We consider agent-denoting nominalizations like the finder of the wallet, contrasting them with the better-studied action/event-denoting nominalizations. We show that in English, Sakha, and Mapudungun, agent-denoting nominalizations can have none of the verbal/clausal features that event-denoting nominalizations often have: they cannot contain adverbs, voice markers, aspect, or negation. The one apparent exception to this generalization is that (only) Sakha allows accusative-case objects in agentive nominalizations, but we show that this is due to Sakha's special rule of accusative case assignment, not to a difference in the structure. We explain these restrictions by saying that agentive nominalizers have a semantics like that of a Voice head (Kratzer 1996). Given this, the natural order of semantic composition implies that agentive nominalizers, like Voice, must combine directly with a bare VP. We conclude by presenting the results of a seventy-eight-language survey, confirming that human languages in general avoid clause-like syntax inside agentive nominalizations, although it is permitted in reduced relative clauses, which may look superficially similar.

Because many of the forms participating in inherent variability are not attested in the standard language, they are often construed as evidence of change. We test this assumption by confronting the standard, as instantiated by a unique corpus covering five centuries of French grammatical injunctions, with data on the evolution of spontaneous speech over an apparent-time span of 119 years.

Reasoning that forms salient enough to have attracted the attention of grammarians were likely widespread in the speech of the time, we demonstrate how these materials may be used to (i) infer the existence of prior variability, (ii) trace the evolution of normative dictates associated with the variants, and most revealing, (iii) discern hints of prior linguistic conditioning of variant selection. These are then operationalized as factors in a multivariate analysis and tested against the facts of usage.

The linguistic focus is on future temporal reference, a notoriously variable sector of the grammar in which competing exponents have persisted for centuries. Systematic comparison of grammatical treatments with actual speaker behavior shows virtually no correspondence between the motivations offered in the literature and those constraining actual variant choice. Prescriptive efforts to explain variability, by ascribing to each variant form a dedicated reading or context of use, have had no effect on speech, which is shown to be governed by a powerful set of tacit variable constraints. These in turn are unacknowledged by the grammatical tradition. The result is a great and growing disconnect between the variable rules governing speech and the normative dictates that underlie the notion of the standard. We explore the implications of these findings for the use of grammarians' observations as data for linguistic analysis.

Backward control is an obligatory interpretational dependency between an overt controller and a nonovert controllee in which the controllee is structurally superior to the controller: Meg persuaded Δi[Roni to give up]. It contrasts with ordinary forward control, in which the controller is structurally higher: Meg persuaded Roni [Δi to give up]. Although backward control has been previously documented (Polinsky & Potsdam 2002a), clear cases are rare. This article presents an alternation between forward and backward object control in the Austronesian language Malagasy and argues for the backward-control structure. Backward control is thus a reality and needs to be incorporated into any comprehensive theory of control. The article argues against an analysis of backward control that identifies the controllee as the null pronominal pro.

This article proposes and tests an experimental method to assess the psychological reality of hierarchical theories of constituent structure in particular domains. I show that a hierarchical theory of constituent structure necessarily makes the prediction that an association between constituents should be easier to learn than an association between strings that cross constituent boundaries, whereas dependency-based theories of constituency predict that constituents cannot have associations that their parts do not have. Previous research has shown that the major division within an English syllable is between the onset and the nucleus, rather than between the nucleus and the coda. Thus, the nucleus forms a constituent (the rime) with the coda rather than the onset. The hierarchical theory of constituency thus proposes that English speakers should learn rime-affix associations more easily than body-affix associations and that the rime can have associations that its parts do not have. These predictions are confirmed in the present study. Applications of the experimental method and its variants to linguistic constituency in other domains are discussed.

This article describes in detail several explicit computational methods for approaching such questions in phonology as the vowel/consonant distinction, the nature of vowel harmony systems, and syllable structure, appealing solely to distributional information. Beginning with the vowel/consonant distinction, we consider a method for its discovery by the Russian linguist Boris Sukhotin, and compare it to two newer methods of more general interest, both computational and theoretical, today. The first is based on spectral decomposition of matrices, allowing for dimensionality reduction in a finely controlled way, and the second is based on finding parameters for maximum likelihood in a hidden Markov model. While all three methods work for discovering the fairly robust vowel/consonant distinction, we extend the newer ones to the discovery of vowel harmony, and in the case of the probabilistic model, to the discovery of some aspects of syllable structure.

