This article deals with the typology of the case marking of semantic core roles. The competing economy considerations of hearer (disambiguation) and speaker (minimal effort) are formalized in terms of EVOLUTIONARY GAME THEORY. It is shown that the case-marking patterns that are attested in the languages of the world are those that are evolutionarily stable for different relative weightings of speaker economy and hearer economy, given the statistical patterns of language use that were extracted from corpora of naturally occurring conversations.

In this article, I focus on the intonation patterns of Turkish-German bilinguals to discuss intonation within the context of language contact and language variation. The intonational variance involves the realization of terminal rises as produced by second- and third-generation Turkish-German bilinguals living in Germany. These speakers produce two phonetically, phonologically, and pragmatically distinct rises, which differ from what is typically reported for German monolinguals. The primary phonetic differences between the two rises include the relative alignment and slope of the rise, with one rise aligning on the final syllable of the word regardless of the stress pattern and showing a significantly steeper slope than the other. Although the source of these two rises is likely the two languages used by the speakers, this is not a case of intonational code-switching. Rather, the two rises, along with other edge phenomena, form an intonational system in which the rises are in contrast with one another as well as with falls and level edge contours and as such play different pragmatic roles relative to one another.

This article examines crosslinguistic variation in FILLER-GAP DEPENDENCIES (WH-questions and relative clauses) from a processing perspective, and integrates research findings from psycholinguistics, language typology and generative grammar. Numerous implicational universals and hierarchies are proposed that receive a natural explanation in terms of processing and complexity. Filler-gap domains are complex in proportion to their size and in proportion to the amount of simultaneous syntactic and semantic processing that is required in addition to gap identification. They are simplified by making the gap easier to identify and process, or by avoiding a gap structure altogether. When grammatical variation is viewed from this perspective many descriptive insights and implicational patterns can be motivated that have either been stipulated or that have gone unnoticed hitherto. This approach provides an alternative to the assumption of innate parameterized subjacency constraints in this area.

This article examines the distribution of accusative case morphology in Kannada, detailing the syntactic, semantic, and morphological factors that contribute to its occurrence. Accusative case morphology is optional on inanimate direct objects. When optional, its presence indicates a specific reading, which I argue is best modeled as a choice function. The specific readings due to morphological form are distinct from specific readings that arise from syntactic position. Positional specificity is detectable only on morphologically noncasemarked object NPs. When the accusative case morpheme is obligatory, specificity effects are positional and not due to the presence of the morpheme. In this situation, additional morphology is required to achieve an inherently specific interpretation, suggesting a separation between morphological signals and meaning.