A widespread assumption in the language contact literature is that affixes are never borrowed directly, but only indirectly, that is, as part of complex loanwords. From such complex loanwords, affixes may eventually spread to native stems, creating hybrid formations, in a process of language-internal analogical extension. Direct borrowing is the extraction of an affix based on knowledge of the donor language, without the mediation of complex loanwords within the recipient language. This article suggests that direct borrowing can also be the only or primary process leading to productive loan affixes. Criteria are provided to assess instances of direct and indirect borrowing on the basis of the distribution of borrowed affixes across complex loanwords and hybrid formations. These are applied to corpora of various languages. A scale of directness of affix borrowing is proposed, based on the extent to which speakers of the recipient language rely (i) on their knowledge of the donor language (direct borrowing) and (ii) on complex loanwords within their native language (indirect borrowing).

The relevance of the concepts of local syntactic selection and constraints on locally selected dependents in modeling how arguments are syntactically realized has been virtually unchallenged and is assumed to be universal. In this article, we examine more closely these assumptions and ask whether there is anything invariant in the realization of arguments. We argue that the facts of Oneida, and Iroquoian in general, suggest the answer to this question is No. There is no use in Oneida for local selection of phrases realizing semantic arguments (and lexical records of this selection), and words are, as a result, functionally complete. We also argue that there is no use for a level of argument structure or any analogous notion in Oneida. The kinds of processes that justify positing such a level are systematically absent. The facts of Oneida suggest that there is less universality in the syntax/semantics interface (particularly when it comes to the realization of semantic arguments) than is typically assumed and that languages may vary widely in the way semantics is mapped onto syntax. We end with a formal model of the relevant fragment of Oneida within head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG).

Object markers alternate between a prefix and a suffix position in the Thetogovela dialect of Moro, an underdocumented Kordofanian language of Sudan. Although the alternation appears to depend on the morphosyntactic category of verb forms, we show that it actually follows from the tonal properties of these verb forms. Verb stems that are usually marked with a default, phonologically predictable leftmost high tone select prefix object markers. The high-toned prefix object marker appears inside the stem, and its high tone serves as the default tone of the stem, obviating the need for inserted high tone. Verb stems that impose other tone patterns, either all high or all low, select suffix object markers, a fact that we attribute to the incompatibility of high-toned prefix object markers with all-high and all-low tone patterns. The data are analyzed as a case of phonology conditioning prefix placement and overriding standard suffix position. Although such phonologically determined mobile affixes are rare in the world’s languages, the Moro case provides a new example of affix mobility based on a novel property, tone, and it underscores the need to incorporate such cases into the architecture of grammatical systems.

This article proposes that patterns of phonological contrast should be added to the list of factors that influence sound change. It adopts a hierarchically determined model of contrast that allows for a constrained degree of crosslinguistic variation in contrastive feature specifications. The predictions of this model are tested against a database comprising the set of vowel changes in the Al-gonquian languages. The model reveals striking commonalities in the underlying sources of these changes and straightforwardly predicts the previously unrecognized patterning of the languages into two groups: (i) those in which */ε/tends to merge with */i/and palatalization is triggered by */i/, and (ii) those in which */ε/tends to merge with */a/and palatalization is triggered by */ε/. In addition to providing a new argument for the relevance of contrast to phonology, the model also gives us a way to import traditional philological findings into a framework that brings them to bear on theoretical questions.

Narrators like to highlight important events in their stories. In some languages, they may shift to first- or second-person pronouns to refer to third-person referents in order to do so. Such pronoun shifts show functional parallels with tense shifts like the historical present, as both highlight events through shifts in deictic categories. Longacre (1983:138-39) discusses the parallels between person and tense shifts in his account of narrative peak, that is, the formal marking of important narrative events. Labov (1972) analyzes similar strategies as internal evaluations. Person shifts constitute a phenomenon of the discourse-syntax interface and present a clear case of discourse structure influencing grammar. Both person shifts themselves and their motivation in narrative structure have been little investigated. The article reviews person shifts in a number of languages reported in the literature and analyzes in detail the characteristics of this discourse strategy in Saliba-Logea, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. The study contributes to the growing body of research on pronouns and person markers, and on referring expressions more generally, by adding a new angle of investigation. Previous studies have tended to focus on the morphosyntactic choices of referring expressions and their motivations, that is, on the choices between lexical nouns, free vs. bound pronouns, and so forth. The present study focuses on the paradigmatic choices between different person forms within one and the same morphosyntactic expression type. In doing so it offers a new perspective on pronoun choice and the factors influencing it crosslinguistically. While some types of person shift appear to be rare, overall, the strategy of person shift at narrative peak seems to constitute a solid crosslinguistic phenomenon.

