There are two fundamentally different kinds of comparison: DIFFERENCE comparisons and CONTRAST comparisons. Unlike adjective phrases, noun phrases can occur in contrast comparisons (such as This bird is more a duck than a goose), but not in difference comparisons (#This bird is more a duck than that one is), where the mediation of a partitive particle is necessary (as in more of a duck). The problem is that postulating either semantic gradability or even just ad-hoc, metalinguistic, gradable interpretations for nouns in order to capture the meaning of contrast comparisons results in wrong predictions for difference comparisons and for most other gradable constructions (#very duck, #too duck, #duck enough, #the most duck). This article presents an account that exploits the psychological notion of a CONTRAST SET to explain these data and to correctly predict the truth conditions and characteristic inference patterns of contrast comparisons. Two main conclusions are, first, that if adjectives are degree expressions, so are nouns, and second, that nouns form a different type of degree expression.

Case assignment and argument licensing in process nominals, that is, nouns such as destruction that are morphologically related to verbs, are assumed to operate in a verblike manner both within government-and-binding theory and, more recently, within the distributed morphology framework. The data from Russian challenge this approach and reveal that there is an important difference between the verbal and the nominal domains: case assignment in verbs is sensitive to the underlying argument structure, but in nominals to surface structure, that is, the collection of overt arguments. We propose a hierarchy of case-assignment rules that applies in the nominal domain. Moreover, within the nominal domain, case assignment is uniform: the same rules apply to different types of nominals, including prototypical process nominals and relational nouns. The main theoretical advantage of our lexicalist, constraint-based approach is that it can capture similarities between the verbal and the nominal domains, seen in the assignment of inherent and lexical cases, but also in their fundamental differences.

The received wisdom is that word-order alternations in Slavic languages arise as a direct consequence of word-order-related information-structure constraints such as ‘Place given expressions before new ones’. In this article, we compare the word-order hypothesis with a competing one, according to which word-order alternations arise as a consequence of a prosodic constraint: ‘Avoid stress on given expressions’. Based on novel experimental and modeling data, we conclude that the prosodic hypothesis is more adequate than the word-order hypothesis. Yet we also show that combining the strengths of both hypotheses provides the best fit for the data. Methodologically, our article is based on gradient acceptability judgments and multiple regression, which allows us to evaluate whether violations of generalizations like ‘Given precedes new’ or ‘Given lacks stress’ lead to a consistent decrease in acceptability and to quantify the size of their respective effects. Focusing on the empirical adequacy of such generalizations rather than on specific theoretical implementations also makes it possible to bridge the gap between different linguistic traditions and to directly compare predictions emerging from formal and functional approaches.

This study is concerned with whether an asymmetric phonetic overlap between speaker groups contributes to the directional spread of sound change. An acoustic analysis of speakers of Southern British English showed that younger speakers’ fronted /u/ was probabilistically closer to that of older speakers’ retracted /u/ distributions than the other way around. Agent-based modeling based on the same data showed an asymmetric shift of older toward younger speakers’ fronted /u/. The general conclusion is that sound change is likely to be propagated when a phonetic bias within an individual is further magnified by a difference between speaker groups that is in the same direction.

Given that nouns rarely appear in isolation in French, infants acquiring the language must often retrieve the underlying representation of vowel-initial lexical forms from liaison contexts that provide conflicting information about the initial phoneme. Given this ambiguity, how do learners represent these nouns in their lexicons, and how do these representations change as learners’ knowledge of liaison and the lexicon become more adult-like? To explore this question, we analyze the types of errors children make, in both naturalistic and elicited speech, and how these are affected by input frequency. In doing so, we evaluate two major proposals for how children's early representations of liaison develop. The first model, couched in a constructionist framework, predicts relatively late mastery of liaison (age five or older) and heavy dependence on the contexts in which a particular noun appears in the input. The second model takes an approach to liaison development that integrates it more closely with general phonological development and predicts relatively early mastery (by age three). The results of a corpus study reveal that by age three children are correctly producing liaison in the nominal domain and that their production errors are consistent with a phonological model of liaison acquisition. An elicitation task demonstrates that three-year-olds succeed at learning and correctly apply their knowledge of liaison to new nouns following brief exposure, though their productions continue to be influenced by nouns’ input distributions. Taken together, our findings suggest that by age three children are well on their way to adult-like representations of liaison. A phonologically based model, incorporating the effect of distributional context on early errors, provides a better overall fit to the data we present.

