While affix ordering often reflects general syntactic or semantic principles, it can also be arbitrary or variable. This article develops a theory of morpheme ordering based on local morphotactic restrictions encoded as weighted bigram constraints. I examine the formal properties of morphotactic systems, including arbitrariness, nontransitivity, context-sensitivity, analogy, and variation. Several variable systems are surveyed before turning to a detailed corpus study of a variable affix in Tagalog. Bigram morphotactics is shown to cover Tagalog and the typology, while other formalisms, such as alignment, precedence, and position classes, undergenerate. Moreover, learning simulations reveal that affix ordering under bigram morphotactics is subject to analogical pressures, providing a learning-theoretic motivation for the specific patterns of variation observed in Tagalog. I raise a different set of objections to rule-based approaches invoking affix movement. Finally, I demonstrate that bigram morphotactics is restrictive, being unable to generate unattested scenarios such as nonlocal contingency in ordering.

This article discusses four grammatical constructions that have been appropriated from Chinese into Singapore English and spelled out with English morphosyntactic materials. These constructions have developed unique structural properties and usage patterns that differ in interesting ways from those of their respective Chinese sources and English exponents. While the structural properties of these constructions are shaped by the grammars of Chinese and English, the two languages with a constant presence in Singapore, the usage patterns are largely determined by the grammatical requirements associated with the English exponents. I argue that frequency of use in the contact language plays a crucial role in substratum-derived linguistic change, and propose a usage-based exemplar model of substratum transfer and stabilization that gives an adequate and cogent explanation of the facts discussed here.

This article explores the architecture of the interface between morphosyntax and lexical semantics, in particular the semantic underpinnings of argument realization. Many theories of lexical meaning assume that argument realization is derived from underlying event structure: the relative prominence of coarguments in a clause follows from their relative semantic prominence in how the event unfolds. I show that event structure is not sufficient to capture certain generalizations about argument realization, however, focusing on arguments that alternate between direct and oblique realization. I show that for these alternations the relevant semantic contrast is in strength of truth conditions: direct realization encodes a monotonically stronger set of truth conditions associated with the alternating argument than oblique realization. This, I suggest, follows if word meanings are built from basic units that are related to one another implicationally, and the relative implicational strength of such components figures into argument realization. I use as a case study English locative and conative alternations, which, I argue, reflect stronger and weaker degrees of affectedness along an independently motivated affectedness hierarchy. I also show that similar contrasts are found with other alternations on other hierarchies. I conclude by suggesting that a theory of weakening truth conditions is not incompatible with event-structural analyses of verb meaning, and in fact the two augment one another.

Some conceptual metaphors common in spoken languages are infelicitous in sign languages. The explanation suggested in this article is that the iconicity of these signs clashes with the shifts in meaning that take place in these metaphorical extensions. Both iconicity and metaphors are built on mappings of two domains: form and meaning in iconicity, source domain and target domain in metaphors. Iconic signs that undergo metaphoric extension are therefore subject to both mappings (Taub 2001). When the two mappings do not preserve the same structural correspondence, the metaphorical extension is blocked. This restriction is formulated as the double-mapping constraint, which requires multiple mappings to be structure-preserving. The effects of this constraint go beyond explaining possible and impossible metaphors in sign languages. Because of the central role of metaphors in various linguistic processes, constraints on their occurrence may affect other linguistic structures and processes that are built on these metaphors in both sign and spoken languages.

An increasingly common theme in publications on ethical review in the social sciences is the burden that regulation places on researchers. But empirical findings of the extent of the problem are difficult to find, and much of the criticism of ethical review boards rests on anecdotal and individual reports. Within linguistics there has also been a greater focus on ethics, but discussion has focused on field research, and ethical regulation has not been systematically surveyed. In this report I present and discuss the results of an anonymous survey of linguistic fieldworkers and their responses to human subjects review. These results provide a snapshot of fieldwork regulation and its effect on field practices.

During the past two decades, field linguists have expressed serious concerns over the unprecedented rapid loss of 'indigenous languages', the endangerment of many others, and the implications of these processes for the education and economic development of 'indigenous populations', among other matters. The book to which this article responds is a rare volume that focuses on the use of 'minority languages' in education and national economies to eradicate poverty, as well as on socioeconomic hardships the poor experience in shifting to the 'dominant language'. I explain how complex the subject matter is and how little prepared linguistics still is for it. I show that our profession has no empirically grounded and ecology-specific advice to provide to economists and politicians who are concerned with societal multilingualism (mis)construed as an obstacle to economic development. Nor does the field appear to have determined under what ideal socioeconomic conditions a language can be maintained without being a liability or an unnecessary burden to its speakers.