Most formal research on the imperative sentence type has focused on canonical imperatives, forms like Leave!, which are often characterized across languages by properties such as bare verbal morphology and omission of the subject. Noncanonical imperatives therefore offer an opportunity to investigate imperative properties from a different perspective. This article argues that negation-licensed commands, forms like No smoking!, first introduced in Iatridou 2021, contain an unusual combination of properties that offer a unique insight into the nature of canonical imperatives. This article has two main findings: (i) negation-licensed commands have a morphosyntax similar to that of existential declaratives, but a speech-act update similar to that of canonical imperatives, and (ii) their speech-act update is subtly different from canonical imperatives in a way that motivates a reevaluation of the speech-act operator in canonical imperatives. This article therefore demonstrates that noncanonical constructions are worth studying not only because of their interesting properties, but also because they offer insights into canonical constructions that could not be gathered otherwise.

While it is known that speakers tend to use more reduced forms for more predictable words or phrases, it is unclear whether the same happens at the referential level: the influence of referent predictability on pronoun production remains a contentious issue, with divergent findings reported in the literature. To address this inconsistency, we carried out a Bayesian meta-analysis of the current literature on the relationship between referent predictability and pronoun production. Our meta-analysis covers twenty primary peer-reviewed studies, encompassing twenty-six experiments across eight languages. We find stronger evidence for a small positive effect of referent predictability on pronoun usage, as opposed to the alternative hypothesis of no effect or a negative effect. As the first comprehensive synthesis of available evidence on this topic, our study offers insights into pronoun production and identifies promising avenues for future research: focus on typologically diverse languages, on conditions where a variety of referring expressions are expected or where the effect of predictability is more likely to appear, and others. Finally, we also advocate for the use of meta-analysis as a tool for theoretical linguistics.

Knowledge of the mechanisms of phonetically motivated sound changes is incomplete and based primarily on apparent—rather than real-time—evidence. How exactly does an innovative variant become the new norm within individual and population-level grammars? Here, eighteen L1 English speakers were recorded in 2014 and again in 2022. Acoustic analysis of sibilants in /str/ shows (i) coarticulatory /s/-retraction for all speakers in 2014 and (ii) a group-level increase in the degree of /s/-retraction in 2022. Perception data show that increased /s/-retraction was audible to listeners. Increased /s/-retraction also matched the outcome of simulated interaction between the speaker participants in an agent-based model. However, the effects of sound change are not predictable within idiolects: some speakers’ production targets shifted incrementally in the opposite direction of the group-level trend.

In French, the members of a subclass of anticausative verbs are optionally marked with the clitic se, traditionally considered to be a reflexive marker. We show that this optionality is not a case of free variation. Rather, the presence or absence of se is influenced by lexical-pragmatic considerations: while by default, both variants are equally acceptable, in the context of a human subject, cooperative speakers strongly prefer the variant that in certain cases avoids and in other cases maintains ambiguity with the semantically reflexive interpretation that arises in parallel with the intended (anticausative) interpretation. Understanding these preferences requires taking into account the agent bias—that is, the tendency to interpret human nouns in subject position as agents whenever possible—and the multifunctionality of se, which is used to form both (nonagentive) anticausative predicates and (agentive) semantically reflexive ones. The preference for the presence vs. absence of se is predicted based on whether the alternative reflexive interpretation is in line with shared assumptions about the event. The interaction between the choice of form by the cooperative language user and individual verb subclasses is an example of what we call lexical-pragmatic effects.

Like most people who have done linguistic field work for thirty years or so, I have worked on languages which are now extinct, eight of them in my case, and I have studied, and continue to study, many languages which are seriously imperiled. My experience is far from unusual, and the testimony of field workers alone would amply illustrate the extent of language loss in the world of the present era.

Linguists need to collect, organize, analyze, and share data. Despite the variability of linguistic research in terms of inputs and outcomes, there are some common stages, including morphological parsing, lexicon creation, and textual editing. A common software tool for this work is FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx). In this article, we examine some of the ways that FLEx’s data structures conflict with contemporary practices in language work. These assumptions exclude key groups of users and erect barriers to theoretically and practically relevant research. Where workarounds are feasible, they are both fragile and costly. We use this example to start a broader conversation about software infrastructure for digital linguistic data analysis, and how problems with this infrastructure reflect larger issues in language documentation and linguistics.

We contend that attention to signed languages is crucial for a fuller understanding of the processes and mechanisms behind regular sound change in spoken languages. While the label ‘regular sound change’ would seem to limit the object of study to language change in the auditory-vocal channel, a typical assumption is that a visual-gestural modality correlate to regular sound change exists. At the same time, there exists a conflicting position that languages in nonauditory modalities, as they do not deal with sounds, are irrelevant to the study of sound change. These contradictory stances converge in their consequences, leading to the general practice in historical linguistics of not taking evidence from signed languages into account when developing theories of sound change. However, we argue that consideration of the affordances of the visual-gestural modality, and the distinctive aspects of language transmission and demographics in signing communities, is of particular value for refining the field’s understanding of the processes and constraints on regular sound change. Insights from signed languages push us to reframe the processes and mechanisms that lead to regular sound change and to broaden our understanding of why it happens. This has implications for a programmatic exploration of theories of regular sound change.

