In addition to representing a main source of data in linguistic research, example sentences are a core vehicle for linguists in teaching a wide range of phenomena to our students. However, the content of these sentences often reflects the biases of the researchers who construct them: referents are typically given Anglocentric proper names like John and Mary, reflecting (at least implicitly) dominant white culture and conformity to heteronormative gender roles. To support linguists in shifting these practices, we present the Diverse Names Database, a database of 78 names from a variety of languages and cultures, confirmed with native speakers. We outline the goals for the project, introduce our process of developing and adjusting the design, and present some additional issues and reflections for consideration, such as how to use the database as one component of an affirming, anti-racist, and gender-equitable linguistics pedagogy. We aim to generate meta-level discussions about disciplinary conventions and canons, and to challenge the idea that underlying linguistic structures are, or should be, the only things of relevance when constructing example sentences. How we teach linguistics is part of how we practise it, and how we do both matters to the composition and direction of the field.

Linguistics faculty are sometimes reluctant to provide explicit writing instruction in their courses. One major point of hesitancy is that there is not enough time to “add” writing to the curriculum. We argue, in contrast, that spending strategic time on writing reinforces and enriches the linguistics curriculum, rather than detracting from it. When students apply linguistics to the real world through relevant writing assignments, linguistics becomes more meaningful, which increases student engagement and improves the perception of linguistics. Explicit writing instruction is beneficial for all students, but especially marginalized students. Teaching students how to write also provides them with transferable skills that they can take with them to their future careers.

This article provides the first systematic account of relativization in Likpakpaln, an understudied Mabia (Gur) language of Ghana. Broadly speaking, Likpakpaln features two types of relative clauses: restrictive and non-restrictive. Both types of relative clauses are finite and marked by a relative pronoun as well as a clausal definite determiner. The first type is always headed by an indefinite noun. The second is invariably headed by a definite head noun, is additionally marked by a prosodic break, and is usually under focus. The relative pronoun is a composite form comprised of a noun class agreement marker and an invariant relative marker. A number of the features of relative clauses in Likpakpaln align it with other Mabia languages of the region, whereas others distinguish it from these languages. This analysis situates Likpakpaln within its genealogical and areal context while providing new typological perspectives on the Mabia languages as a whole.

This article examines passive-type constructions in Mauritian Creole, arguing that they are topic, not passive constructions. I claim that their initial argument (the displaced object) occupies the specifier position of a Topic Phrase, not the structural subject position. This proposal is motivated by the fact that nothing at the surface identifies the displaced object as a grammatical subject, except its position relative to an auxiliary or verb. The topic analysis is supported by both semantic restrictions relating to specificity and animacy and syntactic restrictions relating to distribution (word order) and coordination. It is also supported by the fact that these same restrictions do not apply in unaccusatives, a structurally similar type of construction. The important contribution of this article is that passive-type constructions in Mauritian Creole are ‘apparent’ rather ‘real’ passives, with the wider implication being that creoles, like many languages, do not use canonical passives to express passive meaning.

Most people working in the field of linguistics in the US and Canada have an intuitive sense of who the “major players” are among PhD-granting linguistics departments. Our analysis demonstrates that the frequently-perceived hierarchy of linguistics programs is indeed correct. Drawing on publicly available information from Winter/Spring, 2019 on faculty at all PhD-granting linguistics programs across the US and Canada, we use social network and heat map visualizations to demonstrate the existence of an extraordinarily strong and relatively stable hierarchy of programs whose graduates dominate the linguistics academic job market. A secondary finding is that many of the top programs are characterized by gender imbalances. We argue that the top programs’ tremendous influence on the job market as a whole affords these programs the ability – indeed, the responsibility – to take the lead in effecting positive change in the field's hiring patterns more broadly.

Previous evidence has suggested that acoustic similarity between first language (L1) and second language (L2) sounds is an accurate indicator of the speakers’ L2 classification patterns. This study investigates this assumption by examining how speakers of an under-researched language, namely Cypriot Greek, classify L2 English vowels in terms of their L1 categories. The experimental protocol relied on a perception and a production study. For the purpose of the production study, two linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models, one with both formants and duration (FD) and one with only formants (F) as input, were used to predict this classification; the models included data from both English and Cypriot Greek speakers. The perception study consisted of a classification task performed by adult Cypriot Greek advanced speakers of English who permanently resided in Cyprus. The results demonstrated that acoustic similarity was a relatively good predictor of speakers’ classification patterns as the majority of L2 vowels classified with the highest proportion were predicted with success by the LDA models. In addition, the F model was better than the FD model in predicting the full range of responses. This shows that duration features were less important than formant features for the prediction of L2 vowel classification.

