Quatrains in English folk verse are governed by laws that regulate the patterns of truncation (nonfilling of metrical positions) at the ends of lines. Each truncation pattern (we claim 26) is adhered to consistently through multiple stanzas and defines a verse type. Our descriptive goal is to account for why these and only these truncation patterns exist. Our crucial hypothesis is that the function of truncated lines is to render SALIENT certain layers in the natural constituency of the quatrain: the line, the couplet, or the quatrain as a whole. All three cannot be rendered salient at once, so the saliency constraints conflict. Each saliency constraint also conflicts with metrical constraints, which require that metrical positions be filled with appropriate syllables and stresses. The twenty-six well-formed quatrain types each represent a particular prioritization of the conflicting constraints.

We formalize this in optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993): the inventory of types is derived as the factorial typology of our constraint set; namely, the set of outputs of all grammars obtained by freely ranking the violable constraints. We also account for differing text frequencies in our data corpus by assigning each constraint a range of possible strengths, and from this develop an optimality-theoretic account of gradient well-formedness judgments.

We argue against the prevailing view that metathesis is somehow less natural phonetically than other processes and distinguished by a relatively greater phonological motivation. We survey cases of consonant-vowel metathesis—both synchronic processes and diachronic changes—with the goal of understanding how metathesis sound changes arise. We identify two types of CV metathesis, with distinct synchronic properties and distinct historical origins, and we argue that the two types do have natural, phonetic bases and fundamental commonalities.

This project collected linguistic data for spatial relations across a typologically and genetically varied set of languages. In the linguistic analysis, we focus on the ways in which propositions may be functionally equivalent across the linguistic communities while nonetheless representing semantically quite distinctive frames of reference. Running nonlinguistic experiments on subjects from these language communities, we find that a population’s cognitive frame of reference correlates with the linguistic frame of reference within the same referential domain.

This report examines the behavior of a morpheme um in Toba Batak (Malayo-Polynesian) which alternates as a prefix or an infix, and argues that the observed variation is conditioned by constraints on consonant clusters. Thus, Toba Batak shows that segmental factors may crucially influence the linear position of affixes, in contrast with a wealth of cases cited in the prosodic morphology literature in support of claims that the distributional properties of morphemes are often conditioned by prosodic structure. In addition, evidence from several sources on Toba Batak suggest that um in this language has been migrating from infixed to prefixed positions over time, and that taken as a whole, the stages involved in this change are linguistically coherent. This pattern of shift has interesting implications for typology and for theories of language evolution.