SIL International trains between two hundred and three hundred linguists every year. Many of these missionary linguists will use their training not only to win converts to Protestant Christianity, but also to add to SIL's massive linguistic bibliography. While tension between the evangelical and scientific goals of the organization have manifested from time to time internally, as some members insist that linguistic expertise and publication come before evangelism while others resist, it is for outsiders that SIL's dual identity has tended to cause the most difficulties (Svelmoe 2008). Ironically, as this paper demonstrates, linguists in the United States, Mexico, and Latin America have themselves to blame and credit, almost as much as SIL itself, for the eventual shape of the organization.

There is a long-standing debate about the principles constraining the combinatorial properties of suffixes. Hay 2002 and Hay & Plag 2004 proposed a model in which suffixes can be ordered along a hierarchy of processing complexity. We show that this model generalizes to a larger set of suffixes, and we provide independent evidence supporting the claim that a higher rank in the ordering correlates with increased productivity. Behavioral data from lexical decision and word naming show, however, that this model has been one-sided in its exclusive focus on the importance of constituent-driven processing, and that it requires supplementation by a second and equally important focus on the role of memory. Finally, using concepts from graph theory, we show that the space of existing suffix combinations can be conceptualized as a directed graph, which, with surprisingly few exceptions, is acyclic. This acyclicity is hypothesized to be functional for lexical processing.

Color naming in the world's languages has traditionally been viewed as reflecting either a universal set of focal colors, or linguistic relativity. Recently, a different view has gained support: color naming may be accounted for in terms of the overall shape of perceptual color space. Here, we show that the new shape-based perspective can clarify which languages have color-naming systems that deviate from what universal forces would predict. Specifically, we find that the color-naming systems of two languages that have been held to counterexemplify universals of color naming—Pirahã and Warlpiri—are in fact consistent with the structure of color space. In contrast, two other languages that have not yet been the focus of much attention—Karajá and Waorani—are apparently inconsistent with that structure in a substantial way. We propose that the notion of ‘fit to the shape of color space’ provides a useful and objective means of determining which languages have genuinely unusual color-naming systems.

Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirahã is exceptional in displaying ‘inexplicable gaps’, that these gaps follow from a cultural principle restricting communication to ‘immediate experience’, and that this principle has ‘severe’ consequences for work on universal grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language, especially the rich material in Everett 1986, 1987b, we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical ‘gaps’ supposedly characteristic of Pirahã are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world's languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Pirahã lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Pirahã. Likewise, we find no evidence that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Pirahã constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominai possessor recursion and the behavior of WH-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Pirahã. Finally, following mostly Gonçalves (1993, 2000, 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Pirahã culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the ‘immediate experience’ restriction. We conclude that there is no evidence from Pirahã for the particular causal relation between culture and grammatical structure suggested by Everett.

Language ideologies generally refer to the kinds of cultural assumptions or beliefs that speakers hold about their OWN language: its relation to the world, its relation to their sense of self, its relation to other languages, and so forth (Silverstein 1979, Woolard 1998). But in the kinds of cross-cultural contact situations that linguists, anthropologists, missionaries, or other Christian aid workers often find themselves, language ideologies about OTHER peoples' languages can be just as important. Though cultural assumptions about language may change over time and across historical and social contexts, they never disappear, not even from professional linguistics. Here I look at some of the key language ideologies at issue when considering the relationship between SIL and endangered-language linguistics.

This article responds to criticisms of the proposals of Everett 2005 by Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues (2009, this issue). It argues that their criticisms are unfounded and that Pirahã grammar and culture are accurately described in Everett 2005. The article also offers more detailed argumentation for the hypothesis that culture can exert an architectonic effect on grammar. It concludes that Pirahã falsifies the single prediction made by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch (2002) that recursion is the essential property of human language.

This short report draws attention to an interesting kind of configuration in the lexicon that seems to have escaped theoretical or systematic descriptive attention. These configurations, which we dub SEMPLATES, consist of an abstract structure or template, which is recurrently instantiated in a number of lexical sets, typically of different form classes. A number of examples from different language families are adduced, and generalizations made about the nature of semplates, which are contrasted to other, perhaps similar, phenomena.

Commentators on the Christian missionary organization SIL International have long noted the organization's bipartite structure, which embraces both evangelism and linguistic science. These seemingly dissociate goals are mutually reinforcing, with SIL's linguistic work contributing to its evangelical aims and vice versa. This paper focuses on a third, equally important, component of SIL's work that academic linguists tend to overlook: community development. We argue that although this kind of work evidences a concern for speaker welfare, it also conceals an incompatibility with the principle of self-determination, the idea that communities have a right to freely choose their own futures. Despite a rhetorical commitment to the latter ideal, the practical effects of SIL involvement are closely aligned with the forces of politically and economically dominant societies that confront and overwhelm local indigenous societies and their languages.

Recent concern among linguists about endangered languages has increased interest in fieldwork to document these languages. This in turn has brought a new generation of linguists into contact with the largest linguistic fieldwork organization in the world, SIL International, and its primary partner organization Wycliffe Bible Translators.

Discussions of the psycholinguistic significance of regularity in inflectional morphology generally deal with languages in which regular forms can be clearly identified and revolve around whether there are distinct processing mechanisms for regular and irregular forms. We present a detailed description of Dinka's notoriously irregular noun number inflection and suggest that no pattern can usefully be designated as regular. Psycholinguistic studies of Dinka would make a valuable contribution to our understanding of inflectional morphology crosslinguistically.