This article examines the role of subjecthood in the domain of anaphoric binding through the lens of West Circassian, a Northwest Caucasian language with ergative alignment. West Circassian reflexives and reciprocals display a puzzling mismatch in binding directionality with transitive ergative-absolutive predicates. Reflexives treat the ergative agent as the structurally higher argument, with the bound pronoun appearing in the position of the absolutive theme. A reciprocal pronoun, by contrast, appears in the ergative position and is bound by the absolutive theme, suggesting that the absolutive theme is structurally superior to the ergative agent. The article demonstrates that both anaphors are constrained in crosslinguistically familiar ways, but reflexives are subject to an additional licensing condition that limits the set of possible antecedents to the highest argument in the thematic domain. By demonstrating that structural superiority is domain-sensitive, the article challenges the significance of subjecthood as a grammatical primitive and argues that it should be replaced with a tree-geometrical notion of contextually determined prominence.

This article presents four experiments that investigate the meaning of English and Italian statements containing the epistemic necessity auxiliary verb must/dovere, a topic of long-standing debate in the philosophical and linguistics literature. Our findings show that the endorsement of such statements in a given scenario depends on the participants' subjective assessment about whether they are convinced that the conclusion suggested by the scenario is true, independently from their objective assessment of the conclusion's likelihood. We interpret these findings as suggesting that English and Italian speakers use epistemic necessity verbs to communicate neither conclusions judged to be necessary (contrary to the prediction of the standard modal logical view) nor conclusions judged to be highly probable (contrary to the prediction of recent analyses using probabilistic models) but conclusions whose truth they believe in (as predicted by the analysis of epistemic must as an inferential evidential). We suggest that this evidential meaning of epistemic must/dovere might have arisen in everyday conversation from a reiterated hyperbolic use of the words with their original meaning as epistemic necessity verbs.

A large amount of sentence-processing work has focused on revealing how the parser incrementally integrates each incoming word into the current linguistic representation. It is often explicitly or implicitly assumed that the structure endorsed by the parser should determine the ultimate interpretation of the sentence. The current study investigates whether the interpretive bias in sentence comprehension necessarily tracks the parsing bias. Our case study concerns the locality bias in nonlocal dependencies, specifically Mandarin WH-in-situ scope dependencies. Our findings suggest a misalignment between parsing and interpretative decisions at the global level. In particular, for Mandarin WH-in-situ constructions that involve scope ambiguity, there is a locality bias in parsing, but an antilocality bias in interpretation. Building upon the RATIONAL SPEECH ACT framework, we propose a Bayesian pragmatic analysis to account for these findings. Under our proposal, the seeming conflict between parsing and interpretation will ultimately disappear because parsing preferences will be naturally embedded under the pragmatic reasoning process to generate the ultimate interpretation. The current study therefore makes novel contributions, both empirically and theoretically, to addressing the broader question about the relationship between parsing and interpretation.

Uspanteko is an endangered Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. Unstressed vowels in Uspanteko often delete, though deletion is variable within and across speakers. Deletion appears to be phonological: it is sensitive to foot structure, morphology, and certain phonotactics, and it occurs in slow, careful speech. But deletion also has characteristics more typical of a phonetic process: it is intertwined with a pattern of gradient vowel reduction and is insensitive to most phonotactics. Electroglottography data shows that even ‘deleted’ vowels may contribute voicing to intervals when flanked by voiceless consonants. This suggests that ‘deleted’ vowels are represented in the input to speech production, even when they are acoustically masked by articulatory overlap with adjacent segments. We conclude that vowel deletion is grammatically controlled gestural overlap, consistent with the claim that phonological representations encode information about the relative timing and coordination of articulatory gestures (e.g. Browman & Goldstein 1986, Gafos 2002). At a minimum, language-specific phonetic processes must have access to more fine-grained, abstract grammatical information than is usually assumed.

Listeners have a remarkable ability to adapt to novel speech patterns, such as a new accent or an idiosyncratic pronunciation. In almost all of the previous studies examining this phenomenon, the participating listeners had reason to believe that the speech signal was produced by a human being. However, people are increasingly interacting with voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) devices that produce speech using text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. Will listeners also adapt to novel speech input when they believe it is produced by a device? Across three experiments, we investigate this question by exposing American English listeners to shifted pronunciations accompanied by either a ‘human’ or a ‘device’ guise and testing how this exposure affects their subsequent categorization of vowels. Our results show that listeners exhibit perceptual learning even when they believe the speaker is a device. Furthermore, listeners generalize these adjustments to new talkers, and do so particularly strongly when they believe that both old and new talkers are devices. These results have implications for models of speech perception, theories of human-computer interaction, and the interface between social cognition and linguistic theory.

Comprehending and producing words is a natural process for human speakers. In linguistic theory, investigating this process formally and computationally is often done by focusing on forms only. By moving beyond the world of forms, we show in this study that the discriminative lexicon (DL) model—operating with word comprehension as a mapping of form onto meaning, and word production as a mapping of meaning onto form—generates accurate predictions about what meanings listeners understand and what forms speakers produce. Furthermore, we show that measures derived from the computational model are predictive for human reaction times. Although mathematically very simple, the linear mappings between form and meaning posited by our model are powerful enough to capture the complexity and productivity of a Semitic language with a complex hybrid morphological system.