Nonadjacent dependencies are an important part of the structure of language. While the majority of syntactic and phonological processes occur at a local domain, there are several processes that appear to apply at a distance, posing a challenge for theories of linguistic structure. This article addresses one of the most common nonadjacent phenomena in phonology: transparent vowels in vowel harmony. Vowel harmony occurs when adjacent vowels are required to share the same phonological feature value (e.g. V+f C V+f). However, transparent vowels create a second-order nonadjacent pattern because agreement between two vowels can ‘skip’ the transparent neutral vowel in addition to consonants (e.g. V+f C VlF C V+f). Adults are shown to display initial learning biases against second-order nonadjacency in experiments that use an artificial grammar learning paradigm. Experiments 1-3 show that adult learners fail to learn the second-order long-distance dependency created by the transparent vowel (as compared to a control condition). In experiments 4-5, training in terms of overall exposure as well as the frequency of relevant transparent items was increased. With adequate exposure, learners reliably generalize to novel words containing transparent vowels. The experiments suggest that learners are sensitive to the structure of phonological representations, even when learning occurs at a relatively rapid pace.

This article discusses the effects of variation in the meaning of property concept (PC) lexemes (Dixon 1982) on the form of predicative and comparative constructions. We demonstrate the existence of two kinds of PC lexeme, which differ systematically in how they participate in constructions expressing the truth conditions of PC predication. The first kind of lexeme is used in canonical predicative constructions, the other in predicative constructions that invoke possessive morphology or syntax. The differences between the two classes are observable both within a single language and crosslinguistically. The article argues that the morphosyntactic differences in the behavior of the two lexeme types are predictable from their lexical semantics. Specifically, we argue that some PC lexemes denote mass substances (in a technical sense) and therefore require possessive semantics to achieve the relevant truth conditions. A semantic theory for substancedenoting lexemes is developed, and a compositional analysis of the relevant constructions is presented for Ulwa, an endangered Misumalpan language of Nicaragua. We argue that assuming semantic variation is necessary, since the observed generalizations cannot be captured by extending existing semantic analyses of gradable adjectives to all PC lexemes.

I examine the behavior of rare and other frequency adjectives in the tough-construction (TC). Due to the effects of a heretofore overlooked semantic selectional restriction, such adjectives have not generally been recognized as grammatical in the TC. I show here that they do occur grammatically in this construction when the relevant selectional restriction is satisfied. Specifically, as it does in non-TC sentences, rare in the TC requires that its subject be kind-denoting, a requirement not imposed on the embedded-clause gap position whose reference the TC matrix subject controls. In this, TCs with rare exemplify a previously unattested selectional and thematic asymmetry in the construction. On their face, the facts appear to argue strongly in favor of treating the rare-TC matrix subject as a thematic argument of the TC matrix predicate, an intriguing and challenging prospect given the fact that such an analysis has been roundly (though not universally) rejected for canonical TCs. Instead, I take the prima facie counterintuitive position that the rare-TC matrix subject is not a thematic argument of the TC matrix predicate; I argue that rare-TCs are thematically and syntactically identical to canonical TCs in this respect. I propose that the kind-denotation requirement for rare-TC matrix subjects is imposed indirectly, through the interaction of a selectional restriction on the infinitival argument of rare and the Agree calculus (Chomsky 2000, 2001) that identifies the TC matrix subject with the embedded gap position whose reference it controls (Rezac 2004, 2006). Beyond its contribution to our theoretical understanding of the perennially thorny TC, the present study constitutes, to the best of my knowledge, the first detailed empirical investigation of the behavior of adjectives like rare in the TC.

Alternation among restrictive relativizers in written Standard English is undergoing a massive shift from which to that. In corpora of written-edited-published British and American English covering the period from 1961-1992, American English spearheads this change. We study 16,868 restrictive relative clauses with inanimate antecedents from the Brown quartet of corpora. Predictors include additional areas of variation regulated by prescriptivism. We show that: (i) relativizer deletion follows different constraints from the selection of either that or which; (ii) this change is a case of institutionally backed colloquialization-cum-Americanization; and (iii) uptake of the precept correlates with avoidance of the passive voice at the text level but not with other prescriptive rules.

This article provides an account of the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles in responses, starting with yes and no in English, and then extending the coverage to their crosslinguistic kin. Polarity particles are used in responses to both declarative and interrogative sentences, and thus provide a window onto the semantics and discourse effects of such sentences. We argue that understanding the distribution and interpretation of polarity particles requires a characterization of declaratives and interrogatives that captures a series of challenging similarities and differences across these two sentence types. To meet this challenge we combine and extend insights from inquisitive semantics, dynamic semantics, and commitment-based models of discourse. We then provide a full account of the English data that leads to a typology of polarity particles and a series of crosslinguistic predictions. These predictions are checked against data from Romanian, Hungarian, French, and German, languages that contrast with English in that they have ternary polarity particle systems, and contrast with one another in further subtle ways.

