This article investigates how children learn an infinitely expanding ‘universal’ system of classificatory kinship terms. We report on a series of experiments designed to elicit acquisitional data on (i) nominal kinterms and (ii) sibling-inflected polysynthetic morphology in the Australian language Murrinhpatha. Photographs of the participants' own relatives are used as stimuli to assess knowledge of kinterms, kin-based grammatical contrasts, and kinship principles, across different age groups. The results show that genealogically distant kin are more difficult to classify than close kin, that children's comprehension and production of kinterms are streamlined by abstract merging principles, and that sibling-inflection is learned in tandem with number and person marking in the verbal morphology, although it is not fully mastered until mid to late childhood. We discuss how the unlimited nature of Australian kinship systems presents unusual challenges to the language learner, but suggest that, as everywhere, patterns of language acquisition are closely intertwined with children's experience of their sociocultural environment.

Earlier research has found that phonological markedness constraints (for example, against stress clash or sibilant sequences) statistically influence speakers' choices between particular syntactic constructions and between synonymous words. In this study, we test phonological constraints not just in particular cases, but across the board. We employ a novel method that statistically models the distribution of word bigrams (consecutive two-word sequences) and how this distribution is influenced by phonological constraints. Our study of multiple corpora indicates that several phonological constraints do indeed play a statistically significant role in English sentence formation. We also show that by examining particular subsets of the corpora we can diagnose the mechanisms whereby phonologically marked sequences come to be underrepresented. We conclude by discussing modes of grammatical organization compatible with our findings.

This article focuses on the role of congruence in Creole formation and development, using a competition-and-selection framework. The proposal is that the similarities (the congruent features) that speakers perceive between the languages in contact are favored to participate in the emergence and development of a new language. Specifically, I illustrate how morphosyntactic and semantic features are more likely to be selected into the grammatical makeup of a given Creole when they PREEXIST and are shared by some of the source languages present in its linguistic ecology. This is empirically supported in this article by numerous case studies and a survey of congruent features in twenty contact languages across nineteen grammatical and lexical domains. In order to show how congruence operates, I propose a model of matter and pattern mapping, adapted to the multilingual setting in which Creole languages emerge.

An indisputable fact of life and of nature is that humans and human institutions necessarily both exist in and live through time. The importance of this fact and the conscious recognition of it is reflected in the concern for the passage of time and for humans' place vis-à-vis time observable in various sorts of artistic expression, from the visual arts such as sculpture and painting to various reflections in literary and even musical sources. Taking the arts as my point of departure, I first outline here and then contrast different views of time from within different domains and disciplines and from different vantage points, discussing in turn the artist's, the physicist's, the linguist's, and, ultimately, the ordinary speaker's view of time. I then contrast continuity across time with change across time, and illustrate continuity amidst change through an extended case study of the past-tense marker in Indo-European languages known as the ‘augment’, examining its stability and change throughout all of attested Greek, from Mycenaean Greek of the second millennium BC up through Modern Greek of the present day, with particular focus on its realization in certain regional dialects of the modern language. The augment thus provides an important object lesson in linguistic continuity and change, as it proves to be a remarkably durable but at the same time intriguingly elastic morpheme, at least as far as Greek is concerned. Since the view of time that I ultimately dwell on leads me to a consideration of time and history, I end with some observations on both the history of the field and my own personal history.

The world's languages exhibit striking diversity. At the same time, recurring linguistic patterns suggest the possibility that this diversity is shaped by features of human cognition. One well-studied example is word order in complex noun phrases (like these two red vases). While many orders of these elements are possible, a subset appear to be preferred. It has been argued that this ordering reflects a single underlying representation of noun phrase structure, from which preferred orders are straightforwardly derived (e.g. Cinque 2005). Building on previous experimental evidence using artificial language learning (Culbertson & Adger 2014), we show that these preferred orders arise not only in existing languages, but also in improvised sequences of gestures produced by English speakers. We then use corpus data from a wide range of languages to argue that the hypothesized underlying structure of the noun phrase might be learnable from statistical features relating objects and their properties conceptually. Using an information-theoretic measure of strength of association, we find that adjectival properties (e.g. red) are on average more closely related to the objects they modify (e.g. wine) than numerosities are (e.g. two), which are in turn more closely related to the objects they modify than demonstratives are (e.g. this). It is exactly those orders which transparently reflect this—by placing adjectives closest to the noun, and demonstratives farthest away—that are more common across languages and preferred in our silent gesture experiments. These results suggest that our experience with objects in the world, combined with a preference for transparent mappings from conceptual structure to linear order, can explain constraints on noun phrase order.