This article provides a general analysis of the semantics of person, broadly construed, through a case study of Ojibwe (Central Algonquian). Ojibwe shows person-like distinctions based on whether an entity is living or nonliving (i.e. animacy) and, within living things, whether a being is prominent or backgrounded in the discourse (i.e. obviation). The central principle of the account is contrast: the activation and interpretation of a feature is driven by the requirement that it makes a cut to derive the proper categories within a given inventory. With this principle, I show that a small set of bivalent features denoting first-order predicates can capture Ojibwe as well as a wider typology of person, animacy, obviation, and noun classification distinctions.

This article documents a previously unattested variety of obligatory control (OC) in the Nakh-Daghestanian language Chirag Dargwa, which lies at the intersection between two phenomena known from previous research: overt controlled subjects and partial control. Despite being less widespread crosslinguistically, these two phenomena do occur in various unrelated languages and are known to not quite fit in with existing theories of OC. Combined in a single construction, they yield a new empirical option in the typology of OC and provide evidence in favor of a pro analysis of controlled subjects.

How may the structure of a new linguistic community shape language emergence and change? The 1817 founding of the US's first enduring school for the deaf, the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in Hartford, Connecticut, heralded profound changes in the lives of deaf North Americans. We report the demographics of the early signing community at ASD through quantitative analyses of the 1,700 students who attended the school during its first fifty years. The majority were adolescents, with adults also well represented. Prior to 1845, children under age eight were absent. We consider two groups of students who may have made important linguistic contributions to this early signing community: students with deaf relatives and students from Martha's Vineyard. We conclude that adolescents played a crucial role in forming the New England signing community. Young children may have pushed the emergence of ASL, but likely did so at home in deaf families, not at ASD.

The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest language families in the Americas. However, there has been considerable debate about its origin and how it spread. Here we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to analyze lexical data from thirty-four Uto-Aztecan varieties and two Kiowa-Tanoan languages. We infer the age of Proto-Uto-Aztecan to be around 4,100 years (3,258–5,025 years) and identify the most likely homeland to be near what is now Southern California. We reconstruct the most probable subsistence strategy in the ancestral Uto-Aztecan society and infer no casual or intensive cultivation, an absence of cereal crops, and a primary subsistence mode of gathering (rather than agriculture). Our results therefore support the timing, geography, and cultural practices of a northern origin and are inconsistent with alternative scenarios.

This article is concerned with the syntactic position of negation and how that connects to negation's morphological realization and semantic and pragmatic effects. We focus on the case of contracted negation in English, which may appear both before and after the grammatical subject, and which has been classically analyzed as involving a single syntactic element placed by syntactic rule into distinct linear positions. We argue that this analysis is incorrect and that, in fact, there are multiple negations in English which are not related by a syntactic movement rule. We use the rich and complex morphosyntactic and semantico-pragmatic variation in the behavior of negation in varieties of Scots to motivate the argument and to develop a new approach that comes with both empirical and theoretical advantages.

This article argues that language play is intimately related to linguistic variation and change. Using two corpora of online present-day English, we investigate playful conversion of adjectives into abstract nouns (e.g. made of awesome∅), uncovering consistent rule-governed patterning in the grammatical constraints in spite of this option stemming from deliberate subversion of standard overt suffixation. Building on Haspelmath's (1999) notion of ‘extravagance’ as one of the keys to language change, we account for the systematic patterning of deliberate linguistic subversion by appealing to tension between the need to stand out and the need to remain intelligible. While we do not claim that language play is the only cause of linguistic change, our findings position language play as a constant source of new linguistic variants in very large numbers, a small proportion of which endure as changes. Our conclusion is that language play goes a long way toward accounting for linguistic innovations—with respect to where they come from and why languages change at all.

This study investigates the linguistic outcome of migration-induced dialect contact in contemporary urban settings by tracking the development of the variable deletion of /w/ in Seoul Korean. The results from apparent-time and real-time analyses reveal that the rate of postconsonantal /w/-deletion, which previously had been rising, has begun to fall. In addition, the strong effect of the preceding consonant on this deletion has weakened significantly. Meanwhile, the rate of non-postconsonantal /w/-deletion has continued to rise, and, for younger speakers, non-postconsonantal /w/-deletion now patterns similarly with postconsonantal /w/-deletion. I argue that the dilution of the original pattern of the deletion rule is the result of the interplay between linguistic diffusion induced by a massive influx of migrants into Seoul and phonological restructuring by subsequent generations.

Subjunctives are typically used in intensional, or modal, contexts to talk about possible worlds, but they can also be licensed in negative contexts. While prior work has sought to unify these ‘polarity’ subjunctives with ‘intensional’ subjunctives, in this article I build a case that they represent, in German and Russian at least, a distinct use as negative polarity items (NPIs). This usage fills a gap in the typology of NPIs: unlike known items such as any or ever, which are taken to activate alternatives consisting of individuals, eventualities, or times, these items activate alternatives consisting of worlds.

