When Powell published his exhaustive classification of the aboriginal languages of North America north of Mexico (1891), he set up 58 independent linguistic families. Since he was interested in establishing nomenclature as well as in determining families, he adopted the convention of adding the suffix -an or -ian to each of his proposed names. Even though it is desirable to have a uniform way of designating linguistic families, it turns out that the device has tended to obscure an extremely noteworthy fact about these families, namely that over 40 per cent of them are language isolates, that is, single languages with no demonstrable close relationship to any other single language or family of languages. Moreover, the majority of these language isolates were concentrated in two principal areas: (1) the “Pacific” area along the Pacific Coast from Southern Alaska to Baja California, and (2) the “Gulf” area along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Coahuila. Notwithstanding the fact that many of the language isolates of these two areas have now been subincluded in larger groupings, they remain, for the most part, but distantly related to their nearest congeners. For this reason they still play a significant role in imparting to these two large areas their distinctive character of great linguistic diversity.

Most studies of code switching have focussed on its use in informal, oral settings, but written examples also occur. The Castilian-Hebrew switching in the Jewish taqqanot ‘statutes’ of Valladolid, Spain, written in 1432, provides important data for testing the different constraints proposed in studies on code switching. Examples of switches between determiner-noun, preposition-noun, possessive-noun, quantifier-noun, and ser-participle indicate that the code switches in the taqqanot usually conform to some of the constraints already proposed: the Free Morpheme Constraint, the Equivalence Constraint, and the Closed-Class Constraint. At the same time, the analysis of these medieval switches confronts the same unresolved issues as other studies, for instance, the need to adequately distinguish between borrowings and code switches and the question of whether bilingual utterances always have an identifiable matrix language.

Of 3,570 segmental malformations found in three corpora of English loanwords in French, h is the only segment that is never substituted. While interdentals are systematically adapted, h is systematically deleted. We attribute this to the fact that French — like Italian and Portuguese, where h is also deleted — does not phonologically employ the Pharyngeal node, the primitive essential in the adaptation of gutturals. The primitive cannot be dealt with (substituted or deleted), thus blocking phonetic interpretation of h. We encode this formally in the Non-availability Principle. Spanish, Greek and Russian, which employ the Pharyngeal node, replace h with the velar fricative x, a native sound, just as Fula replaces Arabic pharyngeals that it lacks with native laryngeals. The Non-availability Principle predicts that gutturals, whose sole articulatory specification is Pharyngeal (as is the case of Arabic pharyngeals and laryngeals) will be deleted in a language like French. This is confirmed. The Pharyngeal node, like tones and lexical accent, constitutes an unavailable primitive in French.

In the evolution of morphological studies, morphological features and markedness have come to play increasingly important rôles. Feature notation in morphology allows the development of the notion of natural morphological class, renders explicit much of the internal structure of paradigms and permits the exploitation, suitably adapted, of many of the results obtained in phonology. Markedness considerations, particularly when linked to general theories of morphology, again highlight morphological structure, constrain the variety of permitted analyses, and indicate, at least in part, the expected direction of historical change. In the sections to follow, I will present an analysis of Old French nominal and adjectival inflection which makes key use of morphological features and the differences between the marked and unmarked values of these features. This study will be particularly concerned with constraining the morphological analysis of Old French and conversely, with using Old French data to investigate more general properties of morphological systems.

This article aims to examine to what extent English and Jordanian Arabic (JA) have the same classification of N + N compounds based on their degree of compositionality. It also attempts to propose a universally applicable classification of compositionality in N + N compounds. I suggest a modified version of the degree of compositionality based on previous classifications by Fernando (1996), Dirven and Verspoor (1998), and Kavka (2009). The new classification is based on the semantic contribution of the head and the non-head to the meaning of the whole compound. After I have applied the new scale to the JA data, I argue that English and JA have compounds that exhibit the four degrees of compositionality; namely completely compositional, semi-compositional, semi non-compositional and completely non-compositional. The article concludes with some recommendations for future research.

This article explores the realization of definiteness in Chuj, an underdocumented Mayan language. I show that Chuj provides support for recent theories that distinguish between weak and strong definite descriptions (e.g., Schwarz 2009, 2013; Arkoh and Matthewson 2013; Hanink 2018; Jenks 2018). A set of morphemes called “noun classifiers” contribute a uniqueness presupposition, composing directly with nominals to form weak definites. To form strong definites, I show that two pieces are required: (i) the noun classifier, which again contributes a uniqueness presupposition, and (ii) extra morphology that contributes an anaphoricity presupposition. Chuj strong definites thus provide explicit evidence for a decompositional account of weak and strong definites, as also advocated in Hanink 2018. I then extend this analysis to third person pronouns, which are realized in Chuj with bare classifiers, and which I propose come in two guises depending on their use. On the one hand, based on previous work (Postal 1966, Cooper 1979, Heim 1990), I argue that classifier pronouns can sometimes be E-type pronouns: weak definite determiners which combine with a covert index-introducing predicate. In such cases, classifier pronouns represent a strong definite description. On the other hand, I argue, based on diagnostics established in Bi and Jenks 2019, that Chuj classifier pronouns sometimes arise as a result of NP ellipsis (Elbourne 2001, 2005). In such cases, classifier pronouns reflect a weak definite description.

