In many languages, finite-clause-embedding verbs vary in whether they allow WH-dependencies to cross from the embedded to the matrix clause—a phenomenon we call ‘bridge effects’. Why bridge effects exist has been the subject of much debate; we argue that contributing to the lack of consensus are the relatively small samples of verbs (from twelve to seventy-five for English) previously tested in the literature. To resolve this issue, we report two new data sets of bridge effects covering a nearly exhaustive sample of 640 English verbs. We use these data sets to address three research questions: Are there bridge effects at all? How well do leading theories of bridge effects explain observed variation across the full range of verbs? And are there new patterns emerging from our data that could lead to a better theory? We ultimately argue in favor of a multivariate approach, drawing upon existing ideas while including a novel morphosyntactic licensing component identified from our data. We also discuss implications for theories of locality and explore how context might affect the acceptability of WH-dependencies.

This article argues that language play is intimately related to linguistic variation and change. Using two corpora of online present-day English, we investigate playful conversion of adjectives into abstract nouns (e.g. made of awesome∅), uncovering consistent rule-governed patterning in the grammatical constraints in spite of this option stemming from deliberate subversion of standard overt suffixation. Building on Haspelmath's (1999) notion of ‘extravagance’ as one of the keys to language change, we account for the systematic patterning of deliberate linguistic subversion by appealing to tension between the need to stand out and the need to remain intelligible. While we do not claim that language play is the only cause of linguistic change, our findings position language play as a constant source of new linguistic variants in very large numbers, a small proportion of which endure as changes. Our conclusion is that language play goes a long way toward accounting for linguistic innovations—with respect to where they come from and why languages change at all.

This article provides an argument for Hong Kong English being a tonal language and informs the growing literature on word- and phrase-level prosody interactions. By teasing apart tonal effects that come from intonation and those that come from the word boundary, a clear picture emerges that H tones are assigned in all combinations to HKE di- and trisyllabic words. Tone spreading and blocking across words can also be seen in HKE, but syllables lexically specified for H never give up their tones. Complexity in HKE tone patterns arises when the H tones interact with boundary tones, such as the declarative final L% and the word-initial M.

English’s role as political science’s lingua franca should inspire reflection but not alarm. Greater multilingualism would undercut academic exchange and provide only a mirage of linguistic equality. The profession should nonetheless recognize and work to mitigate advantages held by native speakers.

This report describes a new research resource: a searchable database of 4,700 naturally occurring instances of sluicing in English, annotated so as to shed light on the questions that have shaped research on ellipsis since the 1960s. The paper describes the data set and how it can be obtained, how it was constructed, how it is organized, and how it can be queried. It also highlights some initial empirical findings, first describing general characteristics of the data, then focusing more closely on issues concerning antecedents and possible mismatches between antecedents and ellipsis sites.

Whether we like it or not, English has become the lingua franca of political science. The symposium presents three thoughtful essays about the pros and cons of this domination and what can and should be done to mitigate the negative consequences.

Linguistic diversity and multilingualism have implications for our understanding of politics that should be debated more thoroughly in connection with key epistemological and methodological issues in political science. Finding an appropriate approach to the linguistic frame of all political activities, and of the analysis of these activities, remains a crucial concern for those scholars in our discipline who are convinced that understanding politics requires understanding political culture, and that political cultures tend to overlap to a significant extent with linguistic cultures. From this perspective, the dominance of English in scholarly communication at the global level must be counterbalanced by a strong commitment to fostering and sustaining a multilingual ethos in our immediate academic environment.

In this article, we analyze the syntax of sentences such as Here is my daughter, which we refer to as presentatives. Presentatives turn out to have a wide range of properties that distinguish them sharply from ordinary declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, and exclamatives. Drawing on recent work on the left periphery, we develop a novel account of their syntactic structure that uses only independently proposed syntactic primitives. We argue that English presentatives involve an ordinary DP combined with two left-peripheral heads, encoding the time and location of the speaker, along with an anaphoric T head and a light verb. The resulting structure is a triple consisting of the speech time, speech location, and an entity denoted by a DP. The overall picture that emerges suggests that presentatives may constitute their own minor clause type, one that we might expect to be widely available crosslinguistically, since it is built from a particular combination of these widely available primitives. A brief survey of presentatives in languages other than English suggests that they are indeed widely available, and our analysis provides an explicit framework for detailed investigations of presentatives in other languages, which may use an overlapping, but not necessarily fully identical, set of primitives.

