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- Volume 6, 2020
Annual Review of Linguistics - Volume 6, 2020
Volume 6, 2020
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On Becoming a Physicist of Mind
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 1–23More LessIn 1976, the German Max Planck Society established a new research enterprise in psycholinguistics, which became the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. I was fortunate enough to be invited to direct this institute. It enabled me, with my background in visual and auditory psychophysics and the theory of formal grammars and automata, to develop a long-term chronometric endeavor to dissect the process of speaking. It led, among other work, to my book Speaking (1989) and to my research team's article in Brain and Behavioral Sciences “A Theory of Lexical Access in Speech Production” (1999). When I later became president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, I helped initiate the Women for Science research project of the Inter Academy Council, a project chaired by my physicist sister at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. As an emeritus I published a comprehensive History of Psycholinguistics (2013). As will become clear, many people inspired and joined me in these undertakings.
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Metered Verse
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 25–44More LessGenerative metrics studies versification as a stylization of phonological form. This review article outlines its main goals, hypotheses, and findings and presents a template-matching version of it, which models meters as mappings of abstract verse patterns to their permissible linguistic instantiations. It lays out the key features that verse rhythm shares with rhythm in other cognitive domains and distinguishes it from biological rhythms, offering evidence suggesting that these features are rooted in the language faculty. After a review of the typology of stress-, weight-, and tone-based meters, the predictions of the theory are illustrated in more detail with an analysis of Shakespeare's blank verse. The theory is extended by modeling conventions of setting poems to music as an interface between composition and delivery. English text-setting, which privileges natural phonological stress and phrasing, even at the expense of the poem's meter, lineation, and caesuras, is contrasted with other traditions in which text-setting is more faithful to meter. The negotiation of phonology and meter in song provides a sensitive probe into the prosodic organization of language.
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Grammatical Gender: A Close Look at Gender Assignment Across Languages
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 45–66More LessThis review takes a broad perspective on one of the most fundamental issues for gender research in linguistics: gender assignment (i.e., how different nouns are sorted into different genders). I first build on previous typological research to draw together the main generalizations about gender assignment. I then compare lexical and structural approaches to gender assignment in linguistic theory and argue that a structural approach is likely more successful at explaining gender assignment cross-linguistically.
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The Role of the Lexicon in the Syntax–Semantics Interface
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 67–87More LessEvidence from the study of verbal argument alternations suggests that the syntactic structure of an event-denoting clause often reflects the structure of the event it denotes, in the sense that parts of the clause refer to aspects of the event. The patterns of such mappings between clause structure and event structure tend to be crosslinguistically uniform. Proffered explanations for these phenomena fall into two distinct theoretical currents. Lexicalists explain these phenomena in terms of the inherent paradigmatic structure of the lexicon, which leads verbs with similar meanings to have similar valence structures. Constructionists see these phenomena as evidence that the syntax itself conveys meaning that composes with the meaning contributed by the verb. The roots of this theoretical split are traced to differing perspectives on polysemy, and a partial synthesis of the two perspectives is proposed.
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The Syntax of Adverbials
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 89–109More LessAfter explicit phrase structure rules were abandoned in government–binding theory, some account of the distribution of adverbials became necessary. This review surveys two current theories. The first, often called the scopal theory, posits that the main factor is semantics: In general, adverbials can appear wherever they cause no violation of semantic well-formedness. Purely syntactic and morphological factors play a role, but it is a relatively minor one. Though the scopal theory predicts a significant range of adverbial distribution correctly, much of its underlying semantic analysis remains to be developed in explicit terms. The second theory discussed in this review, the cartographic theory, takes syntax as central, proposing that adverbials are individually licensed by dedicated functional heads, arranged in a rigid hierarchy by Universal Grammar. This approach has some empirical successes but also a number of problems; thus, the scopal theory is more likely to represent the right direction.
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Successive Cyclicity and the Syntax of Long-Distance Dependencies
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 111–130More LessEvery major theoretical approach to syntactic structure incorporates a mechanism for generating unbounded dependencies. In this article, I distinguish between some of the most commonly entertained mechanisms by looking in detail at one of the most fundamental discoveries about long-distance dependencies, the fact that they are successive cyclic. Most of the mechanisms posited in order to generate long-distance dependencies capture this property, but make different predictions about what reflexes of successive cyclicity should be attested across languages. In particular, theories of long-distance dependencies can be distinguished according to whether they propose intermediate occurrences of the moving phrases (movement theories) or whether intermediate heads carry features relevant to displacement (featural theories). I show that a full consideration of the typology of successive cyclicity provides clear evidence that both components are part of the syntax of long-distance dependencies. In addition, reflexes of successive cyclicity are equally distributed across the CP and vP edge, suggesting that these are parallel domains.
