In this article, the author demonstrates that verbal compound constructions involving an ideophone and a light verb represent a widespread syntactic device in the world's languages. The author provides evidence that phono-symbolic morphemes cannot be treated as ‘bare’ direct objects in such constructions. Ideophones appearing in the light verb-adjacent position form a semantic unit with the verbal predicate, despite the fact that in some languages they can be syntacticized as (bare) nouns and appear in argumental position. Specifically, ideophones in complex predicates are part of the verbal domain with which they ‘blend’ (yielding a single predicate) through the mechanism of conflation, along the lines of Hale and Keyser (1993, 2002), and building on Ramchand (2008).

Arabic is often investigated within dialectological frameworks that emerged in the 19th century, though that work now exists alongside decades of variationist sociolinguistic research. The latter method typically produces abundant data, recorded at very high quality, which lend themselves to being transcribed, described and preserved. This paper presents descriptive information on the Arabic dialect of Gaza City, based on recent sociolinguistic fieldwork conducted in the Gaza Strip with 39 speakers from the wider Gaza City community. These descriptive aspects of the dialect are presented as part of a broader discussion regarding the need for a more holistic integration of sociolinguistics and language description and documentation in work on understudied or endangered varieties of Arabic.

Nancy Dorian's foundational work on the loss of Gaelic in the East Sutherland communities continues to provide important insights into the nature of the process of language change in situations of obsolescence. In this article I look at a subset of Dorian's data from the perspective of current syntactic theory, and argue that the connected loss of such apparently different constructions as objects of non-finite verbs, inalienable possessive structures, and a range of passives, and the concomitant restructuring of the grammar, all follow from the interaction between a reduction in agreement features on a functional head and the broad syntactic ecology of the language. This approach makes sense of why these apparently disparate constructions all undergo the particular kinds of change that are seen, changes which are mysterious from the perspective that an obsolescing language should alter to become more like the dominant language (in this case English) which is replacing it.

We argue for the existence of nominal serialization based on our analysis of a Finnish construction consisting of a syntactically fixed sequence in which a prosaic noun is followed by an ideophonic noun. A database compiled from a range of diverse sources provides material for the analysis. Muysken and Veenstra's (2006) criteria for the serialization of verbs are adapted and applied to our analysis of these ideophonic constructions as involving the serialization of nouns. We provide evidence that the noun–noun sequence is nested within a possessive structure that behaves as a syntactic atom, exhibits idiosyncratic phonology, and encodes speaker perspective.

Variation is described as two or more variants competing for finite resources. In this model, two outcomes are possible: language change or specialization. Specialization can be broken down further: specialization for different functions, and partial specialization – stable variation. In this paper, I analyze the differences between stable variation and language change using the two variables present in Ancient Egyptian possessive constructions. Observing four Egyptian possessive variants, split into two groups with two variants each – clitic possessor variants and full nominal possessor variants – for a total of 2251 tokens, I compare factors affecting variant choice in each possessive group. Results of distributional and multivariate analyses indicate that a) change over time occurs in clitic possession, while stable variation occurs with noun variants; and b) different kinds of factors govern the two sets: the continuous variable phrase complexity affects variant choice in nominal possession, but does not affect the clitic variants.

This article proposes that two linguistic systems (that is, two languages or registers) with different degrees of morphosyntactic integration of ideophones may apply the same restrictions on ideophones in different ways. In Study 1, the author shows quantitatively that the sentence-type restrictions reported for ideophones in several languages also constrain Japanese ideophones, but to a lesser extent. In Study 2, the author argues that two previously identified restrictions on Japanese ideophonic verbs appear to apply only partially to ideophonic verbs in baby talk and highly playful discourse. It is concluded that the strength of these restrictions is negatively correlated with the overall degree of morphosyntactic integration of ideophones in the language or register.

This paper analyzes the ergative-antipassive alternation in Inuktitut using a variationist sociolinguistic approach. This alternation is not a typical linguistic variable, as these constructions are traditionally believed to have different syntactic functions. However, the nature of those functions remains controversial (e.g., Bittner 1987, Manga 1996), and they are undergoing changes in some dialects (e.g., Johns 2001, Carrier 2012), with the antipassive being increasingly used in place of the ergative. Thus, a variationist sociolinguistic approach is employed here to identify the significant functions of these constructions, and to find the specific context where they overlap and the language change is taking place. The study examines data collected in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, which presents a case of new-dialect formation due to the High Arctic relocation. The analysis reveals the functions of these constructions, describes the source of fading ergativity for the dialects considered in this study, and supports Trudgill's (2004) theory on new-dialect formation.

The paper surveys overlap between corpus linguistics and variationist sociolinguistics. Corpus linguistics is customarily defined as a methodology that bases claims about language on usage patterns in collections of naturalistic, authentic speech or text. Because this is what is typically done in variationist sociolinguistics work, I argue that variationist sociolinguists are by definition corpus linguists, though of course the reverse is not true: the variationist method entails more than merely analyzing usage data, and not all corpus analysts are interested in variation. But that being said, a considerable and arguably increasing number of corpus linguists not formally trained in variationist sociolinguistics are explicitly concerned with variation and engage in what I call corpus-based variationist linguistics (CVL). I first discuss what unites or divides work in CVL and in variationist sociolinguistics. In a plea to cross subdisciplinary boundaries, I subsequently identify three research areas where variationist sociolinguists may draw inspiration from work in CVL: conducting multi-variable research, paying more attention to probabilistic grammars, and taking more seriously the register-sensitivity of variation patterns.