The present study investigates several linguistic factors that might be determinants of differences in the ease of acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in L2 contexts, using the acquisition of English relative clauses by Kurdish Sorani native speakers. The analysis of 1440 subject and object RCs formed by Kurdish Sorani-speaking learners of English in a sentence combination task and a sentence translation task indicates that the syntactic functions of the noun phrase (NP) relativized in the RC, the position of the RC in the matrix clause (whether centre- or right-embedded), and the properties of RCs in L1 affect the acquisition and the formation of RCs in L2. The study also provides evidence that the syntactic functions of the relativized NP in the matrix clause, and the consistency/inconsistency of word orders in L1 and L2 do not influence the acquisition of RCs in L2.

In this article, we document the gender of the noun “COVID-19” in a database of more than 76,000 tweets and in traditional media (approximately 500,000 articles) in French as spoken in Africa, (North) America and Europe. We find that North American media comply near-categorically with the recommendations of the feminine by the World Health Organization and local linguistic authorities in March 2020. The majority of North American tweets follow suit soon after. The African data show an increase of articles and tweets adopting the feminine after the Académie française's recommendation in May 2020. Finally, the feminine is negligible in the European data. We argue that among the factors at play are dialect-specific differences in French gender and loanword adaptation; the complex relationship among linguistic authorities, the public, and local media; and the relative delay in the Académie française's recommendation of the feminine.

This study examines the acquisition of kind-referring expressions such as The dodo is extinct. The objective is to investigate whether second language (L2) learners’ acquisition of nominal number marking and articles expressing kind-reference in English is affected by their first language (L1), their L2 proficiency in English, or the syntactic position of the kind-referring noun phrase (NP). L2 learners of English with Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish L1 backgrounds and a control group of native English speakers (NSs) participated in the study. The results from a Fill in the Gaps Task (FGT) and an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) demonstrated that L2 learners were more successful in their production and acceptability judgments when the expression of kind-reference in the target language was similar to that in their L1. The results also showed non-facilitative L1 transfer in the domain of bare singulars, as well as a positive effect of higher L2 proficiency on kind-referring NPs. Finally, the study revealed a subject/object asymmetry in the acquisition of kind-referring NPs in L2 English.

The present article analyzes the meaning and form of onomatopoeias in Tjwao, a Khoe-Kwadi (Kalahari Khoe) language. Making use of a prototype approach to categorization, a corpus of 113 onomatopoeic lexemes were tested for their compliance with the semantic, phonetic, and morphological features associated with the prototype of onomatopoeias in scholarly literature. The evidence demonstrates that Tjwao onomatopoeias tend to instantiate the prototype fully. This signifies, in turn, that, as far as their phonetics and morphology are concerned, Tjwao onomatopoeias tend to be extra-systematic.

Work by Chomsky et al. (2019) and Epstein et al. (2018) develops a third-factor principle of computational efficiency called “Determinacy”, which rules out “ambiguous” syntactic rule-applications by requiring one-to-one correspondences between the input or output of a rule and a single term in the domain of that rule. This article first adopts the concept of “Input Determinacy” articulated by Goto and Ishii (2019, 2020), who apply Determinacy specifically to the input of operations like Merge, and then proposes to extend Determinacy to the labeling procedure developed by Chomsky (2013, 2015). In particular, Input Determinacy can explain restrictions on labeling in contexts where multiple potential labels are available (labeling ambiguity), and it can also provide an explanation for Chomsky's (2013, 2015) proposal that syntactic movement of an item (“Internal Merge”) renders that item invisible to the labeling procedure.

This Commentaire bears out a prediction of Anand et al.'s (to appear) syntactic identity condition on sluicing. Identity is calculated over argument domains as small as small clauses. With extraction of a small clause subject, sluicing is possible where only a small clause predicate has an antecedent.

The English particle verb alternation has been argued to be sensitive to the social role occupied by speakers on radio broadcasts; Kroch and Small (1978) argue that radio show hosts and in-studio guests’ greater sensitivity to prescriptive norms makes them more likely to use the joined variant of the alternation than listeners calling in to the show. This study analyzes 10,521 tokens of variable particle verbs from the RadioTalk Corpus (Beeferman et al. 2019) to try to replicate the effect of speaker role. Our analysis confirms that direct object length, register, a measure of frequency, semantic compositionality of the particle verb, and the particle's prosody all condition the alternation. However, the effect of social role does not replicate.

This article provides a description and an Optimality Theory (OT) analysis of contact-induced changes and variation in contemporary Yoruba syllable structure. The article claims that a major diachronic change has occurred in the syllable structure of Yoruba phonology due to its continued contact with English, resulting in the invention, preservation, and hypercorrection of clusters and codas. I characterize this change in terms of OT constraint re-ranking (Miglio and Moren 2003) and assess the resulting synchronic variation against the indexed constraint approach of Itô and Mester (1995a, b, 1999), the ranked-winners approach of Coetzee (2004), the partial-order co-phonology of Anttila (1997), and the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) model of Goldwater and Johnson (2003). I show that none of these approaches is able to account independently for the categorical, gradient, and lexically conditioned variation that characterize the contemporary Yoruba syllable structure, but rather that a MaxEnt model augmented with lexical indexation is the most economical model that fits the Yoruba data accurately.

