Annual Review of Linguistics - Volume 8, 2022

My career falls into two distinct periods. The first two decades featured insecurity combined with the luck of wandering into situations that ultimately helped me become a better linguist and a better teacher. I had the insecurity mostly under control by the watershed year of 1988, when I published a favorably reviewed coauthored book on language contact and also became editor of Language. Language contact has occupied most of my research time since then, but my first encounter with Séliš-Ql'ispé (a.k.a. Montana Salish), in 1981, led to a 40-year dedication to finding out more about the language and its history.

Although sign languages are crucial for research on the human linguistic capacity, argument structure in these languages is rarely addressed in theoretical and typological studies. This article provides an overview of existing research on argument structure and argument structure alternations in sign languages. It demonstrates that there are many fundamental similarities between the two modalities in the domain of argument structure, such as the basic valency patterns and the semantic basis of argument structure. At the same time, modality effects, such as iconicity, simultaneity, and the use of space, play an important role in argument structure realization. Finally, the article discusses how emerging sign languages present an opportunity to observe and study the emergence of argument structure.

In recent years, construction-based approaches to morphology have gained ground in the research community. This framework is characterized by the assumption that the mental lexicon is extensive and richly structured, containing not only a large number of stored words but also a wide variety of generalizations in the form of schemas. This review explores two construction-based theories, Construction Morphology and Relational Morphology. After outlining the basic theoretical architecture, the article presents an array of recent applications of a construction-based approach to morphological phenomena in various languages. In addition, it offers reflections on challenges and opportunities for further research. The review highlights those aspects of the theory that have proved particularly helpful in accommodating both the regularities and the quirks that are typical of the grammar of words.

Languages offer various ways to present what someone said, thought, imagined, felt, and so on from their perspective. The prototypical example of a perspective-shifting device is direct quotation. In this review we define perspective shift in terms of indexical shift: A direct quotation like “Selena said, ‘Oh, I don't know.’” involves perspective shift because the first-person indexical ‘I’ refers to Selena, not to the actual speaker. We then discuss a variety of noncanonical modality-specific perspective-shifting devices: role shift in sign language, quotatives in spoken language, free indirect discourse in written language, and point-of-view shift in visual language. We show that these devices permit complex mixed forms of perspective shift which may involve nonlinguistic gestural as well as visual components.

Children's linguistic knowledge and the learning mechanisms by which they acquire it grow substantially in infancy and toddlerhood, yet theories of word learning largely fail to incorporate these shifts. Moreover, researchers’ often-siloed focus on either familiar word recognition or novel word learning limits the critical consideration of how these two relate. As a step toward a mechanistic theory of language acquisition, we present a framework of “learning through processing” and relate it to the prevailing methods used to assess children's early knowledge of words. Incorporating recent empirical work, we posit a specific, testable timeline of qualitative changes in the learning process in this interval. We conclude with several challenges and avenues for building a comprehensive theory of early word learning: better characterization of the input, reconciling results across approaches, and treating lexical knowledge in the nascent grammar with sufficient sophistication to ensure generalizability across languages and development.

This article provides an overview of graded and probabilistic approaches in semantics and pragmatics. These approaches share a common set of core research goals: (a) a concern with phenomena that are best described as graded, including a vast lexicon of words whose meanings adapt flexibly to the contexts in which they are used, as well as reasoning under uncertainty about interlocutors, their goals, and their strategies; (b) the need to show that representations are learnable, i.e., that a listener can learn semantic representations and pragmatic reasoning from data; (c) an emphasis on empirical evaluation against experimental data or corpus data at scale; and (d) scaling up to the full size of the lexicon. The methods used are sometimes explicitly probabilistic and sometimes not. Previously, there were assumed to be clear boundaries among probabilistic frameworks, classifiers in machine learning, and distributional approaches, but these boundaries have been blurred. Frameworks in semantics and pragmatics use all three of these, sometimes in combination, to address the four core research questions above.

