This list acknowledges recent works (except offprints of single articles) that appear to bear on the scientific study of language. The receipt of individual books cannot be separately acknowledged and no book can be returned to the publisher. Note especially that by accepting a book the Editor implies no promise that it will be reviewed in this journal. Reviews are printed as circumstances permit.

Recent research has shed new light on the role and characteristics of prosodic domains, including segmental and tonal feet, in an array of languages. This research extends to African languages, but much work remains to be done. Tonal African languages are particularly problematic, as correlates of stress or metrical prominence are often not well defined or are absent altogether. In addition, descriptive work may omit details of the structure and function of prosodic domains. An exception to this is Bambara, where research implicates a pivotal role for foot structure in segmental and tonal processes. These processes reference a foot domain; however, there are conflicting accounts of certain defining characteristics of its structure. This article aims to challenge two long-held claims about Bambara prosodic structure. The data presented support a claim that all Bambara feet are uniformly trochaic and parsed from left to right in all instances. I intend to illustrate that Bambara segmental and tonal feet are a single, structurally unified prosodic entity.

[The following is a slightly modified version of the annual report about Language for 2014 submitted by the editor, Greg Carlson, to the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America for its consideration at its January meeting.]

Classical Sanskrit is well known for making extensive use of compounding. I argue, within a lexicalist framework, that the major rules of compounding in Sanskrit can be most appropriately characterized in syntactic, not morphological, terms. That is, Classical Sanskrit ‘compounds’ are in fact very often syntactic phrases. The syntactic analysis proposed captures the fact that compound formation is closer to a morphological process than other aspects of syntax, and so permits some acknowledgment of the gradient nature of the word-phrase divide, even within a strictly lexicalist theory.

In this response to commentators on our target article ‘Child language acquisition: Why universal grammar doesn't help’, we argue that the fatal flaw in most UG-based approaches to acquisition is their focus on describing the adult end-state in terms of a particular linguistic formalism. As a consequence, such accounts typically neglect to link acquisition to the language that the learner actually hears, instead assuming that she is able, by means usually unspecified, to perceive her input in terms of high-level theoretical abstractions.

This list acknowledges recent works (except offprints of single articles) that appear to bear on the scientific study of language. The receipt of individual books cannot be separately acknowledged and no book can be returned to the publisher. Note especially that by accepting a book the Editor implies no promise that it will be reviewed in this journal. Reviews are printed as circumstances permit.

Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (2014; AP&L) identify three problems with universal grammar (UG), namely: linking, data coverage, and redundancy, and argue for an alternative approach to child language acquisition. Behme (2014) aims to make a stronger case against UG. She attempts to show, by combining AP&L’s arguments with evidence from developmental psychology and formal linguistics, that UG should be rejected. In this commentary, I argue that Behme’s article does not present strong enough evidence to reject UG. Although Behme has pointed out some problems for UG theorists to consider, she fails to pinpoint where UG has really gone wrong. I then try to make clear what the fatal problem with UG is.

Subjacency characterizes a set of phenomena whose acquisition must be explained by any proposal for human language learning. We take a broader perspective than previous responses to Ambridge, Pine, and Lieven (2014), arguing that they have not shown that this UG principle is ‘redundant’ because their proposed alternative does not take into account firmly established constraints on A-bar dependencies. We illustrate a range of challenges for theories hoping to reduce subjacency to independently motivated, primarily nonsyntactic constraints: they must include a way to account for attested crosslinguistic variation in island effects, the cross-construction generality of island effects, and the effects of resumption and of WH-in-situ on island behavior.