Recent studies have highlighted divergent change as a more common outcome of language contact than previously thought. While convergent change is often attributed to bilingual cognitive pressures, divergent change has usually been explained by appealing to sociocultural factors. We argue that the effects of social pressures on linguistic systems must nevertheless be realized in how language is processed in the individual bilingual speaker and, therefore, that divergent change is also ultimately rooted in bilingual cognition. Since lexical forms are most susceptible to contact-induced divergent change we focus on their production. We begin by developing a cognitive model that combines Grosjean's language mode with a later output-monitoring stage. The parameters to the model are then fit to the results of an experiment in which bilinguals are seen to avoid shared lexical items. These best-fit parameters form the basis of a series of multi-agent simulations that show rapid divergence in the lexica of languages with large proportions of bilinguals. We consider the implications of these findings for the psycholinguistic study of bilingual lexical selection, the construction of phylogenies, and the reconstruction of language family histories.

The voice system of Tagalog has been proposed to be symmetrical in the sense that there are no morphologically unmarked voice forms. This stands in contrast to asymmetrical voice systems, which exhibit unmarked and marked voices (e.g. active and passive in German). This article investigates the psycholinguistic processing consequences of the potential (a)symmetries in the voice systems of Tagalog and German by analyzing changes in cognitive load during sentence production. Tagalog and German native speakers’ pupil diameters were recorded while they produced sentences with different voice markings. Growth-curve analyses of the shape of task-evoked pupillary responses revealed that processing-load changes were similar for different voices in the symmetrical voice system of Tagalog. By contrast, actives and passives in the asymmetrical voice system of German exhibited different patterns of processing-load changes during sentence production. This is interpreted as supporting the notion of (relative) symmetry in the Tagalog voice system. Mental effort during sentence planning changes in different ways in the two languages because the grammatical architecture of their voice systems is different. Additionally, an anti-Patient bias in sentence production was found: linking patients to the subject function seems to be associated with greater cognitive effort. This anti-Patient bias in production adds converging evidence to ‘subject preferences’ reported in the sentence-comprehension literature.

This article analyzes the sociophonetic dynamics of the acquisition of a prestige variety of English in post-apartheid South Africa. New economic and educational opportunities have seen the rapid growth of a Black middle class, whose younger members have increasingly come into contact with what used to be ‘(L1) White South African English’. The article documents the differences among younger Black peoples’ English from the traditional L2 of their parents’ generation, via acoustic analyses of two sets of variables: schwa as a full vowel, and neutralizations of vowel length. At the same time there is considerable internal difference among younger Black speakers in relation to social class and gender. The finding that young Black women are in the lead in acquiring the prestige variety is triangulated with a perception experiment and citations from commentaries in the press and young peoples’ own attitudes.

We present evidence from experiments on novel blend formation showing that adult English speakers have access to constraints that give phonological privilege to HEADS, NOUNS, and PROPER NOUNS, even though the nonblend phonology provides no evidence that such constraints are generally active in the grammar of English. Our results (i) demonstrate that these positional constraints are universally available; (ii) confirm that the lexical category ‘proper noun’ has the status of a strong position, which has broader implications for the role of lexical categories in positional privilege effects; and (iii) confirm that strong positions based on salience from nonphonetic sources (such as morphosyntactic, semantic, or psycholinguistic salience) participate in position-specific phonological phenomena.

The concept of ‘renewal’ is widely used in the literature on morphosyntactic change, but hardly ever theorized. Here we scrutinize the viability of this concept theoretically as well as empirically, revisiting in detail the most frequently cited case of renewal, namely the resemblance between the Latin and French synthetic futures. Phenomena accounted for in terms of renewal can also be accounted for in terms of grammaticalization theory. We argue that there is no need and no empirical support for renewal as its own type of change alongside grammaticalization. However, grammaticalization theory so far has neglected to properly account for influences of the existing system on ongoing grammaticalization processes. As an initial approximation of this vast field of study, we propose several domains where we believe that system influences on grammaticalization are operative. On the one hand, this involves making more precise the source determination hypothesis as developed in work by Joan Bybee and colleagues. On the other, it comprises interactions between constructions in paradigm formation.