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Antipassives in Crosslinguistic Perspective
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 131–153More LessRecent descriptive and typological research on antipassives has allowed many existing claims about antipassives to be reevaluated. Although there is still debate about which characteristics are necessary and sufficient for a construction to be considered an antipassive, it is clear that antipassives indicated by verbal marking are more widespread than previously thought. Parameters such as whether the patient can be expressed as an oblique argument, whether the antipassive is lexically restricted, and whether the antipassive is obligatory are important factors in the distribution and classification of antipassive constructions. Additionally, antipassive functions are more varied than often described, and do not necessarily correlate with morphological or syntactic ergativity.
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Lexical-Functional Grammar: An Overview
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 155–172More LessLexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) is a model for the analysis of language in which different types of linguistic information are represented in separate dimensions, each with its own formalism. These dimensions are linked by mapping principles. In this article, I describe the architecture of the model and illustrate some dimensions of information and the mapping between them in more detail. I also provide an outline of the analysis of long-distance dependencies and control to illustrate the advantages of this type of model. I briefly mention some further areas where LFG has proven to be a useful tool for analysis and provide references for the reader to follow up.
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Determiners and Bare Nouns
Veneeta Dayal, and Yağmur SağVol. 6 (2020), pp. 173–194More LessDeterminers and bare nouns raise questions about the interface between morphosyntax and semantics. On the syntactic side, the primary issue is whether bare nouns have a null determiner making all noun phrases structurally uniform. On the semantic side, the primary issue involves determining and deriving the range of permissible readings. Of primary significance are the availability of definite and indefinite readings for bare nouns and how such readings relate to the presence or absence of lexical exponents of (in)definiteness in a language. Further refinements include the special scope properties of kind terms versus regular indefinites, differences between singular and plural kind terms, number distinctions within the noun phrase, and the role of incorporation. We present the theoretical and typological advances that have been made in addressing these issues and identify which considerations are purely syntactic or purely semantic in nature and which considerations have implications for the interface.
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Treebanks in Historical Syntax
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 195–212More LessOver the last 20 years, the development of a wide range of treebanks that track the evolution of languages’ syntactic patterns through time has revolutionized the field of historical syntax. The range of treebanks now available facilitates research into the long histories of many of the major Indo-European languages. Although the field's essentially corpus-based methodology has not changed, the quantity of data now available and the ease and precision with which those data can be extracted have created new opportunities. For example, with a treebank it is possible to extract all examples of surface strings associated only with abstract structures (e.g., relative clauses, extraposition), to investigate predictions made by syntactic analyses, to search for rare constructions, and to extract enough data to support sophisticated statistical analyses. Crucially, treebanks make verification and replicability of results possible.
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Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 213–234More LessDistributional semantics provides multidimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown by a large body of research in computational linguistics; yet, its impact in theoretical linguistics has so far been limited. This review provides a critical discussion of the literature on distributional semantics, with an emphasis on methods and results that are relevant for theoretical linguistics, in three areas: semantic change, polysemy and composition, and the grammar–semantics interface (specifically, the interface of semantics with syntax and with derivational morphology). The goal of this review is to foster greater cross-fertilization of theoretical and computational approaches to language as a means to advance our collective knowledge of how it works.
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The Grammar of Degree: Gradability Across Languages
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 235–259More LessIn this review, we discuss the empirical landscape of degree constructions cross-linguistically as well as the major analytical avenues that have been pursued to account for individual languages and cross-linguistic variation. We first focus on comparatives and outline various compositional strategies for different types of comparative sentences as well as points of cross-linguistic variation in the lexicalization of comparative operators and gradable predicates. We then expand the discussion to superlatives, equatives, and other degree constructions. Finally, we turn to constructions beyond the prototypical degree constructions but where degree-based analyses have been pursued; we focus on change-of-state verbs and exclamatives. This is an area that is especially ripe for future cross-linguistic research. We conclude by mentioning connections to other subfields of linguistics, such as language acquisition, historical linguistics, and language processing.
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Techniques in Complex Semantic Fieldwork
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 261–283More LessThe main goal of semantic fieldwork is to accurately capture the contribution of natural language expressions to truth conditions and to pragmatic felicity conditions, by interacting with native speakers of the language under investigation. Most semantic fieldwork tasks (including, for example, acceptability judgment tasks, elicited production tasks, and translation tasks) require the researcher to present a discourse context to the consultant. The important questions then become how to present that context to consultants and how to best ensure that the consultant and the researcher have the same context in mind. We argue that phenomena which rely on controlling for interlocutor beliefs are particularly well suited for the storyboard elicitation methodology. This includes “out-of-the-blue” scenarios, which we treat as a special type of discourse context that must also be controlled for. We illustrate these claims by presenting novel storyboards targeting the de re/de dicto ambiguity and verum marking.
