Paraguayan Guaraní has nominal markers that affect the temporal interpretation of the noun phrase they attach to. On the basis of data collected during recent fieldwork in Paraguay, I explore in this article the lexical semantic, semantic, and discourse properties of these nominal temporal markers and develop a semantic analysis that accounts for their meaning and use. I then address the claim (made e.g. in Nordlinger & Sadler 2004) that such markers are nominal past and future tenses. A comparison of the properties of verbal temporal markers to those of the Guaraní nominal markers reveals that the Guaraní nominal markers share few of the properties of verbal tenses and hence should not be called nominal tenses. I conclude by addressing the implications of these findings for theories of temporality.

We address the articulation between language change in the historical sense and language change as experienced by individual speakers through a trend and panel study of the change from apical to dorsal /r/ in Montreal French. The community as a whole rapidly advanced its use of dorsal [R]. Most individual speakers followed across time were stable after the critical period, with phonological patterns set by the end of adolescence. A sizeable minority, however, made substantial changes. The window of opportunity for linguistic modification in later life may be expanded with rapid change in progress when linguistic variables take on social significance.

We present an experimental investigation of the role of resumptive pronouns. We investigate object extraction in WH-questions for a range of syntactic configurations (nonislands, weak islands, strong islands) and for multiple levels of embedding (single, double, and triple). In order to establish the crosslinguistic properties of resumption, parallel experiments were conducted in three languages, viz. English, Greek, and German. Three main experimental results are reported. First, resumption does not remedy island violations: resumptive pronominals are at most as acceptable as gaps, but not more acceptable. This result disconfirms claims in the literature that resumptives can ‘save’ island violations. Second, embedding reduces acceptability even in extraction out of nonislands and declaratives, structures standardly assumed to be fully grammatical. Third, nonislands and weak islands pattern together and contrast with strong islands in terms of the effect of resumption and embedding. Our experimental findings show a remarkable consistency across the three languages we investigate; crosslinguistic variation appears confined to quantitative differences in crosslinguistically identical principles. We argue that these experimental results can be explained by the interaction of grammatical principles with resource limitations of the human parser. In particular, extraction from nonislands and weak islands imposes increased demands on the computational resources of the parser. We extend Gibson's (1998) syntactic prediction locality theory in order to formalize this intuition and account for the processing complexity of A-bar dependencies.

This short report investigates the relationship between population size and phoneme inventory size, and finds a surprisingly robust correlation between the two. The more speakers a language has, the bigger its phoneme inventory is likely to be. We show that this holds for both vowel inventories and consonant inventories. It is not an artifact of language family.

The Matses language of the Panoan family, spoken in Amazonian Peru and Brazil, has one of the most intricate evidential systems ever described, requiring speakers to precisely and explicitly code their source of information every time they report a past event. In a typologically unique inflectional configuration that I call DOUBLE TENSE the speakers specify both (i) how long ago an inferred event happened and (ii) how long ago the evidence upon which the inference was made was encountered. This article explores in detail the Matses evidential system, focusing on several novel patterns relevant to the typological study of evidentiality and providing social and historical perspectives.

The sounds that distinguish words in the world's languages can be described in terms of properties that are often called (distinctive) features. The best-known attempts to describe sounds in this way are the acoustic features of Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1952) and the innate cognitive abilities described by the feature theory of Chomsky and Halle (1968). This article provides a more comprehensive answer to the problem of specifying contrasting segments, but one that still leaves some questions open. It also considers the constraints on possible combinations of features, using a development of the notion of a feature hierarchy suggested by Clements (1985).

This short report presents results from a replication of Labov's study of language variation and language change in progress on Martha's Vineyard (MV). The original paper was revolutionary in many respects: it established that the relationship between social and linguistic variables could be systematically studied, and put forward the construct of apparent time as a means of inferring diachronic change in progress based on synchronic patterns. By drawing on Labov's methods for a restudy of MV forty years later, we establish (i) the validity of apparent-time inferencing, and (ii) the robustness of social indexing for the (ay) and (aw) variables on MV. The results strengthen both methodological and theoretical principles that have become central to (socio)linguistics.