The historical diffusion of lexical and grammatical features from one pidgin to another has been well documented for the Pacific region, particularly by Baker (1993) who argued that items were spread individually in the early nineteenth century via an ad hoc foreigner talk register. Noting the profound similarities between Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE) and the Caribbean English Creoles (CECs) which led Bickerton (1981) to propose the language bioprogram hypothesis, Goodman (1985) suggested a stronger model of diffusion, one which involved the transmission of a structurally complex pidgin or creole from the Caribbean to Hawai‘i. Holm (1986) and Dillard (1995) have endorsed Goodman’s hypothesis. This study, drawing on a wealth of pidgin/creole data spanning the previous two centuries, finds little support for Goodman’s proposal. Textual evidence shows that the nineteenth-century pidgin of Hawai‘i lacked not only the structure of later HCE but also displayed far stronger links with neighboring Pacific pidgin Englishes than the CECs. Furthermore, the creole TMA system and for-complementation patterns are revealed to have developed late and primarily (though not entirely) within the population of native-born speakers, as predicted by the bioprogram. However, while the pace of creolization was fairly rapid in Hawai‘i, HCE did not form entirely within a single generation.

We discuss the Labovian view of the speech community against the backdrop of data from research on variation in minority languages. While members of the same speech community normally share a set of norms for social and stylistic constraints on variation and normally share a common grammar, a number of researchers have noted that some speech communities include subgroups of speakers that are unlike the rest of the community in that they observe different rules or constraints on variable usage. We provide an overview of the main types of discontinuities in variable usage which have been attested both in majority and minority languages and discuss twelve cases of discontinuity which have been documented in the speech of Franco-Ontarian adolescents residing in minority Francophone communities. We also attempt to account for the existence of these discontinuities and consider their implications for the concept of the speech community.

In some languages there are dependencies between grammatical systems, e.g. there may be fewer tense choices in negative than in positive polarity. We examine the direction of dependencies between eight types of grammatical systems, and establish a dependency hierarchy. Polarity is at the top of the hierarchy—the choices available in another system may depend on polarity, but the possibility of positive/negative specification never depends on any of the other systems considered here. Next come systems associated with the predicate (or perhaps with the clause as a whole): tense, aspect, and evidentiality. Next come systems associated with predicate arguments—person, reference classification (covering gender/noun class, classifiers, and human/nonhuman or animate/inanimate); then number. And finally case, which marks the function of a predicate argument. The rationale for this hierarchy is considered. An appendix adds systems of definiteness to the discussion.

Shakespeare’s verse is studded with alliteration and paronomasia. The more fundamental question of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorant and obstruent sequences, are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.

Jaeger, Lockwood, Kemmerer, Van Valin, Murphy, and Khalak 1996 (Language 72.3) reported an experimental study that provided reaction time and PET neuroimaging data said to support Pinker’s (1991) theory of inflectional morphology in which rule-governed forms and exceptions are processed by separate mechanisms. The results were also taken as evidence against connectionist accounts in which a single processing system generates both types of forms. We provide a critical analysis of the study that yields three main conclusions: First, Jaeger et al.’s data do not provide strong evidence that rule-governed forms and exceptions are processed in separate brain regions. Second, there are problems with the design of the study that contaminate critical comparisons between conditions. The results therefore afford alternative interpretations related to experiment-specific factors rather than the regular-irregular distinction. Third, the dissociations between rule-governed forms and exceptions observed in studies such as Jaeger et al.’s can be accommodated by the connectionist theory. We conclude by offering suggestions for future research that would overcome the major limitations of this study and provide more decisive evidence bearing on the issues.

Seidenberg & Hoeffner (hereafter S&H) have presented a critique of our PET study of regular and irregular verb morphology in English, and have faulted it on five main points. We will address each of these points briefly in this reply.