Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles while their eye movements were recorded. Speakers produced a large range of word orders, consistent with the language having flexible word order, with variation significantly influenced by agent and patient humanness. An analysis of eye movements showed that Murrinhpatha speakers' first fixation on an event character did not alone determine word order; rather, early in speech planning participants rapidly encoded BOTH event characters and their relationship to each other. That is, they engaged in Relational Encoding, laying down a very early conceptual foundation for the word order they eventually produced. These results support a Weakly Hierarchical account of sentence production and show that speakers of a free word order language encode the relationships between event participants during earlier stages of sentence planning than is typically observed for languages with fixed word orders.

The question of whether Irrealis is a meaningful concept in crosslinguistic comparison has been the subject of long-standing controversy. In this article, we argue that the semantic domain of irreality is split into two domains—the possible and the counterfactual—and that an ‘irrealis’ marker in a given language may refer either to only one of these domains or to both. A significant part of the crosslinguistic variation in what is referred to by the term irrealis can be traced back to this distinction. Other factors that obscure the realis/irrealis divide include functional subdivisions of the irrealis domain and paradigmatic competition within the TAM system of a language. We conclude that ‘irrealis’ is a crosslinguistically meaningful notion.

Phonetic realization is highly variable and highly structured within and across talkers. We examine three constraints that could structure the phonetic space of related speech sounds: target, contrast, and pattern uniformity. Target uniformity requires a uniform mapping from distinctive features to their corresponding phonetic targets within a talker, contrast uniformity requires a consistent difference in the phonetic targets that realize featural contrasts across talkers, and pattern uniformity requires a uniform template of phonetic targets across talkers. Focusing on American English sibilant fricatives, we measure and compare each constraint's influence on the phonetic targets corresponding to place of articulation. We find that target uniformity is the strongest constraint: each talker realizes a given distinctive feature value in highly similar ways across related sounds. Together with similar findings for other sound classes, this result reveals fine-grained systematicity in the mapping from phonology to phonetics and has implications for theories of speech production and speech perception.

In Spanish, the element todo ‘all’ agrees in gender and number with the noun it quantifies over (todas las ventanas ‘all.F.PL the.F.PL windows.F.PL'). In this article I discuss a novel construction in Rioplatense Spanish, restricted to existentials and possessives, in which todo agrees in gender and number with a given nominal in the structure but is neither syntactically nor semantically related to it (e.g. Hay toda agua en el baño (have.PRS all.F.SG water.F.SG in the bathroom) ‘There's water over the whole bathroom floor'). I argue that the syntax and the interpretation of this construction can be explained only if todo ‘all’ is understood to be modifying a silent element (in the sense of Kayne 2004). In particular, I propose that todo is the modifier of a PP headed by the silent preposition WITH, and that the nominal that agrees with todo is the complement of this silent P. This analysis sheds light on the structure of existential sentences and supports the view put forth in Levinson 2011, contra Freeze 1992, that a single underlying structure for possessive structures cannot be maintained.

We question the commonly accepted assumption that American Sign Language (ASL) has no overt copula. We present evidence that one of the functions of the sign Self in present-day ASL is as a copula. This sign evolved into its current function by way of a grammaticalization process called the ‘copula cycle’ (Katz 1996). The copula cycle consists of a deictic item transforming into a demonstrative pronoun and then into a copula by means of a series of syntactic reanalyses. We present corpus evidence from Old French Sign Language (LSF) in the 1850s, Old ASL in the 1910s, and present-day ASL dating to the 2000s and the late 2010s, and with these data analyze ASL examples of syntactic structures outlined by Li and Thompson (1977) that led to the increased use of Self as a copula. We also find that Self, which is not generally regarded as a pointing sign, follows the grammaticalization scheme for pointing signs outlined by Pfau and Steinbach (2006), indicating that the scheme may be used for signs that are derived from demonstratives. Ultimately, we conclude that ASL undergoes the same grammaticalization processes as spoken languages.

In this article, we develop a theory of the form and interpretation of nonrestrictive nominal appositives (NAPs) by combining two recent syntactic and pragmatic approaches. Following Ott (2016), we assume that NAPs are independent elliptical speech acts, which are linearly interpolated into their host sentences in production. Building on insights in Onea 2016, we argue that NAPs make their pragmatic contribution as short answers to discourse-structuring Potential Questions. We show how these two assumptions combine to yield a comprehensive theory of NAPs that captures their central syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties and furthermore sheds light on the mechanisms that govern their linear interpolation.

Discussing language variation in introductory linguistics courses is a given in helping university students understand that speakers and communities use language differently. For Spanish majors/minors in the US, such content can be explored in linguistics courses taught in Spanish. However, little research has been done on pedagogy for teaching Hispanic linguistics in this context. Following an action-based design, this study contributes to research on linguistics pedagogy by exploring how students in four sections of an introductory Spanish linguistics course reacted not only to the topic of social and/or structural variation but also to the use of corpus tools in exploring this topic.

Indexical associations are a crucial construct in third-wave variationist work, but little is understood about how perceivers incorporate indexical information over the course of sociolinguistic perception. In classic speaker evaluation, participants listen to a stimulus and report evaluations after listening, limiting our access to the moment-to-moment process of updating social percepts. Studies developing in-the-moment tools have combined methods development with substantive theoretical questions, hindering assessment. We test a continuous evaluation tool using a gestalt style shift and the English variables (ING) and like. The tool captures the expected reactions but has poor time granularity and very high variability. Divergence between slider responses and after-the-fact ratings suggests that the tasks may depend on a different mix of processes, underlining the multiplicity of sociolinguistic cognition processes.