce accidental generalizations, thus failing to model speakers' behavior.

This article explores a ‘pragmatic ambiguity’ of negation in English, first discussed by Horn (1985, 1989:Ch.6) in his appeal to an intuitive division between ordinary, ‘descriptive’ negation and marked, ‘metalinguistic’ uses of negation in everyday language. The main agenda is to better understand what such a pragmatic ambiguity of negation really amounts to: are there sufficient grounds to posit TWO types of negation, and what prevents Horn's PRAGMATIC ambiguity from being SEMANTIC in its nature?

In this article, I review the key features promoted by Horn as characteristic of the purported duality in negation—particularly those posited for marked, metalinguistic uses of negation, such as resistance to prefixal incorporation, failure to trigger negative polarity items, and employment of the paradigmatic not X but Y construction. I then consider and evaluate subsequent attempts to posit a finer-grained analysis of metalinguistic negation, as endorsed by Foolen (1991) and Geurts (1998). The article concludes by upholding the so-called pragmatic ambiguity, but advises due caution with regard to Horn's diagnostics when appealing to this intuitive distinction of negation within use.

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.

The results of a production experiment show that English speakers distinguish elements under contrastive focus from elements that are merely new in the discourse. A novel paradigm eliciting both contrastively focused and merely discourse-new elements in the same sentence avoids differences in information structure and pitch accenting in the context surrounding the target elements that were confounds in previous studies on the topic. Elements under contrastive focus show greater duration, relative intensity, and F0 movement with respect to other elements in the utterance than elements that are new in the discourse but not under contrastive focus. We argue that the phonetic differences revealed here cannot be explained in terms of systematic manipulation of pitch-accent type or phrasal boundaries, and should instead be analyzed as differences in phrase-level phonological prominence for contrastively focused and merely discourse-new elements.

This article explains the correlation between agreeing and nonagreeing forms of pronominal possessors and their person features in Romanian and other Indo-European languages: first- and second-person pronouns agree, whereas third-person pronouns are nonagreeing forms marked with genitive case. We show that the distribution of agreeing and nonagreeing pronominal forms follows from a constraint of FEATURE UNIQUENESS, which prevents a pronominal root from merging with more than one set of inflectional features (distinguished from lexical features, which belong to the root). The analysis is shown to extend to the agreeing third-person possessors found in most Romance and Germanic languages and to the Slavic agreeing nominal possessors.

The imperative-and-declarative (IaD) construction in English (e.g. Study hard and you will pass the class) has two distinct readings: one that has the semantics of a conditional and additionally the meaning of an imperative, and one that has only the semantics of a conditional, with no imperative meaning. There are two general kinds of syntactic approaches in the literature for analyzing this construction: one that treats the two interpretations as underlyingly syntactically the same, and one that treats them as two distinct syntactic constructions. This short report presents the results of an acceptability-judgment experiment that was designed to inform the debate between the two kinds of approaches. The two types of IaDs were observed to behave differently with respect to two phenomena we evaluated, suggesting either that they should be treated as grammatically distinct, or that a theory that treats them as grammatically the same must give a pragmatic account of the differences. Furthermore, because the pattern of data that we observed was a statistical interaction between two factors—a pattern of data that is not detectable without quantitative measurements—the results provide compelling evidence for the need for quantitative evaluations of linguistic hypotheses.

Dunn and colleagues (2008) describe and exemplify the use of sophisticated analyses of abstract structural features to reconstruct language histories. The techniques that they use do show some clustering in the groups of languages that they examine; Dunn et al. state that they ‘tend to favor a phylogenetic origin for the signal of relatedness’ (p. 748), and that the results of their test case ‘show a close degree of correspondence to the existing linguistic classification based on sound-meaning correspondences’ (p. 747). We argue that a more parsimonious explanation for the results obtained by Dunn et al.'s methodology is that it accurately maps linguistic geography, the network of contact and diffusion that postdates a proto-language, in most cases corresponding to geographic distance.

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.