In this article, I argue that at least in some subsets of grammar, non-standard dialects are indeed more natural than their standard counterparts. I present data from the new Freiburg English Dialect corpus FRED, for the first time comparing and quantifying traditional dialect data from across the whole of Great Britain. The most frequent non-standard verb forms cluster around forms like drink – drunk – drunk and sing – sung – sung. The framework of Natural Morphology (Wurzel 1984, 1987) in combination with Bybee's Network Model (Bybee 1985, 1995) is employed to define the notion of naturalness and to explain why this verb class has been strengthened historically, and is still attracting new members today.

Phonological chain shifts have been the focus of many theoretical, developmental, and clinical concerns. This paper considers an overlooked property of the problem by focusing on the typological properties of the widely attested ‘s>θ>f’ chain shift involving the processes of Labialization and Dentalization in early phonological development. Findings are reported from a cross-sectional study of 234 children (ages 3 years; 0 months–7;9) with functional (nonorganic) phonological delays. The results reveal some unexpected gaps in the predicted interactions of these processes and are brought to bear on the evaluation of recent optimality theoretic proposals for the characterization of phonological interactions. A developmental modification to the theory is proposed that has the desired effect of precluding certain early-stage grammars. The proposal is further evaluated against the facts of another widely cited developmental chain shift known as the ‘puzzle>puddle>pickle’ problem (Smith 1973).

Since early studies in language development, scholars have noticed that function words, in particular auxiliaries, often appear to be missing in early speech, with the result that child utterances sometimes exhibit verbs with non-finite morphology in seemingly matrix clauses. This has led to the idea of a ‘deficit’ in the child's syntactic representations. In contrast with previous studies, this article explores the possibility that the child's phonology may considerably impact her overt realization of auxiliaries. Specifically, it examines the hypothesis that non-finite verbs in early speech are in fact attempted periphrastics (i.e. auxiliary/modal+non-finite verb) in which the auxiliaries are just reduced phonetically, often to the point where they remain unpronounced. We studied 28 normally developing French-speaking children aged between 23 and 37 months. New observational data uncovered a continuum in a given child's phonetic realizations of auxiliaries. Children showed various levels of auxiliary reduction, suggesting that their non-finite verbs are best analyzed as being part of periphrastics involving an auxiliary form that represents the endpoint on this continuum, i.e. is (completely) deleted. Further examination of these verbs revealed that their semantics corresponds to the semantics of adult periphrastics. Additionally, the results of an experiment where children imitated sentences with either periphrastic or synthetic verbs showed that responses with non-finite verbs were predominantly produced when the target sentence involved a periphrastic, rather than a synthetic verb.

I investigate the syntax and semantics of a previously unexamined English adjective construction, exemplified by sentences like Middlemarch is a long book to assign. The construction, which I call the nominal attributive-with-infinitive construction (nominal AIC), is of interest for the semantics of gradability and modality. I argue that the major interpretive characteristic of the nominal AIC – the interpretation of inappropriateness associated with it – arises from the interaction between the positive degree operator associated with the gradable adjective and the modality of the infinitival relative clause, which contributes to the computation of the standard of comparison. Nominal AICs are compared and contrasted with a surface-identical construction I call the clausal AIC, with attributive too, and with attributive comparatives; they are shown to exhibit major syntactic and semantic differences from all of these. The paper serves both as a contribution to the semantic literature on gradability and as a contribution to the descriptive grammar of English, as it is, to the best of my knowledge, the first systematic description and analysis of the nominal AIC.

This paper presents a description and a theoretical analysis of agreement within coordination in Lamaholot (Austronesian), where the first conjunct agrees with the conjunction ‘and’. Conjunctive agreement is obligatory in the subject position but is optional in the object position. The analysis is couched in terms of markedness of case and proposes that the case of the subject (nominative) is unmarked compared to the case of the object (accusative), and that only unmarked case enables phi-features of the agreement control to be copied onto the agreement host. Apparent optionality is accounted for by manners of case spreading in coordination. Conjunctive agreement is also reported in the genetically unrelated but areally related language of Walman. Although conjunctive agreement originates in verbal agreement with the comitative function in both languages, it is shown that grammaticalization from the comitative to the conjunction is more advanced in Lamaholot, at least in terms of syntax and morphology.

Lightfoot (2002) argues that syntactic reconstruction is rendered impossible by the lack of any analogue in syntax to the traditional notion of the phonological ‘correspondence set’ of the Comparative Method and by the radical discontinuity caused by reanalysis between successive grammars. Alice Harris and Lyle Campbell, in various works, have defended the notion of ‘syntactic pattern’ as the analogue of the correspondence set, arguing that patterns can be compared across languages, with innovations being stripped away to reveal aspects of the protolanguage. In this article, I argue that syntactic reconstruction can be carried out while maintaining and indeed utilizing core notions in generative approaches to syntactic change such as the central role of reanalysis and child language acquisition and the distinction between the abstract grammatical system and the surface output of that system. Reanalysis itself is constrained by the fact that both pre- and post-reanalysis grammars must be acquirable on the basis of the same primary linguistic data. This imposes limits on the possible hypotheses that can be entertained (‘local directionality’) even in the absence of any crosslinguistic generalizations about patterns of change (‘universal directionality’). This approach is then applied to aspects of the syntax of free relative clauses and negation in the early Brythonic Celtic languages (Welsh, Breton and Cornish), showing that non-trivial reconstructions can be achieved even where the daughter languages manifest significant differences.

This article evaluates Derek Bickerton's 2009 theory of language evolution. Bickerton argues that language was the result of a need to recruit individuals to help in the scavenging of carcasses of megafauna. The signals used for recruitment at the earliest stage of language evolution were iconic and could be used to refer to objects outside the sensory range of the receiver(s). Bickerton's scenario is an example of what is described in game theory as a stag hunt. We can, by recasting Bickerton's scenario as a stag hunt, identify criteria that any account of the transition to language must satisfy. There are several hurdles we would need to jump over to demonstrate that Bickerton's model is valid. First, not much is known about early hominin scavenging. While the available evidence is compatible with Bickerton's scenario, it is compatible with other scenarios as well. Second, Bickerton argues that, at the initial stage of language evolution, signals were grounded in salient aspects of the environment. The empirical support for natural salience as a determinant of the communication systems used at the earliest stages of language evolution is mixed at best; communication systems can arise spontaneously in the absence of natural salience. Third, maintaining communication systems is nontrivial because of the incentive to deceive.

The Oxford Handbook of Compounding surveys a variety of theoretical and descriptive issues, presenting overviews of compounding in a number of frameworks and sketches of compounding in a number of languages. Much of the book deals with Germanic noun–noun compounding. I take up some of the theoretical questions raised surrounding such constructions, in particular, the notion of attributive modification in noun-headed compounds. I focus on two issues. The first is the semantic relation between the head noun and its nominal modifier. Several authors repeat the argument that there is a small(-ish) fixed number of general semantic relations in noun–noun compounds (‘Lees's solution’), but I argue that the correct way to look at such compounds is what I call ‘Downing's solution’, in which we assume that the relation is specified pragmatically, and hence could be any relation at all. The second issue is the way that adjectives modify nouns inside compounds. Although there are languages in which compounded adjectives modify just as they do in phrases (Chukchee, Arleplog Swedish), in general the adjective has a classifier role and not that of a compositional attributive modifier. Thus, even if an English (or German) adjective–noun compound looks compositional, it isn't.