Erosion of DIFFERENTIAL OBJECT MARKING (DOM)—the overt morphological marking of animate direct objects—has been observed in Spanish heritage speakers who are second-generation immigrants in the United States (Montrul 2004, Montrul & Bowles 2009). We investigated whether DOM is similarly vulnerable in heritage speakers of Hindi and Romanian, two other languages that also exhibit DOM, as well as in first-generation immigrants, adults who are presumably the main source of input to heritage speakers. We report the results of three experimental studies testing acceptability of DOM through a bimodal judgment task in first- and second-generation Spanish, Hindi, and Romanian speakers in the US and native speakers in Mexico, India, and Romania matched for age and socioeconomic status. Our results show structural changes with DOM in all of the heritage speaker groups to different degrees. Acceptance of nontarget DOM omission was more extensive in Spanish than in Hindi and Romanian. First-generation Hindi and Romanian immigrants did not differ in their grammatical proficiency and acceptance of DOM omission from the Hindi and Romanian speakers tested in India and in Romania. However, the first-generation Mexican immigrants displayed similar performance to the Spanish heritage speakers, suggesting that Spanish DOM is prone to L1 attrition in the first generation as well. We discuss linguistic and experiential factors relevant to the three languages and the three immigrant communities to explain these findings.

In the verb-initial language Chamorro, an Austronesian language of the Mariana Islands, WH-dependencies exhibit a special verbal inflection known as wh-agreement: verbs along the path of the wh-dependency are inflected for the grammatical relation of the gap and the intermediate landing sites of the filler. Two on-line comprehension experiments conducted in the Northern Mariana Islands reveal that the morphological paradigm of wh-agreement affects the timing of dependency formation and interpretation in this language. Overt wh-agreement facilitates the formation of a WH-dependency. When overt WH-agreement could occur but does not, however, its absence delays and attenuates WH-dependency formation. In short, morphological information exerts a powerful influence on the unfolding parse, one that has temporal priority over syntactic information, such as word order, and semantic information, such as argument structure.

We argue that DISTRIBUTIONAL MODIFICATION is one strategy that language affords for composing propositions about the quantity of entities that participate in a given situation. Distributional modifiers apply to kind descriptions, contributing the entailment that the kind is instantiated by a SET of tokens with a particular distribution. As a case study, we analyze frequency adjectives (FAs, e.g. occasional). We show that previous work, including our own, has suffered for focusing on the paraphrases of FAs rather than on their morphosyntax. We argue for two subclasses of FAs: those that are intersective modifiers sortally restricted to events, and those that are not. The study reinforces two novel theoretical claims in Gehrke & McNally 2011: sometimes kinds are realized by sets of tokens, rather than individual tokens; and some clauses constitute descriptions of EVENT KINDS, rather than EVENT TOKENS.

The spatial affordances of the visual modality give rise to a high degree of similarity between sign languages in the spatial domain. This stands in contrast to the vast structural and semantic diversity in linguistic encoding of space found in spoken languages. However, the possibility and nature of linguistic diversity in spatial encoding in sign languages has not been rigorously investigated by systematic crosslinguistic comparison. Here, we compare locative expression in two unrelated sign languages, Turkish Sign Language (Türk İşaret Dili, TİD) and German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS), focusing on the expression of FIGURE-GROUND (e.g. cup on table) and FIGURE-FIGURE (e.g. cup next to cup) relationships in a discourse context. In addition to similarities, we report qualitative and quantitative differences between the sign languages in the formal devices used (i.e. unimanual vs. bimanual; simultaneous vs. sequential) and in the degree of iconicity of the spatial devices. Our results suggest that sign languages may display more diversity in the spatial domain than has been previously assumed, and in a way more comparable with the diversity found in spoken languages. The study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of how space gets encoded in language.

We argue for an extension of the proposal that grammars are in part shaped by processing systems. Hawkins (2014) and others who have advanced this idea focus primarily on parsing. Our extension focuses on production, and we use that to explore explanations for certain subject/object asymmetries in extraction structures. The phenomenon we examine, which we term the mirror asymmetry, runs in opposite directions for within-clause and across-clause (long-distance) extraction, showing a preference for subject extraction in the former and for object extraction in the latter. We review several types of evidence suggesting that the mirror asymmetry and related phenomena are best explained by an account of the formation of grammars that assigns an important role to properties of sentence planning in production.