STYLISTIC FRONTING (SF) is an optional syntactic phenomenon whereby a lexical item that may belong to various syntactic categories fronts to a pre-finite-V position, if no subject is merged in SPECIP. The literature reports that SF is productive in Icelandic and Old Scandinavian, and it is also attested in some Old Romance languages (Old Catalan, Old French). This article presents a phase-based analysis of SF in Old Italian. In this language, SF has some previously undiscussed characteristics. A corpus study shows that Old Italian displays a root/nonroot asymmetry in the typology of fronting items. In root clauses, nominal elements, such as nominal predicates with a special semantics, front more frequently than verbal elements (infinitives, past participles), which most frequently front in nonroot clauses. Since fronting in root clauses is intrinsically ambiguous with topicalization and focalization, it is not considered SF and is not extensively discussed in this article. By contrast, I analyze as proper SF the fronting operation that occurs in nonroot clauses, and I argue that this is a movement anchoring the event-structure (VP) semantic content to the context (FINP). This type of movement is possible only if vP is not a phase and no intervening agentive external argument is merged in SPECVP. The fronted material is pragmatically presupposed and interpreted as the SUBJECT OF PREDICATION. Pragmatics tests corroborate the argument.

There has been extraordinary attention devoted to the Celtic mutations over the years, with various authors arguing for phonological, morphological, or lexical treatments (and various blends thereof). Strikingly, this literature is virtually bereft of any mention of the phonological restrictions that can sometimes limit the applicability of mutation. In this article, we provide a detailed experimental and corpus-based investigation of the phonological restrictions on Scottish Gaelic mutation. Using both techniques, we show that the phonological restrictions are alive yet are in a state of flux. The continued productivity of these phonological aspects of the mutation system argues that any analysis of mutation must attend to them.

As linguists theorize about language endangerment and loss (LEL), we must understand the big picture: the coexistence of languages in particular polities and how the competition that sometimes arises is resolved. Many concerns have been voiced about LEL since the early 1990s, but theoretical developments regarding language vitality lag far behind linguists’ current investment in language advocacy. While discussing issues such as the failure to connect the subject matter to language evolution in general, the framing of LEL as deleterious almost exclusively to ‘indigenous peoples’, a lack of historical time depth, and the omission of the ecological factors in typical approaches to LEL, I argue that linguistics should theorize about language vitality more adequately than has been the case to date.

This article analyzes the changes in subject position in Portuguese between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in terms of the loss of verb-second grammar properties and the rise of an SVO grammar. Our analysis is based on the survey of an unprecedented amount of data for sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Portuguese in a syntactically annotated corpus. We argue that in Classical Portuguese (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries) the verb moves to C(omp), there is no preverbal position reserved for subjects, and all of the preverbal phrases are discourse-prominent constituents—which characterizes Classical Portuguese as a V2-type grammar. In Modern European Portuguese (from the eighteenth century on), in contrast, the verb does not move as high as C(omp), and there is a preverbal position reserved for subjects—in other words, this is an SVO grammar. We suggest that this change from a verb-movement, V2-type grammar to an SVO grammar derived from a prosodic change that happened in the seventeenth century, which also affected clitic placement.

Dependent clauses are one of the prominent examples illustrating the ability to generate recursive structures by a computational mechanism. Three types of dependent clauses have usually been distinguished in a broader sense: (i) complement clauses, (ii) adverbial clauses, and (iii) correlative or relative clauses. The question of whether these three types can be reduced to a single abstract structure has inspired several fruitful lines of research, resulting in a mass of new empirical findings and leading to novel results. For example, many authors have proposed to analyze different types of dependent clauses as correlative/relative clauses (see Arsenijevic 2009, Bhatt & Pancheva 2006, Caponigro & Polinsky 2011, Geis 1970, Haegeman 2012, Kayne 2014, Krapova 2010, Kratzer 2006, Moulton 2009, 2015, among many others). This special issue of the Historical Syntax section of Language, entitled New insights into the syntax and semantics of complementation, focuses in particular on the diachronic syntax and semantics of dependent clauses and shows to what extent complement, adverbial, and relative/correla- tive clauses may be related to each other.

Salikoko Mufwene raises significant questions about how and why languages become endangered (and die). The purpose of this reply is to provide additional perspective on what goes into answering these questions. Several of Mufwene's claims are responded to. Questions are raised concerning what the theorizing about language endangerment and loss (LEL) that Mufwene calls for would be like. Many causal factors associated with LEL are mentioned, advances in understanding are pointed out, and the roles of language documentation and language revitalization are clarified.