The primary goal of coherence theory is to provide an explanation for the coherence properties of discourse: what properties distinguish a discourse from a mere collection of utterances, and what drives comprehenders to draw inferences in service of establishing coherence. However, the importance of coherence theory goes well beyond that; it also plays a crucial role in theories of a variety of discourse-dependent linguistic phenomena. This article surveys some ways in which coherence theory has been leveraged in this way, appealing to both Relational analyses and Question-Under-Discussion models. Theories of coherence establishment should therefore have a place in the linguist's toolbox as a source of explanation in linguistic theory.

While it is clear that children are more successful at learning language than adults are—whether first language or second—there is no agreement as to why. Is it due to greater neural plasticity, greater motivation, more ample opportunity for learning, superior cognitive function, lack of interference from a first language, or something else? A difficulty in teasing apart these theories is that while they make different empirical predictions, there are few unambiguous facts against which to test the theories. This is particularly true when it comes to the most basic questions about the phenomenon: When does the childhood advantage dissipate, and how rapidly does it do so? I argue that a major reason for the lack of consensus is limitations in the research methods used to date. I conclude by discussing a recently emerging methodology and by making suggestions about the path forward.

This review presents a highly selective survey of connections between music and language. I begin by considering some fundamental differences between music and language and some nonspecific similarities that may arise out of more general characteristics of human cognition and communication. I then discuss an important, specific interaction between music and language: the connection between linguistic stress and musical meter. Next, I consider several possible connections that have been widely studied but remain controversial: cross-cultural correlations between linguistic and musical rhythm, effects of musical training on linguistic abilities, and connections in cognitive processing between music and linguistic syntax. Finally, I discuss some parallels regarding the use of repetition in music and language, which until now has been a little-explored topic.

Corpus-based studies have become increasingly common in linguistic typology over recent years, amounting to the emergence of a new field that we call corpus-based typology. The core idea of corpus-based typology is to take languages as populations of utterances and to systematically investigate text production across languages in this sense. From a usage-based perspective, investigations of variation and preferences of use are at the core of understanding the distribution of conventionalized structures and their diachronic development across languages. Specific findings of corpus-based typological studies pertain to universals of text production, for example, in prosodic partitioning; to cognitive biases constraining diverse patterns of use, for example, in constituent order; and to correlations of diverse patterns of use with language-specific structures and conventions. We also consider remaining challenges for corpus-based typology, in particular the development of crosslinguistically more representative corpora that include spoken (or signed) texts, and its vast potential in the future.

Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children deploy in acquiring these words. Through a few case studies, we show how children make use of syntactic and pragmatic cues to figure out attitude verb meanings and how their successes, and even their mistakes, reveal remarkable conceptual, linguistic, and pragmatic sophistication.

Alternatives and competition in language are pervasive at all levels of linguistic analysis. More specifically, alternatives have been argued to play a prominent role in an ever-growing class of phenomena in the investigation of natural language meaning. In this article, we focus on scalar implicatures, as they are arguably the most paradigmatic case of an alternative-based phenomenon. We first review the main challenge for theories of alternatives, the so-called symmetry problem, and we briefly discuss how it has shaped the different approaches to alternatives. We then turn to two more recent challenges concerning scalar diversity and the inferences of sentences with multiple scalars. Finally, we describe several related alternative-based phenomena and recent conceptual approaches to alternatives. As we discuss, while important progress has been made, much more work is needed both on the theoretical side and on understanding the empirical landscape better.

Second language (L2) sentence processing research studies how adult L2 learners understand sentences in real time. I review how L2 sentence processing differs from monolingual first-language (L1) processing and outline major findings and approaches. Three interacting factors appear to mandate L1–L2 differences: (a) capacity restrictions in the ability to integrate information in an L2; (b) L1–L2 differences in the weighting of cues, the timing of their application, and the efficiency of their retrieval; and (c) variation in the utility functions of predictive processing. Against this backdrop, I outline a novel paradigm of interlanguage processing, which examines bilingual features of L2 processing, such as bilingual language systems, nonselective access to all grammars, and processing to learn an L2. Interlanguage processing goes beyond the traditional framing of L2 sentence processing as an incomplete form of monolingual processing and reconnects the field with current approaches to grammar acquisition and the bilingual mental lexicon.

