So-called new englishes, distinct forms of English which have emerged in postcolonial settings and countries around the globe, have typically been regarded individually, as unique varieties shaped by idiosyncratic historical conditions and contact settings, and no coherent theory to account for these processes has been developed so far. This article argues that despite all obvious dissimilarities, a fundamentally uniform developmental process, shaped by consistent sociolinguistic and language-contact conditions, has operated in the individual instances of rerooting the English language in another territory. At the heart of this process there are characteristic stages of identity construction by the groups involved, with similar relationships between the parties in migration contact settings (i.e. the indigenous population and immigrant groups, respectively) having resulted in analogous processes of mutual accommodation and, consequently, similar sociolinguistic and structural outcomes. Outlining a basic developmental scenario, I suggest that speech communities typically undergo five consecutive phases in this process—foundation exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization, and differentiation—and I describe the sociolinguistic characteristics of each one. This framework is then applied to case studies of seven different countries (Fiji, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand) which, I argue, are currently positioned at different points along the developmental cycle.

A number of disparate approaches to language, ranging from cognitive linguistics to stochastic implementations of optimality theory, have challenged the classical distinction between knowledge of language and use of language. Supporters of such approaches point to the functional motivation of grammatical structure, language users’ sensitivity to the frequency of occurrence of grammatical elements, and the great disparity between sentences that grammars generate and speakers’ actual utterances. In this article I defend the classical position, and provide evidence from a number of sources that speakers mentally represent full grammatical structure, however fragmentary their utterances might be. The article also questions the relevance of most corpus-based frequency and probability studies to models of individual grammatical competence. I propose a scenario for the origins and evolution of language that helps to explain why grammar and usage are as distinct as they are.

Despite extensive research over the past several decades, a number of issues concerning the development of AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH (AAVE) remain unresolved. These include the regional accommodation of earlier African American speech; the sources of its current, distinctive structural features; and the past and present trajectory of change. To address these questions, this study examines several longstanding, isolated biracial sociolinguistic situations in the coastal and the Appalachian regions of North Carolina. One of these situations involves a core community of African Americans, whereas two of the situations involve case studies of isolated speakers. A comparison of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for speakers representing different generations of African Americans and baseline European American speakers suggests that extensive accommodation to localized dialects characterized earlier African American speech. At the same time, the maintenance of an exclusive subset of dialect features suggests persistent substrate influence and long-term ethnolinguistic distinctiveness along with local dialect accommodation. Younger African Americans in some historically isolated rural regions appear to be moving away from the localized dialects toward a more generalized AAVE norm.

Among the most fascinating data for phonology are those showing how speakers incorporate new words and foreign words into their language system, since these data provide cues to the actual principles underlying language. In this article, we address how speakers deal with neutralized obstruents in new words. We formulate four hypotheses and test them on the basis of Dutch word-final obstruents, which are neutral for [voice]. Our experiments show that speakers predict the characteristics of neutralized segments on the basis of phonologically similar morphemes stored in the mental lexicon. This effect of the similar morphemes can be modeled in several ways. We compare five models, among them stochastic optimality theory and analogical modeling of language; all perform approximately equally well, but they differ in their complexity, with analogical modeling of language providing the most economical explanation.

A central issue in the theory of clause types is whether force is represented in the syntax. Based on data from English, Italian, and Paduan, we examine this question focusing on a less well-studied clause type, exclamatives. We argue that there is no particular element in syntax responsible for introducing force. Rather, there are two fundamental syntactic components which identify a clause as exclamative, a factive and a wh-operator. These are crucial because they are responsible for two fundamental semantic properties characteristic of exclamatives, namely that they are factive and denote a set of alternative propositions. The force of exclamatives, which we characterize as widening, is derived indirectly, based on the semantic properties.

Narrative production experiments reveal systematic crosslinguistic differences in the preferred ratio of overt to possible argument NPs (called here the referential density value) between three pro-drop languages of the Himalayas (Belhare, Maithili, Nepali). These differences can be accounted for by the degree to which morphosyntactic features of NPs, especially case features, are relevant for syntactic processing. This degree is the higher the more there are pivots or controllers of syntactic rules (e.g. verb agreement) that are defined not only on the basis of a thematic role hierarchy but also by a case feature (as when, for example, verb agreement is blocked by quirky case on the thematically highest argument).

How different is the phonology and morphology of nontemplatic (concatenative) word formation from that of templatic (nonconcatenative) word formation? In this article, I focus on the Arabic verbal system, the prototypical example of templatic morphology, with the aim of deriving some of its distinctly special traits from basic principles. The key novel aspect of the approach is its focus on paradigms. The main result is that the paradigm coupled with general phonotactic constraints sets limits on the theoretically possible diversity of stems within that paradigm. As a consequence of its generality, the proposed approach obviates a range of highly specific tools and postulates. Broader implications are developed for the phonological and morphological prerequisites of templatic (nonconcatenative) word formation.

Are syntactic choices influenced by the need to avoid ambiguity? Studies of the use of that with English embedded clauses have reached negative conclusions on this point. It is argued here that these conclusions may be premature. Statistical analysis of another phenomenon of English—use of the optional relative pronoun or complementizer with object relative clauses—in written text suggests that both ambiguity avoidance and anaphoricity contribute to syntactic choices. Ambiguity avoidance is shown to operate at a ‘strategic’ level, influenced by general considerations of syntactic structure, but not by lexical distinctions or pragmatic factors.