This paper provides a response to Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos’s target article, focusing on two issues. First, I point out that the initial framing of their proposal undercuts the larger point that sign languages should be included in linguistic analysis in order to better understand all human languages, rather than specifically in order to better understand spoken languages. Second, I discuss a number of practical considerations for undertaking the analysis of sound change they advocate for, with a focus on transcription. I describe several tools that have been developed for addressing this issue and discuss how they can be employed in the study of sound change in sign languages.

In their target article, Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos discuss the scarcity of regular sound change in signed languages, and they provide a long list of fascinating linguistic and social reasons why this could be the case. Exploring the effects of modality on sound change has the potential to advance our understanding of signed and spoken languages and language in general. In this response, I focus on the implications of the idea that the relative abundance of regular sound change and phonological rules in spoken languages is a consequence of a specific peculiarity of the auditory-vocal modality, namely, that it is highly serial and temporally compressed.

In response to the target article by Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos, I argue that signed and spoken languages share a common core of phonological mental representations, consisting of events (points in time and/or space), features (monadic properties of events), and precedence (a dyadic relation of temporal order between events). In addition to this, signed languages also include dyadic spatial relations between events/points in space and time. Illustrations of the EFPS model for signed phonology are drawn from some simple ASL signs, and an ongoing diachronic change in ASL motorcycle is analyzed using parallel events, partial reduplication, and underspecification.

We explore the role of irregularity in sound change in signed and spoken languages. While all historical phonologists accept some kinds of irregularity in spoken language sound change, a full, rigorous accounting of where and why we find it has been harder to come by. We draw on the foundations of signed language sound change laid by Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos to address this with a focus on irregularity. We begin to develop concrete parallels to irregularity in spoken language sound change, such as proposals for lexical diffusion. Throughout, we pay heed to where differences in modality do and do not make a difference.

In response to Law et al.’s (2025) target article on signed language change, I discuss two aspects of regularity in sound change: the role of phonemes and the contribution of iconicity. Drawing on work on sound change in spoken languages, I set out some arguments for why linguistics needs to take proper account of signed language change, in order to better understand language dynamics in general. I further argue that signed ~ spoken language dichotomies or arguments from exceptionalism are unlikely to be as helpful as robust hypothesis testing.

In this response to the target article by Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos, I draw attention to the fact that ‘sound change’ in sign languages does not seem to follow the Neogrammarian regularity principle and that, as a consequence, synchronic phonologies of sign languages do not have productive, obligatory phonological rules (whether allophonic or allomorphic rules). For example, the sound change that introduced aspiration for voiceless stops at the beginning of stressed syllables (when not preceded by /s/) is reflected as a regular, so-called allophonic rule in the synchronic phonological grammar of Modern English. Sign languages do not appear to have such regular allophonic rules or regular allomorphic rules.

This paper responds to the target article by Law et al. (2025), who explore whether sign languages undergo regular phonological change similar to regular sound change observed in spoken languages. While they argue that iconicity and transmission patterns may inhibit such change, I propose that sign languages evolve systematically in a way that allows for regular change but in modality-specific ways that obscure it. Evidence of grammaticalization, lexicalization, and phonetic variation in sign languages indicates that both signed and spoken languages undergo the same processes, challenging the notion that regular change is absent. Additionally, I propose an approach that examines regular change through bundles of phonological features in signs that act as phonological environments shaping such change. Future research must integrate historical and online data, computer vision, and concerted studies to uncover whether regular phonological change is specific to modality or to language.

In this response to the target article by Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos, which correctly points out that phonological change is a characteristic of both spoken and signed language, I note that we have more to learn from sign languages. Since sign languages are all very young in comparison to oral languages, linguists have an opportunity to observe phonological change as it occurs. Law et al. do not take into account the winding path of phonological change and the social and structural factors that influence this path. Conditions for such changes can be determined in part by the modality (oral or signed) in each type of language, as I discuss here.

This paper responds to commentaries by several authors on our target article, ‘Bringing signed languages into the study of regular sound change’ (Law et al. 2025a). We provide some additional context on the research program that spurred the target article and draw on several themes discussed in both the target article and commentaries, specifically (i) the affordances and effects of modality in (theories of) language change, (ii) iconicity (and indexicality), (iii) variation and irregularity in language change, and (iv) language transmission. We highlight the methodological advances afforded by new technologies to study phonetic variation in signed languages and advocate for increased attention to the systematic and comparative study of phonetic variation in signed languages as a window into processes of phonetic and phonological change in signed languages.