This article builds on the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race to argue that linguistics urgently needs an interdisciplinarily informed theoretical engagement with race and racism. To be adequate, a linguistic theory of race must incorporate the perspectives of linguistic researchers of different methodological approaches and racial backgrounds and must also draw on theories of race in neighboring fields, including anthropology, sociology, and psychology, as well as speech and hearing sciences, composition and literacy studies, education, and critical interdisciplinary race studies. The lack of comprehensive and up-to-date theoretical, analytical, and political understandings of race within linguistics not only weakens research by erasing, marginalizing, and misrepresenting racially minoritized groups, but it also diminishes the impact of the entire field by devaluing and excluding the intellectual contributions of researchers of color, whose work on this topic is rarely welcome within linguistics departments. The article therefore argues for a rethinking of both linguistic scholarship and linguistics as a discipline in more racially inclusive and socially just terms.

This work focuses on explaining both grammatical universals of word order and quantitative word-order preferences in usage by means of a simple efficiency principle: dependency locality. In its simplest form, dependency locality holds that words linked in a syntactic dependency (any head–dependent relationship) should be close in linear order. We give large-scale corpus evidence that dependency locality predicts word order in both grammar and usage, beyond what would be expected from independently motivated principles, and demonstrate a means for dissociating grammar and usage in corpus studies. Finally, we discuss previously undocumented variation in dependency length and how it correlates with other linguistic features such as head direction, providing a rich set of explananda for future linguistic theories.

This study proposes a design for and examines the effects of a PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING approach to the promotion and assessment of deep learning in undergraduate linguistics education. Specifically, it reports on how the higher-order learning outcomes are achieved by students through a semester-long problem-solving task in an introductory Spanish linguistics course. Specific teaching strategies are described, and achievement is measured by student grades, self-evaluations, and reflections. This approach has proven effective for stimulating such higher-order thinking skills as (i) applying knowledge of the material to solving linguistic problems, (ii) developing skills in research and critical analysis, and (iii) developing a professional work ethic.

This research report examines crosslinguistic variation in cooccurrence among nonarticle determiners (demonstratives, proper names, pronouns, possessors) and its implications for understanding nominal (DP) structure and its variation. We present data from several language families and show that languages vary in both the number and permitted combinations of nonarticle determiners within a nominal phrase. These patterns provide new evidence that the primary semantic components of nominal reference—PERSON, DEIXIS, and INCLUSIVENESS—correspond to syntactic features in a universal hierarchy. Languages vary in how these features are bundled on functional heads; nonarticle determiners can cooccur only if their corresponding features are on separate heads.

In some languages, creaky voice is used over relatively long stretches of speech as a prosodic element, to convey emotion, and/or stylistically. A primary acoustic and perceptual cue to creaky voice quality is a low fundamental frequency. Previous research has shown that listeners can make fine-grained comparisons of speakers' habitual modal pitch, but this study focuses on how a combination of modal and nonmodal phonation affects the perception of habitual pitch. A perception experiment assesses whether listeners are more likely to rate a speaker's utterance as being holistically lower in pitch if it contains both modal and creaky voice than if it is fully modal speech. Results indicate that for female American English speakers with higher modal pitch, the inclusion of creaky voice leads listeners to rate such utterances as lower in pitch than fully modal utterances, but not for speakers with lower modal pitch. These results are consistent with studies showing that pitch perception interacts with nonmodal phonation, and they relate to previous observations that speakers may utilize nonmodal phonation to manipulate their intended habitual pitch.

This response builds upon ideas introduced in Charity Hudley et al.'s (2020) target article by focusing on the themes of excellence and racial justice. In addition to relying on previous academic work on race and racism, I also draw from my own experiences as a person of color in the field of linguistics and as a scholar who works with racially minoritized communities. The primary claims of this paper are that the field of linguistics as a whole benefits from broadening and deepening our conceptualizations of scholarly excellence and from consciously attending to the needs and concerns of scholars and community members from racially minoritized groups. To support these claims, I discuss ways in which institutional structures of universities hinder equity and inclusion by marginalizing contributions of scholars from racially minoritized groups and by promoting extractive and neocolonial work involving minoritized communities. I conclude by offering general principles that can serve as guides for fostering greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in university settings. These principles involve acknowledging present shortcomings, aligning the reward system to a broadened notion of excellence and to inclusion, and embracing creative alternatives.

Studies of variable lenition patterns converge on two phonetic properties as characteristic of lenition: reduced duration and increased intensity. However, the causal precedence of the two factors remains unclear. We focus on the causal structure of variable lenition. Study 1 examines the relationship between three correlates of lenition—speech rate, stress, and low information content—and their effect on reduced duration and increased intensity. We find that though increased intensity is more prototypically viewed as the core aspect of lenition, the effect of the three correlates on intensity is mediated by duration. Study 2 shows that all frequent lenition processes in the Buckeye corpus involve durational reduction. The contribution of this article is a proposal with a fairly simple principle, with few auxiliary assumptions: reduced duration precedes increased intensity in variable lenition.