What motivates a fluent bilingual speaker to switch languages within a single utterance? We propose a novel discourse-functional motivation: less predictable, high information-content meanings are encoded in one language, and more predictable, lower information-content meanings are encoded in another language. Switches to a speaker's less frequently used, and hence more salient, language offer a distinct encoding that highlights information-rich material that comprehenders should attend to especially carefully. Using a corpus of natural Czech-English bilingual discourse, we test this hypothesis against an extensive set of control factors from sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and discourse-functional lines of research using mixed-effects logistic regression, in the first such quantitative multifactorial investigation of code-switching in discourse. We find, using a Shannon guessing game to quantify predictability of meanings in conversation, that words with difficult-to-guess meanings are indeed more likely to be code-switch sites, and that this is in fact one of the most highly explanatory factors in predicting the occurrence of code-switching in our data. We argue that choice of language thus serves as a formal marker of information content in discourse, along with familiar means such as prosody and syntax. We further argue for the utility of rigorous, multifactorial approaches to sociolinguistic speaker-choice phenomena in natural conversation.

A key notion in understanding language is ‘possible word (lexeme)’. While there are lexemes that are internally homogeneous and externally consistent, we find others with splits in their internal structure (morphological paradigm) and inconsistencies in their external behavior (syntactic requirements). I first explore the characteristics of the most straightforward lexemes, in order to establish a point in the theoretical space from which we can calibrate the real examples we find. I then schematize the interesting phenomena that deviate from this idealization, including suppletion, syncretism, deponency, and defectiveness. Next I analyze the different ways in which lexemes are ‘split’ by such phenomena. I set out a typology of possible splits, along four dimensions: splits that are (i) based on the composition/feature signature of the paradigm versus those based solely on morphological form; (ii) motivated (following a boundary motivated from outside the paradigm) versus purely morphology-internal (‘morphomic’); (iii) regular (extending across the lexicon) versus irregular (lexically specified); (iv) externally relevant versus irrelevant: we expect splits to be internal to the lexeme, but some have external relevance (they require different syntactic behaviors).

I identify instances of these four dimensions separately: they are orthogonal, and therefore not dependent on each other. Their interaction gives a substantial typology, and it proves to be surprisingly complete: the possibilities specified are all attested. The typology also allows for the unexpected patterns of behavior to overlap in particular lexemes, producing some remarkable examples. Such examples show that the notion ‘possible word’ is more challenging than many linguists have realized.

We reexamine the status of the coordinate structure constraint (CSC; Ross 1967) by drawing on evidence from Japanese and Korean. Contrary to the standard view that the CSC is a syntactic constraint, the empirical patterns from the two languages show that it should instead be viewed as a pragmatic principle. We propose a pragmatic analysis by building on and extending a previous proposal by Kehler (2002). Examining the Japanese and Korean data turns out to be vital in the comparison of the syntactic and pragmatic approaches, since the syntactic differences between the relevant constructions in the two languages and their counterparts in English crucially distinguish the predictions of the two approaches.

This article presents and discusses evidence that genitive and dative objects regularly become nominative in Ancient Greek passives of monotransitives and ditransitives. This is a typologically and theoretically significant state of affairs for two reasons. (i) As is well known, nonaccusative objects are, in many languages, not allowed to enter into Case alternations, a fact that has been accounted for in the government-binding/principles-and-parameters literature on the basis of the assumption that nonaccusative objects—prototypically datives—bear inherent, lexical, or quirky Case. By this reasoning, Ancient Greek genitives and datives must be concluded to have structural Case. (ii) Even in languages where dative-nominative (DAT-NOM) alternations do obtain, they are often limited to ditransitives, a fact that can been taken to suggest that dative qualifies as structural Case only in ditransitives. A language like Ancient Greek, which allows genitive and dative objects to become nominative in all passives (monotransitives and ditransitives), shows that it is, in principle, possible to have a linguistic system where genitive and dative qualify as structural Cases in both monotransitives and ditransitives. Case theories must be designed in such a way as to allow for this option. We argue for an analysis of Case alternations that combines the view that alternating datives and genitives enter the formal operation Agree with a morphological case approach to the distribution of overt case morphology. We furthermore compare Ancient Greek DAT-NOM and genitive-nominative (GEN-NOM) alternations in passives to Icelandic DAT-NOM and GEN-NOM alternations in middles, pointing to a number of interesting differences in the two types of alternations that depend on (i) the types of nonaccusative arguments entering Agree, (ii) the verbal head (Voice or v) entering Agree with nonaccusative objects, and (iii) the rules of dependent case assignment in connection to the role of nominative in the two languages.