Variability in the second language (L2) referential choice could be due to lower language proficiency in the L2 or cross-linguistic influence. We compare the L2 English referential choices of bilinguals of typologically different languages (Spanish and English, null subject and non-null subject) to those of bilinguals of typologically similar languages (Dutch and English, both non-null subject and both using pronouns similarly in the target context). Bilinguals’ performance was further compared to that of a group of functional monolingual English speakers. Both bilingual groups were highly proficient, to explore whether high proficiency would attenuate differences with monolinguals. Participants completed a picture-description task eliciting references to antecedents in two-character contexts. Performance was comparable among all three groups in all conditions—evidence that cross-linguistic influence did not play a role for bilingual referential choices. These results thus show that highly proficient bilinguals of both typologically different and similar languages can perform comparably to monolinguals.

Despite comments in the ELT literature on the importance of word-stress for comprehensibility in English, there are many places where native speakers of English appear to pay it little attention, showing systematic variation as well as errors. At the very least, there is a paradox here, in that learners are told to get a feature right that native speakers feel free to ignore. More detailed consideration, though, shows that matters are not as simple as this implies. In this paper, several types of stress variation in English are exemplified, and it is also shown that in everyday usage native English speakers are flexible in what they will accept where stress is concerned. This raises questions about the best model for teaching stress in English as a second or foreign language. A simple right/wrong dichotomy is unlikely to reflect native usage.

This article presents a dictionary-based study of vowel reduction and preservation in British English in initial pretonic position and intertonic position. The different variables which have been claimed to influence those processes are tested on a data set of over 4,500 words using regression analyses. Our results confirm the significant effects of syllable structure, position of the vowel, word frequency and opaque prefixation. They also provide weak evidence for other factors such as vowel features and the existence of a base in which the vowel bears a stress, although no clear effects of word segmentability could be found. We also report new findings, as we find that foreign words reduce less than non-foreign words; we find that [+back] vowels reduce less than [−back] vowels in initial pretonic position; and we find a difference in behaviour for vowels followed by /sC/ clusters between non-derived words and stress-shifted derivatives.

Previous studies show that bilingual toddlers who develop their first language (L1) alongside another language can show early stabilization in the L1. This study investigates grammatical development of L1 Cantonese in children with very early onset of English before age 3 (earlier-onset bilinguals/EB, n = 31), with matched later-onset bilinguals (LB, n = 21) as the baseline. Input characteristics and child development measures at 3;0 and 5;8 were derived from parental reports, caretaker–child toy play and narration tasks. Results show that at 3;0, when the LB children were monolingual, the EB children were below the LB group in general grammatical complexity and seven specific grammatical structures (‘early costs’). At 5;8, the EB children converged with the LB children across grammatical measures in Cantonese, while demonstrating superior performance in English (‘long-term gains’). Our findings reveal a distinctive velocity of L1 development in early additive bilinguals raised in a bilingual society.

This study tested whether native Chinese (L1) readers whose second language (L2) was English could activate L2 translations of L1 words during L1 sentence reading. Chinese–English bilinguals read Chinese sentences silently, each containing a target word whose parafoveal preview was manipulated. To test cross-language semantic activation, each target word was paired with an identical, an unrelated and a translation-related preview that shared an L2 translation (e.g., 政黨, party as a political group) with the target word (e.g., 派對, party as a social gathering). Compared to the unrelated previews, the translation-related previews induced shorter target-word viewing times, despite no phonological/orthographic overlap. Furthermore, the highly proficient L2 readers showed earlier priming effects than did the average readers. Our results suggest that bilinguals activate lexical representations in both languages automatically and non-selectively, even when the task requires activation of one language only, and that the L2 lexical activation is modulated by L2 proficiency.