In their target article, Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz (2020) have raised several issues and suggestions relating to improving racial equality within the scientific field of linguistics. While accepting the general premises of the authors' original article, this response piece offers reasons and suggestions for expanding the scope of the authors' original aims to apply to a broader, global audience. Four main issues are raised as justification and also as measures for expanding the call to action. These are: (i) the fact that the Linguistic Society of America is the flagship linguistics organization not just for US linguists, but for linguists throughout the world; (ii) the global influence and, in association, the responsibility placed on US and North American linguists to serve as trailblazers in our field; (iii) the applicability of the authors' suggestions within different academic settings, and what can be learned from cross-fertilization of ideas across different communities; and (iv) the critical role of English as a vehicle for spreading not only knowledge about linguistics, but also harmful ideologies about race, class, and ethnicity.

Currently, linguistics (LING) courses are underrepresented in general education at most US universities. As general education requirements undergo reform in higher education, the field of linguistics has an opportunity to assume a more central role. We argue that linguistics courses aligned with the key competencies of critical thinking, information literacy, and inquiry and analysis are well positioned to augment general education curricula, particularly at institutions that utilize common student learning objectives. An innovative The Language of Now core course and its signature assignment, a learner-centered research project on the use of the text-messaging discourse marker lol, illustrate how the methods used in linguistic inquiry are amenable to a range of standards that support general education goals.

With regard to change in inflection, historical linguistics fundamentally relies on the concept of morphological analogy, which is held responsible for nearly all change not attributable to phonological factors. Despite its central importance, how morphological analogy operates has never been established. Two different opinions are held in contemporary linguistics. The first position assumes that morphological analogy modifies inherited inflectional forms, making them more similar to other inflectional forms. According to the second position, in the course of morphological analogy, inherited inflectional forms are not merely modified but rather are replaced by forms created entirely anew on a model pattern already present in the grammar. This research report tries to establish what kind of data may constitute the evidence sufficient to differentiate between the two views. It argues that all relevant data point to whole-word replacement as the only mechanism of analogical change in inflection.

It is well known that floating tones can associate both within a word and across a word boundary. In relation to floating quantity, however, there is extensive evidence for association within a word, but not across a word boundary. This research report presents evidence for the latter configuration in Shilluk, a West Nilotic language. Shilluk noun forms may end in floating quantity, and this quantity is realized only on following vocalic prefixes, that is, across a word boundary. The investigation includes a descriptive analysis of the phenomenon and a production study based on data from ten Shilluk speakers.

This research report discusses a set of Indonesian predicates exemplified by mau ‘want’ and suka ‘like’. I demonstrate with several diagnostics that these morphemes occur as either auxiliary or verb, and note that the availability of the auxiliary reading has been overlooked in recent literature. Since mau and suka belong to the set of so-called crossed control predicates, the lexical ambiguity discussed here has implications for potential analyses of crossed control sentences. I suggest that the auxiliary reading for mau, suka, and other predicates must be carefully ruled out before the existence of a crossed reading can be established.

Rejoining the arguments presented in Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz's (2020) target article responding to the Linguistic Society of America's Statement on Race, we affirm calls for increased participation from diverse scholars and underscore the need for attention to racial perspectives in linguistic research. We argue that beyond position statements on race and increased diversity, antiracist scholarship requires transparent research subjectivities and an acknowledgment of the traditional privileging of certain positionalities and methodologies. Through discussions of current linguistic debates, our research trajectories, and the race-based perspectives in our work, we advocate for collaborative research in the creation of more nuanced scholarship to challenge social injustices within the academy and within our society.

Computational probabilistic modeling is increasingly popular in linguistics, but its relationship with linguistic theory is ambivalent. We argue here for the potential benefit of theory-driven statistical modeling, based on a case study situated at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Using data from a novel experiment, we employ Bayesian model comparison to evaluate the predictive adequacy of four models that differ in the extent to and manner in which grammatically generated candidate readings are taken into account in four probabilistic pragmatic models of utterance and interpretation choice. The data provide strong evidence for the idea that the full range of potential readings made available by recently popular grammatical approaches to scalar-implicature computation might be needed, and that classical Gricean reasoning may help manage the manifold ambiguity introduced by grammatical approaches to these. The case study thereby shows a way of bridging linguistic theory and empirical data with the help of probabilistic pragmatic modeling as a linking function.