This article reports on results from a broad crosslinguistic study based on data from thirty-five signed languages around the world. The study is the first of its kind, and the typological generalizations presented here cover the domain of interrogative structures as they appear across a wide range of geographically and genetically distinct signed languages. Manual and nonmanual ways of marking basic types of questions in signed languages are investigated. As a result, it becomes clear that the range of crosslinguistic variation is extensive for some subparameters, such as the structure of question-word paradigms, while other parameters, such as the use of nonmanual expressions in questions, show more similarities across signed languages. Finally, it is instructive to compare the findings from signed language typology to relevant data from spoken languages at a more abstract, crossmodality level.

I observe that in an early stage of child Catalan and Spanish, no overt subjects are used. At this same age and MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE (MLU), child speakers of overt subject languages such as French, German, Dutch, and English use at least some overt subjects optionally. I explain this crosslinguistic variation by suggesting that the adult target grammars vary with respect to the position in which overt subjects are realized. In the overt subject languages, subjects are realized in the canonical specifier-of-IP position, whereas in the null subject languages (such as Catalan and Spanish), subjects are located in a topic/focus position, which becomes accessible only later in development. As evidence for this, I show that overt subjects, fronted objects, and WH-questions begin to be used at the same point in development in child Catalan and Spanish. I also argue that subject agreement constitutes an incorporated pronominal subject in Catalan and Spanish and that children converge on this parametric option very early. The inability of child Spanish- and Catalan-speakers to use discourse-pragmatic information is explained as a delay in the development of the interface between grammar and discourse-pragmatics.

In Lezgian, a Nakh-Daghestanian language, final and preconsonantal ejectives and voiceless unaspirated obstruents are voiced in certain monosyllabic nouns. This article offers acoustic evidence confirming that the two coda-voicing series are indeed voiced in final position. Based on comparative evidence, it is demonstrated that this phonetically aberrant neutralization pattern is the result of a series of phonetically natural sound changes. Such ‘crazy rules’ (Bach & Harms 1972) undermine any direct phonetic licensing approach to phonology, such as LICENSING BY CUE (Steriade 1997).

Some, but not all, languages with fixed stress exhibit lexical exceptions to their stress rule. Under the assumption that lexical exceptions can occur in a language only if its native speakers can perceive stress contrasts, I argue that the presence of these exceptions depends on the age at which infants discover the stress rule of their language. If the stress regularity is easy to infer from the surface speech stream, then it will be acquired very early, and stress will not be encoded in the phonological representation of words in the mental lexicon; as a consequence, stress contrasts are not well perceived by adult speakers and lexical exceptions are excluded. If, by contrast, the regularity is difficult to infer, then it will be acquired relatively late, after the format of the phonological encoding of words has been fixed. That is, stress will be redundantly encoded in the mental lexicon, and lexical exceptions can thus be perceived and stored by adult speakers. A typological survey concerning the occurrence of exceptions in languages with fixed stress supports this proposal. A comparison with a metrical approach to exceptional stress is made, leading to a proposal about the division of labor between psycholinguistics and theoretical phonology.