We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third-person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit associativity, a cluster of interpretive properties that have been argued also to characterize first- and second-person plural pronouns. Building on Kratzer's (2009) and Harbour's (2016) theories of person, I propose a plurality-based semantics for animacy that captures their shared properties. The compositional mechanism underlying this semantics ties person and animacy features to a single syntactic position inside the noun phrase. This enables an understanding of these features' shared relevance to syntactic operations, including those underlying pronoun cliticization. In these Zapotec varieties, it is constrained both by person (in the well-known person-case constraint) and by animacy.

The lexicon divides into parts of speech (or lexical categories), and there are cross-cutting regularities (features). These two dimensions of analysis take us a long way, but several phenomena elude us. For these the term ‘split’ is used extensively (‘case split’, ‘split agreement’, and more), but in confusingly different ways. Yet there is a unifying notion here. I show that a split is an ADDITIONAL PARTITION, whether in the part-of-speech inventory or in the feature system. On this base an elegant typology can be constructed, using minimal machinery. The typology starts from four external relations (government, agreement, selection, and anti-government), and it specifies four types of split within each (sixteen possibilities in all). This typology (i) highlights less familiar splits, from diverse languages, and fits them into the larger picture; (ii) introduces a new relation, anti-government, and documents it; (iii) elucidates the complexities of multiple splits; and (iv) clarifies what exactly is split, which leads to a sharpening of our analyses and applies across different traditions.

Many languages use phonation types for phonemic or allophonic distinctions. This study examines the acoustic structure of the phonetic space for vowel phonations across languages. Our sample of eleven languages includes languages with contrastive modal, breathy, creaky, lax, tense, harsh, and/or pharyngealized phonations, and languages with allophonic nonmodal phonation on particular tones. In compiling and analyzing this sample we address related issues such as contrast vs. allophony, phonetic similarity across languages, and understanding complex contrasts of several multidimensional phonetic categories via data reduction. Based on extensive acoustic analysis, all of the languages' phonations were mapped into a single phonetic space, which exhibits dispersion (languages with more categories use more of the space). The space is largely two-dimensional, with dimensions that can be interpreted phonetically (e.g. dimension 2 is like a traditional breathy-to-creaky continuum) and also can be related back to the acoustic measures that structure them, thus indicating which acoustic measures are most important across languages.

The term linguistic emancipation embraces various interpretations. One relates to occasions where linguists have helped people overcome problems that are attributable to various linguistic calamities. Another pertinent vector relates to methodological innovations that extricate linguistic research from methodological confinement and that embrace new technologies to help advance our collective scientific mission. These alternative perspectives are illustrated here in small measure through studies of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and gender modification in the speech of a trans woman. The legacy of inventive methodological advances in linguistics is celebrated by emphasizing some liberating linguistic research trajectories in which experimental, self-generated data and descriptive investigations of endangered and underrepresented languages or dialects stand side by side, serving a comprehensive linguistic science in which alternative analytical procedures abound in harmonious complementarity.

We present a comparative analysis of English and Hungarian REPRISE FRAGMENTS. We argue that reprise fragments should be afforded the same theoretical treatment as STANDARD (i.e. nonreprise) fragments. Assuming that standard fragmentary answers and questions are remnants of an ellipsis operation that applies to a clause, this entails that reprise fragments are also remnants of clausal ellipsis. We show that the prevailing approach to standard fragments, which assumes that the remnant of ellipsis always undergoes movement (Merchant 2001, 2004), cannot be plausibly extended to explain the crosslinguistic reprise-fragment data. We argue that a theory is required that restricts antecedents to interrogatives and that allows—but crucially does not REQUIRE—movement of the remnant. Under this account, the differences observed between English and Hungarian reprise and standard fragments follow from independent syntactic differences in how standard and reprise questions are formed in these languages. We therefore provide new evidence to support theories of ellipsis identity that state that only questions make for suitable antecedents for clausal ellipsis (so-called Q-EQUIVALENCE approaches) and to support sententialist analyses of clausal ellipsis that permit ellipsis to occur around designated constituents (so-called IN-SITU approaches).

In this article, we analyze the syntax of sentences such as Here is my daughter, which we refer to as presentatives. Presentatives turn out to have a wide range of properties that distinguish them sharply from ordinary declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, and exclamatives. Drawing on recent work on the left periphery, we develop a novel account of their syntactic structure that uses only independently proposed syntactic primitives. We argue that English presentatives involve an ordinary DP combined with two left-peripheral heads, encoding the time and location of the speaker, along with an anaphoric T head and a light verb. The resulting structure is a triple consisting of the speech time, speech location, and an entity denoted by a DP. The overall picture that emerges suggests that presentatives may constitute their own minor clause type, one that we might expect to be widely available crosslinguistically, since it is built from a particular combination of these widely available primitives. A brief survey of presentatives in languages other than English suggests that they are indeed widely available, and our analysis provides an explicit framework for detailed investigations of presentatives in other languages, which may use an overlapping, but not necessarily fully identical, set of primitives.