A major argument against the feasibility of reconstructing syntax for proto-stages is the widely discussed lack of directionality of syntactic change. In a recent typology of changes in argument structure constructions based on Germanic (Barödal 2015), several different, yet opposing, changes are reported. These include, among others, processes sometimes called dative sickness, nominative sickness, and accusative sickness. In order to tease apart the roles of the different processes, we have carried out a phylogenetic trait analysis on a predefined data set of twelve predicates found across the Germanic phyla using the MULTISTATE method. This is, as far as we are aware, the first application of the MULTISTATE method (Pagel et al. 2004) in historical syntax. The results clearly favor one of the models, the dative sickness model, over any other model, as this model is the only one that can accurately account for both the observed diversity of case frames and the independently proposed philological reconstructions. Methods of evolutionary trait analysis can be used to model evolutionary paths of argument structure constructions, and they provide the perfect testing ground for hypotheses arrived at through philological reconstruction, based on classical historical-comparative methods.

It is standardly assumed that the German declarative dass-complementizer evolved from the demonstrative pronoun (Old High German thaz) used cataphorically. On this analysis, the source structure would be a paratactic sequence of two sentences in which thaz occurred in the final position of the first clause and pointed forward to the content of the second clause. Out of this structure, thaz developed into a subordinate conjunction/complementizer via a shift of the clause boundary (as in Mary knows that: Peter is lying → Mary knows that Peter is lying). This article takes issue with the standard assumption and puts forward an alternative account in which the declarative complementizer developed from a correlative construction (as in Mary knows that, that Peter is lying). The correlative construction (arguably also with an optionally silent correlative) is robustly attested in the old Germanic and old Indo-European languages. The source structure was thus not a sequence of syntactically independent clauses, but a hypotactic structure with an explicative relative clause associated with a silent correlative element in the main clause. In line with the hypothesis currently under discussion—that apparent noun-complement clauses are in fact relative clauses—it is argued that the explicative clause in the correlative structure was a relative clause, and thus the declarative complementizer developed from the relative complementizer thaz. The syntactic reanalyses involved in this new scenario are far less radical than in the traditional one. The new scenario is furthermore supported by crosslinguistic evidence: the development of relativizers into complementizers is a frequently attested grammaticalization path.

In examining the history of /ay/-raising before voiceless consonants in Philadelphia, Josef Fruehwald (2016) concludes that either categorical phonological conditioning was present from the very onset of this phonetic change, or the period of purely phonetic conditioning was too brief to be identified. This is based on the observation that raising is phonological in the Philadelphia data: it occurs before voiced flaps that are underlyingly voiceless (as in writing), but not before underlyingly voiced flaps (as in riding). In this response, we provide the first acoustic documentation of an English variety that shows an incipient phase of /ay/-raising where the conditioning environment is purely phonetic.

We review The Austronesian languages, by Robert Blust, with particular attention to how some of Blust's generalizations about the phonology and morphology of Austronesian languages play out in Malagasy and Chamorro.

One critical assumption that Salikoko Mufwene (2017) makes about the field of language endangerment and loss is that linguists engaged in language endangerment, documentation, and revitalization are concerned with indigenous languages, which naturally leaves out nonindigenous languages. This response concerns itself with addressing this assumption, with a focus on a particular group of nonindigenous languages. It provides insight on the levels of endangerment of pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages for which we have information, and considers some reasons why it is important to focus on the endangerment and loss of these types of nonindigenous languages.

This article addresses the German conjunction zumal ‘the more so as’ from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. On the basis of historical corpus data, I trace the uses and meaning development of the lexical item zumal, from a temporal adverb to a conjunction. I argue that it acquired its current syntactic and interpretive features from the final step in this development: the focus particle zumal adopted some syntactic features and meaning components from the subordinate causal conjunctions da and weil, with which it frequently cooccurred in the historical data. In the current language it is thus best analyzed as a subordinate causal conjunction with focus-marking properties, similar to the combination besonders weil ‘especially since’.

Salikoko Mufwene's (2017) ‘Language vitality’ ranges across many topics related to language endangerment and loss (LEL). In this response, I agree that linguists do need a theory of the reasons LEL occurs, if we are to be effective in aiding communities with language maintenance and revitalization. I argue that there IS an existing, important literature on language loss and language revitalization and reclamation. Finally, I argue that there is good reason to believe that indigenous minority language endangerment is worth considering as a distinct category of LEL.

Berkson, Davis, and Strickler (2017) provide an invaluable report on incipient /ay/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Their data suggest that /ay/-raising conditioned strictly by phonetic voicelessness is a possible early stage in the development of /ay/-raising. This raises a particularly vexing question of why /ay/-raising has gone on to be conditioned by phonological voicing in all North American varieties for which its interaction with /t, d/ flapping has been examined. It suggests that the process of phonologization reorganizes the distribution of phonetic variants, rather than simply discretizing phonetic precursors.