This article investigates the emergence of recursive DPs in child language. In certain languages, DP modification can be achieved via diverse structures and any number of different embedding markers (prepositions, particles, case-marker, etc.), each having to be learned; this diversity may impact the L1 development of recursive DP modification. Japanese, in contrast, relies on two uniform unrestricted strategies: the adnominal particle の (no) or a relative clause. We report the results of an elicited production study comparing the production of recursive DPs in Japanese-speaking children and adults. Our results show that Japanese children were much like adults in the types of semantic modificational relations that elicited the most target responses. Children were different from adults in that they were: a) much less successful overall, and b) they preferred no, independently of whether the condition was biased toward no. We review the implications of these findings for analyses of no.

The Aspect Hypothesis (AH) claims that L2 beginners use the perfective morpheme first with telic predicates (e.g., ‘arrive’, ‘build the house’) and only later with atelic ones (e.g., ‘know’, ‘work’). In contrast, the Lexical Underspecification Hypothesis (LUH) claims that beginners cannot represent the lexical aspect of L2 predicates (hence the telic vs. atelic distinction), because this distinction is a separate component of verb meaning. To investigate whether L2 learners distinguish between telic and atelic predicates, this study compares the responses from 299 L2 Italian learners (with different L1 backgrounds) and responses from 91 native speakers (NS) to the “for/in + time span” adverbial test (Dowty 1979). The analysis shows that native speakers and L2 learners’ responses to the adverbial test diverge significantly, with learners’ proficiency and – to a lesser extent – L1 modulating their ratings. The results suggest that native speakers and beginning-intermediate L2 learners might not represent telicity alike, either because L2 aspectual competence is still developing or because beginning learners rely on the semantic representations of their L1. These findings support the predictions of the LUH and suggest caution when trying to assess learners’ aspectual representations.

Substance-free phonology (SFP) is based on the hypothesis that phonological computation makes no reference to phonetic substance, and that phonological features are treated as arbitrary symbols for the purposes of computation. However, phonologists within the SFP tradition disagree about whether the content of phonological features is innate or learned (“emergent”), and if learned, whether the acquisition process is based on phonological patterning alone or refers to phonetic substance. In the present article we identify predictive differences between these accounts. We conclude that there is an innate basis to phonological features, but that featural content is not innate. We suggest that a hybrid phonetic-phonological approach to feature content acquisition may ultimately be the most successful.

Theories of phonology claim variously that phonological elements are either innate or emergent, and either substance-full or substance-free. A hitherto underdeveloped source of evidence for choosing between the four possible combinations of these claims lies in showing precisely how a child can acquire phonological elements. This article presents computer simulations that showcase a learning algorithm with which the learner creates phonological elements from a large number of sound–meaning pairs. In the course of language acquisition, phonological features gradually emerge both bottom-up and top-down, that is, both from the phonetic input (i.e., sound) and from the semantic or morphological input (i.e., structured meaning). In our computer simulations, the child's phonological features end up with emerged links to sounds (phonetic substance) as well as with emerged links to meanings (semantic substance), without containing either phonetic or semantic substance. These simulations therefore show that emergent substance-free phonological features are learnable. In the absence of learning algorithms for linking innate features to the language-specific variable phonetic reality, as well as the absence of learning algorithms for substance-full emergence, these results provide a new type of support for theories of phonology in which features are emergent and substance-free.

We argue that the representational primes of the human phonological faculty, the so-called distinctive features, are innate and substance-free. Our arguments for the innateness of features are built on traditional and novel logical arguments, experimental evidence accumulating over recent decades, and somewhat detailed proposals about their neurobiological reality. As symbols in the brain, features are substance-free, that is, they are devoid of articulatory and acoustic content, or even any direct reference to such phenomena. This is consistent with our substance-free conception of phonological computation, an approach that eschews functionalist notions like markedness, ease of articulation, and so on. We also outline a neural model of the phonetics-phonology interface called Cognitive Phonetics, which transduces innate features to speech articulation and from speech acoustics. These extra-grammatical transduction procedures are also part of the human biological endowment, which leaves no room for language-specific phonetics in our theory of the externalization of language. We show how Cognitive Phonetics can account for traditionally recognized intersegmental coarticulation, as well as the previously unexplored intrasegmental coarticulation, strongly suggesting that the basic units of speech production are transduced features.