Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted.

In my annual report for 2005, published in Language 82.2 (June 2006), I noted that the end of 2005 meant that I was well past ‘the halfway mark of my editorship’ and that I was therefore ‘on the downhill slope ... of my service’ (p. 466). The final part of that slope began in spirit for me just after the January 2008 LSA annual meeting, some six months ago as I write this. But it has really begun in earnest only in the past month, as my successor has (finally) been selected. This happy turn of events puts me in a position to begin to reflect somewhat on my own term of office.

Frequent words tend to shorten. But do homophone pairs, such as time and thyme, shorten equally if one member of the pair is frequent? This study reports an analysis of roughly 90,000 tokens of homophones in the Switchboard corpus of American English telephone conversations, in which it was found that high-frequency words like time are significantly shorter than their low-frequency homophones like thyme. The effect of lemma frequency persisted when local speaking rate, predictability from neighboring words, position relative to pauses, syntactic category, and orthographic regularity were brought under statistical control. These findings have theoretical implications for the locus of frequency information in linguistic competence and in models of language production, and for the role of articulatory routinization in shortening.

Why do people care about the meaning(s)/significance associated with a word? Does it make sense to advocate or to criticize a certain form-meaning association? This article argues that words do real cognitive and social work as they are deployed in social practice and that it is primarily through words and their histories of use that culture links to language. It is not semantic representations as such that matter but the (mostly extralinguistic) reference and conceptual baggage words acquire in their discursive world travels. Lexical significance shifts and is contested as part of shifting and contested customs, institutions, and ideologies.

In Walman, a language in the Torricelli family spoken in Papua New Guinea, there are two words that have the function of conjoining noun phrases but that have the morphology of transitive verbs, exhibiting subject agreement with the first conjunct and object agreement with the second conjunct. We discuss two interrelated issues concerning these words: (i) Do these words behave syntactically like conjunctions in other languages, in combining with two noun phrases to form a single noun phrase, or are they really just verbs in a serial verb construction?, and (ii) Do these words have a meaning that is closer to a coordinative conjunction like and in English, or do they have a comitative meaning like English with? We show that the evidence on the first of these questions is somewhat contradictory, but that even in cases where the syntactic evidence argues that these verbs do not combine with two noun phrases to form a single noun phrase, they still have a meaning closer to that of and than of with

Data from dual pronoun systems in Australian languages is used to show the pragmatic basis for a cycle of pronoun creation—reduced pronouns from free forms and free from reduced—and the motivation to maintain both types in a linguistic system. Free pronouns become positionally restricted reduced forms by association of clause-initial position with discourse prominence (Swartz 1988, Choi 1999). The same pragmatic motivations result in the creation of new free pronouns, and the divergence of free and reduced pronouns with respect to ergative case marking. Examples of languages at different stages of the cycle include Garrwa (one set of free pronouns, with a strong preference for second position); Djambarrpuyngu and Gupapuyngu (two sets of pronouns transparently related in form and in complementary distribution); Ritharrngu, Djinang, and Djinba (two sets of pronouns transparently related in form but in which the reduced pronouns are becoming obligatory); Warlpiri (two sets of pronouns, which diverge in form, and the reduced set is obligatory); and Warumungu (one set of reduced pronouns, indicating how new free pronouns might emerge based on information-packaging principles). The creation of free pronouns from reduced pronouns argues against strict unidirectionality of change.