The reconstruction of genealogical relationships between languages is traditionally performed through lexical comparison and the establishment of regular sound changes. The historical analysis of other aspects of linguistic structure, like syntactic patterns or the function of grammatical elements, is normally understood to depend on a previously established thorough understanding of the genealogical structure of the family. In this article we show that it is possible to reconstruct historical changes in morphosyntactic function without assuming detailed knowledge about the genealogical developments of the languages involved. Even more surprisingly, we are able to accurately reconstruct the genealogical structure of a language family using only a limited amount of morphosyntactic variation.

As a case study, this article focuses on the nonspatial usage of spatial case marking in the Tsezic languages, a subgroup of Nakh-Daghestanian, spoken in the Caucasus. A new semantic-map-like visualization is developed to represent functional differences in case marking between the various Tsezic languages. Using MAXIMUM PARSIMONY, a reconstruction is proposed for the historical development of the case marking, and the same visualization is used to present the reconstructed historical developments in an insightful manner. Besides various new insights regarding the development of Tsezic case marking, the approach used in this article presents a generally applicable method for the reconstruction of morphosyntactic function.

Although coarticulatory variation is largely systematic, and serves as useful information for listeners, such variation is nonetheless linked to sound change. This article explores the articulatory and perceptual interactions between a coarticulatory source and its effects, and how these interactions likely contribute to change. The focus is on the historical change VN (phonetically, ṼN) > Ṽ, but with more general attention to how a gesture associated with a source segment comes to be reinterpreted as distinctively, rather than coarticulatorily, associated with a nearby vowel or consonant. Two synchronic factors are hypothesized to contribute to reinterpretation: (i) articulatory covariation between the duration of the coarticulatory source (here, N) and the temporal extent of its effects (Ṽ), and (ii) perceived equivalence between source and effect. Experimental support for both hypotheses is provided. Additionally, the experimental data are linked to the historical situation by showing that the contextual conditions that trigger (i) and (ii) parallel the conditions that historically influence phonologization of vowel nasalization.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) and dyslexia have phonological deficits that are claimed to cause their language and literacy impairments and to be responsible for the overlap between the two disorders. Little is known, however, about the phonological grammar of children with SLI and dyslexia, and indeed whether they show differences in phonological development. We designed a nonword repetition task to investigate the impact of word position and stress on the production accuracy of onset clusters. We compared the performance of children with SLI and dyslexia, SLI only, and dyslexia only (mean age eleven), and three groups of typically developing children (aged five, seven, and nine). Analysis of cluster production accuracy revealed that all three clinical groups made significantly more errors on word-medial clusters compared to word-initial clusters. Unstressed clusters were more difficult than stressed clusters for the two dyslexic groups but not the SLI-only group. None of the groups of typically developing children showed an effect of word position or stress on cluster accuracy. All groups, however, created new clusters significantly more frequently in initial than medial positions. These results indicate a difference in phonological grammar in children with SLI and dyslexia that could potentially shed light on the relationship between the two disorders. Furthermore, they indicate that structural position and stress are developmentally independent elements in phonological representations.

The occurrence of WH-items at the right edge of the sentence, while extremely rare in spoken languages, is quite common in sign languages. In particular, in sign languages like LIS (Italian Sign Language) WH-items cannot be positioned at the left edge. We argue that existing accounts of right-peripheral occurrences of WH-items are empirically inadequate and provide no clue as to why sign languages and spoken languages differ in this respect. We suggest that the occurrence of WH-items at the right edge of the sentence in sign languages be taken at face value: in these languages, WH-phrases undergo rightward movement. Based on data from LIS, we argue that this is due to the fact that WH-NONMANUAL MARKING (NMM) marks the dependency between an interrogative complementizer and the position that the WH-phrase occupies before it moves. The hypothesis that NMM can play this role also accounts for the spreading of negative NMM with LIS negative quantifiers. We discuss how our analysis can be extended to ASL (American Sign Language) and IPSL (Indo-Pakistani Sign Language). Our account is spelled out in the principles-and-parameters framework. In the last part of the article, we relate our proposal to recent work on prosody in spoken languages showing that WH-dependencies can be prosodically marked in spoken languages. Overt movement and prosodic marking of the WH-dependency do not normally cooccur in spoken languages, while they are possible in sign languages. We propose that this is due to the fact that sign languages, unlike spoken languages, are multidimensional.