This article presents an analysis of the conjugational systems of West Germanic that highlights the central role of two basic stem types and suggests some consequences for the description of inflectional systems in general. The analyses distinguish morphomic stems, which underlie morphosyntactically distinct word forms, from inflectional stems, which realize tense and mood features and provide the input to regular agreement rules. It is argued that the recognition of these stem types simplifies the description of West Germanic conjugations, supports a general realization-based approach, and suggests a reinterpretation of current realizational models.

The semantics of simple (i.e. two-term) systems of demonstratives have in general hitherto been treated as inherently spatial and as marking a symmetrical opposition of distance (‘proximal’ versus 'distal'), assuming the speaker as a point of origin. More complex systems are known to add further distinctions, such as visibility or elevation, but are assumed to build on basic distinctions of distance. Despite their inherently context-dependent nature, little previous work has based the analysis of demonstratives on evidence of their use in real interactional situations. In this article, video recordings of spontaneous interaction among speakers of Lao (Southwestern Tai, Laos) are examined in an analysis of the two Lao demonstrative determiners nii4 and nan4. A hypothesis of minimal encoded semantics is tested against rich contextual information, and the hypothesis is shown to be consistent with the data. Encoded conventional meanings must be kept distinct from contingent contextual information and context-dependent pragmatic implicatures. Based on examples of the two Lao demonstrative determiners in exophoric uses, the following claims are made. The term nii4 is a semantically general demonstrative, lacking specification of any spatial property (such as location or distance). The term nan4 specifies that the referent is 'not here' (encoding ‘location’ but not 'distance'). Anchoring the semantic specification in a deictic primitive 'here' allows a strictly discrete intensional distinction to be mapped onto an extensional range of endless elasticity. A common ‘proximal’ spatial interpretation for the semantically more general term nii4 arises from the paradigmatic opposition of the two demonstrative determiners. This kind of analysis suggests a reappraisal of our general understanding of the semantics of demonstrative systems universally. To investigate the question in sufficient detail, however, rich contextual data (preferably collected on video) is necessary.

We present and analyze the results of a connectionist simulation which modeled the reanalysis of the Latin gender system in its transition to Old French. The network reanalysis was based solely on formal cues (word endings and analogy with other words) and on frequency. The results are in accordance with the historical data, and certain errors in simulations are also amenable to principled explanations. Simulations improve dramatically when the networks incorporate information about the Celtic substrate which presumably interfered with gender assignment in Gallo-Romance. This finding has a bearing on issues of gender assignment and processing in bilinguals. Simulations also improve with the introduction of more elaborate recurrent networks, which suggests implications for future connectionist modeling. In particular, the results could be applied to the modeling of gender change in other Romance languages and to the modeling of comparative Romance gender systems. The method proposed here would be advantageous for such simulations since it allows the modeler to take into account a rich variety of facts reflecting actual linguistic history.

Most approaches to spatial language have assumed that the simplest spatial notions are (after Piaget) topological and universal (containment, contiguity, proximity, support, represented as semantic primitives such as in, on, under, etc.). These concepts would be coded directly in language, above all in small closed classes such as adpositions—thus providing a striking example of semantic categories as language-specific projections of universal conceptual notions. This idea, if correct, should have as a consequence that the semantic categories instantiated in spatial adpositions should be essentially uniform crosslinguistically. This article attempts to verify this possibility by comparing the semantics of spatial adpositions in nine unrelated languages, with the help of a standard elicitation procedure, thus producing a preliminary semantic typology of spatial adpositional systems. The differences between the languages turn out to be so significant as to be incompatible with stronger versions of the universal conceptual categories hypothesis. Rather, the language-specific spatial adposition meanings seem to emerge as compact subsets of an underlying semantic space, with certain areas being statistical attractors or foci. Moreover, a comparison of systems with different degrees of complexity suggests the possibility of positing implicational hierarchies for spatial adpositions. But such hierarchies need to be treated as successive divisions of semantic space, as in recent treatments of basic color terms. This type of analysis appears to be a promising approach for future work in semantic typology.

We present and discuss the results of a sociolinguistic historical study of variable deletion of the preverbal negative particle ne ‘not’, a phenomenon observable in many contemporary varieties of spoken French, but which has not yet made its way into standard written French. Our study's two main goals are (i) to contribute to the resolution of a debate over the point in time when ne deletion became a prevalent feature of nonstandard spoken French, and (ii) to assess the role of the affixal status of subject clitic pronouns in the rise of ne deletion.

Our study is based on the analysis of an extensive database comprising a wide range of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century sources providing information on the typical features of nonstandard spoken European and Quebec French. It reveals that ne deletion became widespread in nonstandard spoken French only in the nineteenth century and leads us to hypothesize that the affixal status of subject clitic pronouns contributed to the rise of ne deletion.

Our intent here, in the face of a persistent tradition of studying control in purely syntactic terms, is to reiterate the fundamental importance of semantics in the control problem, and to articulate some of the semantic factors more precisely than has heretofore been possible. After presenting familiar obstacles to a theory of control based on syntactic binding, we make a three-way distinction between ‘unique control’ (usually called obligatory control), ‘free control’, and ‘nearly free control’ (the last two falling under traditional nonobligatory control). We show that in a very large class of cases of unique control, the controlled vp denotes an action and the controller is the character who has the onus for that action. This analysis is applied to four major classes of control verbs and their nominals, as well as a class of adjectives, showing that semantic role reliably identifies the controller, and syntactic position does not. Through a formalization in terms of conceptual structure, we begin to be able to explain much of control directly from the lexical decomposition of the matrix verb. Several classes of exceptions to the conditions on unique control are treated as cases of coercion, in which extra conventionalized semantic material is added that is not present in syntax.