The goal of this article is to diagnose a verbal construction which has made it to common use in Austrian German and is typically unknown to many speakers of Federal German who have not been exposed to Austrian German. This construction is based on the verb gehen (‘go’) conjoined by a particle and the reflexive. An argument for its analysis as a degree-based sufficiency construction is developed, which is constructed by extending existing approaches in the literature on enough constructions and suggesting a meaning of the construction at hand, which is presuppositional in multiple respects. The results of diachronic corpus searches as well as the significance of the results of this work for the space of possibilities of the semantic change of motion verbs are discussed.

In reconstructing prior stages of languages the comparative method (CM) has been primarily applied to phonology. Two standard statements on the CM in recent times illustrate this restricted application. In his article of 1950 on the comparative method, Hoenigswald defines “reconstruction by the comparative method (as) essentially a problem in phonemics, in which the place of allophones is taken by sets of sound correspondences that are partially alike (share one component) and in complementary distribution” (Joos 1957: 298). And in his comprehensive statement (1960:132), Hoenigswald states that “the comparative method is based on the principle that sets of recurring phoneme correspondences between two related languages continue blocks of positional allophones from the mother language.” Handbooks dealing with reconstructed languages reflect the limitation to the phonological component of language. For statements made about syntax are hesitant (Meillet 1967: 29). And one notable attempt to reconstruct a syntactic sequence in Proto-Indo-European, Schleicher’s fable of the horses and the sheep, has been generally condemned, even though it was given some recognition by Hirt (Meillet 1967: 29, Hirt 1939: 113-115). In contrast with the earlier hesitation about applying the CM to the syntactic component of language I would like to suggest that recent developments in linguistics have made it possible to apply the CM to at least some syntactic patterns in much the way historical linguists have been dealing with phonological patterns.

The introduction of empty nuclear positions in syllable structure goes back to the early 80s. Since then, empty nuclei have been proposed in phonological analyses to account for vocalic epenthesis (vowel/Ø alternation). The analysis of Gen put forth in this article argues for empty nuclei although no vowel/Ø alternation can be observed in the language. Nevertheless, on the basis of the tonal patterns of Gen, it is shown that empty positions must be part of the underlying representation of syllables in the language. Another aspect of the study deals with consonant clusters. Thus far, all analyses supporting empty positions within a cluster have also referred to the absence of cooccurrence restrictions among the consonants surrounding the empty vowel. This paper provides new insights since, in Gen, the consonant clusters in which empty nuclei are proposed are typical of those observed in branching onset languages (like French, Italian and English) or in languages having light diphthongs. We argue that all attested consonant clusters in Gen are heterosyllabic.

We present a sociolinguistic analysis of the third person plural verbal suffix -ont in the variety of Acadian French spoken in the northeastern region of New Brunswick. The analysis shows that variation in the use of this traditional morpheme is conditioned by external factors and in particular by social network. In addition, retention of -ont is conditioned by an internal factor, as this suffix regularizes the singular/plural contrast in stems, and the 3SG/3PL contrast in verbal paradigms. The more -ont optimizes these contrasts, the greater the tendency to maintain this morpheme. Thus, forms such as i-pouvont, i-voulont, and i-buvont— which allow speakers to communicate their identity and social position within their speech community as well as to optimize the use of forms in the verb paradigms — have a greater probability of being retained than other forms that offer fewer benefits.

An aspect of the unravelling debate between proponents of ‘abstract’ phonology and ‘natural’ phonology focuses on the role of diachrony in justifying one’s descriptions and in underpinning one’s theories (insofar as they are meant to explain and predict). As a phonetologist who has no theoretical predilections for either transformational generative phonology (TGP) or Hooper’s natural generative phonology (NGP), my viewpoint leads me to view some of the issues raised in Piggott 1980, and in Hooper 1980 which replies to it, as either side-stepping what seem to me to be more fundamental issues or as addressing the issues discussed obliquely instead of head on. Although the fundamental position of developmental linguistics (or lectology) has been clarified at length in other writings, there may be some profit in making those points concrete in direct connection with an actual debate over an actual analysis. Piggott argues against the adequacy of Hooper’s NGP with data taken from Algonquin-Ojibwa. He contrasts Ojibwa nouns that exhibit the deletion of word-final glide plus lax vowel (e.g. anini ‘man’ vs aniniwag ‘men’) and Ojibwa verbs that exhibit the loss of word-final lax vowel but not a preceding glide (e.g. ni-wīndigōw ‘I am a Windigo’ vs ni-wīndigōwi-min ‘we are Windigos’).

Perhaps the most remarkable trait of human language is the way it adapts spontaneously to the particular experience the speaker wants to express. Thanks to our mother tongue, the linguistic means are available to render more or less faithfully whatever we intend to communicate regardless of the particular nature or quality of the message. This is remarkable first of all because, in itself, raw experience is strictly private and incommunicable, a fact Northrop Frye (1971:124) depicts quite vividly in the following passage:

Stowell (1981) demonstrates that nominal phrases in VP or PP are subject to certain constraints which are not pertinent in the domain of NP or AP. Nominal phrases in VP or PP are obligatory and they must be realized in a position which is adjacent to the head of the phrase (i.e., in a phrase marker; “V° NP” or “P° NP”). In contrast, nominal phrases in NP or AP are optional and do not have to be adjacent to the head. There is a systematic exception to this generalization in the lexically determined class of nouns known as Bare NP adverbs (cf. Larson 1985). Nominal phrases headed by one of this class of nouns appear optionally in VP and they are not required to be adjacent to the verb.