Phonological constraints can, in principle, be classified according to whether they are natural (founded in principles of universal grammar (UG)) or unnatural (arbitrary, learned inductively from the language data). Recent work has used this distinction as the basis for arguments about the role of UG in learning. Some languages have phonological patterns that arguably reflect unnatural constraints. With experimental testing, one can assess whether such patterns are actually learned by native speakers. Becker, Ketrez, and Nevins (2007), testing speakers of Turkish, suggest that they do indeed go unlearned. They interpret this result with a strong UG position: humans are unable to learn data patterns not backed by UG principles.

This article pursues the same research line, locating similarly unnatural data patterns in the vowel harmony system of Hungarian, such as the tendency (among certain stem types) for a final bilabial stop to favor front harmony. Our own test leads to the opposite conclusion of Becker and colleagues': Hungarians evidently do learn the unnatural patterns.

To conclude we consider a bias account—that speakers are able to learn unnatural environments, but devalue them relative to natural ones. We outline a method for testing the strength of constraints as learned by speakers against the strength of the corresponding patterns in the lexicon, and show that it offers tentative support for the hypothesis that unnatural constraints are disfavored by language learners.

We use the variationist method to elucidate the expression of future time in English, examining multiple grammaticalization in the same domain (will and going to). Usage patterns show that the choice of form is not determined by invariant semantic readings such as proximity, certainty, willingness, or intention. Rather, particular instances of each general construction occupy lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic niches. While putative differences in meaning are largely neutralized in discourse, grammaticalization paths are reflected in particular constructions of different degrees of lexical specificity, which bear different nuances of meaning or tenacious patterns of distribution inherited from once-meaningful associations. We conclude that collocations contribute to the shape of grammatical variation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore academic linguistics' tacit reliance on a Christian missionary organization, SIL International, to develop technological infrastructure and offer service in local linguistic communities—areas that have generally been ignored by academic linguistics because they have been seen as falling outside its domain of professional responsibility. We refer to these kinds of activities as PRACTICAL LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT because they draw upon linguistic expertise to solve practical real-world problems. Until now, academic linguists have benefited from the practical language development work carried out by our missionary counterparts without much deliberation. But with the contemporary rise in concern over language endangerment, the time has come for us to reflect on how this partnership of convenience can be reconciled with the changing priorities of the discipline. As we redouble our efforts to document, understand, and support the world's linguistic diversity, academic linguists are taking a renewed interest in fieldwork. There are more numerous and generous sources of funding for endangered-language research. Documentary linguistics, which takes the collection, preservation, and annotation of primary linguistic data as its key aim, is emerging as a subfield in its own right (Woodbury 2003, Himmelmann 2006). A growing recognition of the social and economic forces that drive language shift has led many linguists to see basic research in small, minority, and indigenous language communities as addressing issues of human rights (Nettle & Romaine 2000, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, Hinton 2002). Moral and political questions like who funds linguistic work, who carries it out, and who benefits from it and how are much harder to ignore in the context of these changes (Dorian 1993, England 1995). At the same time, changes in the way information is communicated, initiated by the spread of digital technology, have created demands for precise methods of referring to language names, written characters, lexical items, and other linguistic objects. But movements within the academy have not kept pace with these demands.

What is the mechanism by which a linguistic change advances across successive generations of speakers? We explore this question by using the model of incrementation provided in Labov 2001 and analyzing six current changes in English. Extending Labov's focus on recent and vigorous phonological changes, we target ongoing morphosyntactic(-semantic) and discourse-pragmatic changes. Our results provide a striking validation of the incrementation model, confirming its value as a key to understanding the evolution of linguistic systems. However, although our findings reveal the predicted peak in the apparent-time progress of a change and corroborate the female tendency to lead innovation, there is no absolute contrast between men and women with respect to incrementation. Instead, quantitative differences in the social embedding of linguistic change correlate with the rate of the change in the speech community.

Noun-class prefixes are obligatory in most Bantu languages. However, the Sotho languages (Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi) permit a subset of prefixes to be realized as null at the intersection of ‘unmarked’ phonological, syntactic, and discourse conditions. This raises the question of how and when the licensing of null prefixes is learned. Using longitudinal data from three Sesotho-speaking children, this article shows that the conditions needed to license null prefixes have been learned before the age of three, suggesting early abilities for grammatical generalization even at the intersection of different levels of linguistic structure. The implications for learnability theory and Bantu linguistic structure more generally are discussed.