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From African American Vernacular English to African American Language: Rethinking the Study of Race and Language in African Americans’ Speech
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 285–300More LessAfrican American Vernacular English (AAVE), one of the most studied dialects in American English, has undergone several changes in its label across the years. Its most recent designation, African American Language (AAL), reflects a change in approaches to studying race and language in the field. Drawing on observations from related fields like linguistic anthropology and critical race theory, I discuss different conceptualizations of the relationship between race and language and argue in favor of an approach that both recognizes and prioritizes the study of variation within the dialect. This approach will enable researchers to advance theory in language variation and change while also contributing to larger sociopolitical objectives to diversify narratives of blackness.
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The Status of Endangered Contact Languages of the World
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 301–318More LessThis article provides an up-to-date perspective on the endangerment that contact languages around the world are facing, with a focus on pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages. While language contact is often associated with language shift and hence language endangerment, languages arising from contact also can and do face the risk of endangerment. Recent observations and studies show that contact languages may be at twice the risk of endangerment and loss compared with noncontact languages. The loss of these languages is highly consequential. The arguments that usually apply to why noncontact languages should be conserved also apply to many of these contact languages. This article highlights recent work on the documentation and preservation of contact languages and suggests that much more can be done to protect and conserve this unique category of languages.
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Individual Differences in First Language Acquisition
Evan Kidd, and Seamus DonnellyVol. 6 (2020), pp. 319–340More LessHumans vary in almost every dimension imaginable, and language is no exception. In this article, we review the past research that has focused on individual differences (IDs) in first language acquisition. We first consider how different theoretical traditions in language acquisition treat IDs, and we argue that a focus on IDs is important given its potential to reveal the developmental dynamics and architectural constraints of the linguistic system. We then review IDs research that has examined variation in children's linguistic input, early speech perception, and vocabulary and grammatical development. In each case, we observe systematic and meaningful variation, such that variation in one domain (e.g., early auditory and speech processing) has meaningful developmental consequences for development in higher-order domains (e.g., vocabulary). The research suggests a high degree of integration across the linguistic system, in which development across multiple linguistic domains is tightly coupled.
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Language Variation and Social Networks
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 341–361More LessThe close relationship between language variation and the nature of social ties among people has been the focus of long-standing commentary in linguistics. A central puzzle in this relationship is the seeming contradiction between two bodies of evidence: automatic, mechanistic diffusion of linguistic forms through social networks and ideologically mediated choice in uptake of forms. Nearly a century of research has revealed that certain types of network structure facilitate the diffusion of linguistic innovation, but these network structures are always anchored in temporally specific and ideologically mediated cultural norms—for instance, norms of gender, class, and ethnicity. Furthermore, not all linguistic variables diffuse in the same way through these structures; social indexicality has a mediating effect. We review prevailing methodologies, theories, and conclusions of this body of work and look ahead to emerging technological advances and more integrated theoretical approaches.
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Sociolinguistics of the Spanish-Speaking World
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 363–388More LessThis review provides a state-of-the-art overview of Spanish sociolinguistics and discusses several areas, including variationist sociolinguistics, bilingual and immigrant communities, and linguistic ethnography. We acknowledge many recent advances and the abundant research on several classic topics, such as phonology, morphosyntax, and discourse-pragmatics. We also highlight the need for research on understudied phenomena and emphasize the importance of combining both quantitative and ethnographic methodologies in sociolinguistic research. Much research on Spanish has shown that the language's wide variation across the globe is a reflection of Spanish-speaking communities’ rich sociohistorical and demographic diversity. Yet, there are many areas where research is needed, including bilingualism in indigenous communities, access to bilingual education, attitudes toward speakers of indigenous languages, and language maintenance and attrition. Language policy, ideology, and use in the legal and health care systems have also become important topics of sociolinguistics today as they relate to issues of human rights.
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Language and Discrimination: Generating Meaning, Perceiving Identities, and Discriminating Outcomes
Vol. 6 (2020), pp. 389–407More LessHumans are remarkably efficient at parsing basic linguistic cues and show an equally impressive ability to produce and parse socially indexed cues from the language(s) they encounter. In this review, we focus on the ways in which questions of justice and equality are linked to these two abilities. We discuss how social and linguistic cues are theorized to become correlated with each other, describe listeners' perceptual abilities regarding linguistic and social cognition, and address how, in the context of these abilities, language mediates individuals’ negotiations with institutions and their agents—negotiations that often lead to discrimination or linguistic injustice. We review research that reports inequitable outcomes as a function of language use across education, employment, media, justice systems, housing markets, and health care institutions. Finally, we present paths forward for linguists to help fight against these discriminatory realities.
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