This study is concerned with whether an asymmetric phonetic overlap between speaker groups contributes to the directional spread of sound change. An acoustic analysis of speakers of Southern British English showed that younger speakers’ fronted /u/ was probabilistically closer to that of older speakers’ retracted /u/ distributions than the other way around. Agent-based modeling based on the same data showed an asymmetric shift of older toward younger speakers’ fronted /u/. The general conclusion is that sound change is likely to be propagated when a phonetic bias within an individual is further magnified by a difference between speaker groups that is in the same direction.

There has been extraordinary attention devoted to the Celtic mutations over the years, with various authors arguing for phonological, morphological, or lexical treatments (and various blends thereof). Strikingly, this literature is virtually bereft of any mention of the phonological restrictions that can sometimes limit the applicability of mutation. In this article, we provide a detailed experimental and corpus-based investigation of the phonological restrictions on Scottish Gaelic mutation. Using both techniques, we show that the phonological restrictions are alive yet are in a state of flux. The continued productivity of these phonological aspects of the mutation system argues that any analysis of mutation must attend to them.

Dependent clauses are one of the prominent examples illustrating the ability to generate recursive structures by a computational mechanism. Three types of dependent clauses have usually been distinguished in a broader sense: (i) complement clauses, (ii) adverbial clauses, and (iii) correlative or relative clauses. The question of whether these three types can be reduced to a single abstract structure has inspired several fruitful lines of research, resulting in a mass of new empirical findings and leading to novel results. For example, many authors have proposed to analyze different types of dependent clauses as correlative/relative clauses (see Arsenijevic 2009, Bhatt & Pancheva 2006, Caponigro & Polinsky 2011, Geis 1970, Haegeman 2012, Kayne 2014, Krapova 2010, Kratzer 2006, Moulton 2009, 2015, among many others). This special issue of the Historical Syntax section of Language, entitled New insights into the syntax and semantics of complementation, focuses in particular on the diachronic syntax and semantics of dependent clauses and shows to what extent complement, adverbial, and relative/correla- tive clauses may be related to each other.

It is standardly assumed that the German declarative dass-complementizer evolved from the demonstrative pronoun (Old High German thaz) used cataphorically. On this analysis, the source structure would be a paratactic sequence of two sentences in which thaz occurred in the final position of the first clause and pointed forward to the content of the second clause. Out of this structure, thaz developed into a subordinate conjunction/complementizer via a shift of the clause boundary (as in Mary knows that: Peter is lying → Mary knows that Peter is lying). This article takes issue with the standard assumption and puts forward an alternative account in which the declarative complementizer developed from a correlative construction (as in Mary knows that, that Peter is lying). The correlative construction (arguably also with an optionally silent correlative) is robustly attested in the old Germanic and old Indo-European languages. The source structure was thus not a sequence of syntactically independent clauses, but a hypotactic structure with an explicative relative clause associated with a silent correlative element in the main clause. In line with the hypothesis currently under discussion—that apparent noun-complement clauses are in fact relative clauses—it is argued that the explicative clause in the correlative structure was a relative clause, and thus the declarative complementizer developed from the relative complementizer thaz. The syntactic reanalyses involved in this new scenario are far less radical than in the traditional one. The new scenario is furthermore supported by crosslinguistic evidence: the development of relativizers into complementizers is a frequently attested grammaticalization path.

This article addresses the German conjunction zumal ‘the more so as’ from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. On the basis of historical corpus data, I trace the uses and meaning development of the lexical item zumal, from a temporal adverb to a conjunction. I argue that it acquired its current syntactic and interpretive features from the final step in this development: the focus particle zumal adopted some syntactic features and meaning components from the subordinate causal conjunctions da and weil, with which it frequently cooccurred in the historical data. In the current language it is thus best analyzed as a subordinate causal conjunction with focus-marking properties, similar to the combination besonders weil ‘especially since’.

This article scrutinizes the diachrony of relativizers and complement clause subordinators in Russian, Polish, and Czech. Historical morphology indicates a development from agreeing relative pronouns via noninflected relativizers to complement clause subordinators. This concurs with recent findings on Germanic (Axel-Tober 2017), but contradicts more traditional proposals that derive subordinators from demonstratives. The respective syntactic reanalyses are demonstrated on diachronic Slavic corpus data. Moreover, a quantitative comparison of sixteenth- to seventeenth- century East Slavic texts with and without West Slavic interference suggests that the use of kotoryj ‘which’ as a relative pronoun spread into Russian as an inner-Slavic contact-induced change.