This article focuses on the relatively neglected grammar of names, including their morphosyntax, which has not aroused the kind of interest and controversy associated with the (putative) semantics of names. It also focuses on a few Indo-European languages (French, Greek, and particularly English), but refers to a wider range of language types. While not an exhaustive account of the variations in name syntax and morphology, significant variation is nevertheless encountered and analyzed. The suggested universal aspects have some plausibility. I propose that names belong universally, with pronouns and determiners, to a category of determinative. The behavior of names as vocatives and in predications of nomination suggests that they are, unlike pronouns and determiners, inherently neither definite nor indefinite. Moreover, in such circumstances names do not function as regular arguments of the predicator; they do not bear a specified semantic relation to the predicator: they are either EXTRASENTENTIAL or appositive. In order to figure as arguments in other types of predication, and be assigned a specified semantic relation, names must acquire definiteness. Languages differ in whether definiteness is signaled overtly or not: in English, for instance, definite names are not distinguished in form from nondefinite, whereas in Greek definite use of a name is marked by an accompanying article. Other languages vary.

This article reports on results from a broad crosslinguistic study based on data from thirty-five signed languages around the world. The study is the first of its kind, and the typological generalizations presented here cover the domain of interrogative structures as they appear across a wide range of geographically and genetically distinct signed languages. Manual and nonmanual ways of marking basic types of questions in signed languages are investigated. As a result, it becomes clear that the range of crosslinguistic variation is extensive for some subparameters, such as the structure of question-word paradigms, while other parameters, such as the use of nonmanual expressions in questions, show more similarities across signed languages. Finally, it is instructive to compare the findings from signed language typology to relevant data from spoken languages at a more abstract, crossmodality level.

A variety of mechanisms have been proposed in sociolinguistics for the propagation of an innovation through the speech community. The complexity of social systems makes it difficult to evaluate the different mechanisms empirically. We use the four-way typology of mechanisms proposed by Baxter and colleagues (2009), and define them mathematically in such a way that the effects of different mechanisms in the trajectory of a change can be modeled. The model suggests that the widely observed empirical pattern of an S-curve temporal trajectory of change can be captured only if the mechanisms for propagation include replicator selection, that is, differential weighting of the competing variants in a change, except under highly specialized circumstances that probably do not hold in speech communities in general.

Noun incorporation (NI) in Mapudungun is different from NI in better-studied languages like Mohawk in three ways: the incorporated noun is invisible to verbal agreement, incorporation into unaccusative verbs is impossible unless a possessor is stranded, and possessors are the only modifiers that can be stranded. These differences can be explained by saying that the trace of NI retains its person, number, and gender features in Mohawk but not in Mapudungun. Those aspects of grammar that do not involve these features treat NI in the two languages the same; thus, NI has the same gross distribution and anaphoric possibilities in both languages. We extend these results to Nahuatl, Chukchee, Ainu, Southern Tiwa, Mayali, and Wichita, showing that our theory accounts for Mithun’s (1984) distinction between Type III and Type IV noun incorporation in a general way.