This article looks at a hitherto unnoticed series of parallels between Middle English (ME) and Medieval Spanish (MS). In the first place, while both appear to have been essentially VO languages, they allow identical classes of object to move leftward over the verb. In ME, movement is normally to a position between the auxiliary and the main verb, whereas in MS the movement is normally to the left of the auxiliary, if one is present. Second, both languages allowed the fronting of nonfinite verb forms. We argue that the parallels in question are the result of analogous processes of reanalysis operating in the two languages at earlier periods in their history. Both MS and ME descend from languages that tended toward O-V(-Aux) order. According to our analysis, when the structural mechanism giving rise to the latter order was lost, certain instances of OV ordering were nevertheless able to survive in reanalyzed form. The ‘low’ pattern of reanalysis in ME versus the ‘high’ pattern observable in MS can then be attributed to the blocking effect of the subject in Spec-TP in English and its absence in the Spanish case (where the subject is either null or not in spec-TP). As regards nonfinite fronting, this too can be regarded as a relic of the older word order. For MS we posit an analogous reanalysis to that observed for relic OV ordering, whereas for ME the evidence points toward an undisturbed continuation of the earlier V-Aux pattern. This difference between MS and ME can again be attributed to the absence versus presence of a spec-TP subject.

Actualization is traditionally seen as the process following syntactic reanalysis whereby an item’s new syntactic status manifests itself in new syntactic behavior. The process is gradual in that some new uses of the reanalyzed item appear earlier or more readily than others. This article accounts for the order in which new uses appear during actualization. Five corpus-based case studies are presented involving reanalysis and actualization in different functional domains of grammar. These include the reanalysis of all but, far from, and Dutch verre van to adverbial downtoners, and the reanalysis of fan and key from nouns to adjectives. It is shown that actualization proceeds from one environment to another on the basis of similarity relations between environments. The similarity relations may involve broad syntactic generalizations but also superficial similarities to existing patterns, including even an item’s uses prior to reanalysis. Because actualization is guided by local and global analogies to existing uses, one determinant of the course of actualization is the locus of reanalysis, as it defines the first uses of an item under change, on which subsequent uses can be modeled. It also follows that the course of actualization is both item-specific and language-specific. The findings presented challenge the concept of reanalysis, which appears less abrupt than usually assumed. Further, it is argued that the findings fit best with usage-based models of language, which attribute a prominent role to similarity-based organization in grammar, and in which an item’s use can be subject to multiple, potentially conflicting generalizations.

In this discussion note we argue against the findings presented in Hay & Bauer 2007, which show a positive correlation between population size and phoneme inventory size. We argue that the positive correlation is an artifact of the authors’ statistical technique and biased data set. Using a hierarchical mixed model to account for genealogical relatedness of languages, and a much larger and more diverse sample of the world’s languages, we find little support for population size as an explanatory predictor of phoneme inventory size once the genealogical relatedness of languages is accounted for.

Sprouse, Wagers, and Phillips (2012) carried out two experiments in which they measured individual differences in memory to test processing accounts of island effects. They found that these individual differences failed to predict the magnitude of island effects, and they construe these findings as counterevidence to processing-based accounts of island effects. Here, we take up several problems with their methods, their findings, and their conclusions.

First, the arguments against processing accounts are based on null results using tasks that may be ineffective or inappropriate measures of working memory (the n-back and serial-recall tasks). The authors provide no evidence that these two measures predict judgments for other constructions that are difficult to process and yet are clearly grammatical. They assume that other measures of working memory would have yielded the same result, but provide no justification that they should. We further show that whether a working-memory measure relates to judgments of grammatical, hard-to-process sentences depends on how difficult the sentences are. In this light, the stimuli used by the authors present processing difficulties other than the island violations under investigation and may have been particularly hard to process. Second, the Sprouse et al. results are statistically in line with the hypothesis that island sensitivity varies with working memory. Three out of the four island types in their experiment 1 show a significant relation between memory scores and island sensitivity, but the authors discount these findings on the grounds that the variance accounted for is too small to have much import. This interpretation, however, runs counter to standard practices in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and psychology.