Nominalization (e.g., sleeping, that we slept, sleepiness) allows speakers to refer and ascribe properties to whatever sorts of entities clauses, verbs, or adjectives typically denote. Characterizing these relatively abstract entities has challenged semanticists and philosophers of language for over 50 years, thanks especially to Zeno Vendler's early work. Vendler took different kinds of English nominalization constructions to support positing facts, propositions, and events as distinct ontological objects. However, his conclusions remain controversial. The research on nominalization and natural language ontology has never been brought together or put into perspective; in this article, we clarify the complex variety of subsequent ontological positions that build on Vendler's work, identifying points of consensus and disagreement. We also reflect on the consequences and challenges of focusing on the English data and offer a glimpse of how the landscape might change with greater attention to nominalization in other languages.

The theoretical study of perfects tends to be based on data from European languages, particularly English. To find the proper place for perfects, we have to go beyond English to be able to separate what is idiosyncratic from what is generalizable. A central function of perfects is to speak of how the present is different from the past, especially from the immediate past. A perfect typically relates how a past state changes into the present one. Crosslinguistically, we find two major types of perfect: constructions involving the auxiliary verbs ‘be’ and ‘have’, common in Indo-European and neighboring families, and iamitives, which are the result of the grammaticalization of words meaning ‘already’. The status of iamitives is controversial. In this review, I argue that they can be separated both from ‘already’ and from European-style perfects but that it makes sense to postulate a more inclusive crosslinguistic perfect category.

Cochlear implants (CIs) represent a significant engineering and medical milestone in the treatment of hearing loss for both adults and children. In this review, we provide a brief overview of CI technology, describe the benefits that CIs can provide to adults and children who receive them, and discuss the specific limitations and issues faced by CI users. We emphasize the relevance of CIs to the linguistics community by demonstrating how CIs successfully provide access to spoken language. Furthermore, CI research can inform our basic understanding of spoken word recognition in adults and spoken language development in children. Linguistics research can also help us address the major clinical issue of outcome variability and motivate the development of new clinical tools to assess the unique challenges of adults and children with CIs, as well as novel interventions for individuals with poor outcomes.

Glue Semantics (Glue) is a general framework for semantic composition and the syntax–semantics interface. The framework grew out of an interdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection of formal linguistics, formal logic, and computer science. Glue assumes a separate level of syntax; this can be any syntactic framework in which syntactic structures have heads. Glue uses a fragment of linear logic for semantic composition. General linear logic terms in Glue meaning constructors are instantiated relative to a syntactic parse. The separation of the logic of composition from structural syntax distinguishes Glue from other theories of semantic composition and the syntax–semantics interface. It allows Glue to capture semantic ambiguity, such as quantifier scope ambiguity, without necessarily positing an ambiguity in the syntactic structure. Glue is introduced here in relation to four of its key properties, which are used as organizing themes: resource-sensitive composition, flexible composition, autonomy of syntax, and syntax/semantics non-isomorphism.

Research on the prosody and intonation of creole languages has largely remained an untapped resource, yet it is important for enriching our understanding of how or if their phonological systems changed or developed under contact. Further, their hybrid histories and current linguistic ecologies present descriptive and analytical treasure troves. This has the potential to inform many areas of linguistic inquiry including contact effects on the typological classification of prosodic systems, socioprosodic variation (individual and community level), and the scope of diversity in prosodic systems among creole languages and across a variety of languages similarly influenced by language contact. Thus, this review highlights the importance of pushing beyond questions of creole language typology and genetic affiliation. I review the existing research on creole language prosody and intonation, provide some details on a few studies, and highlight some key challenges and opportunities for the subfield and for linguistics in general.

Adult processing of other-accented speech is fast, dependent on lexical access, and readily generalizable to new words. But what does children's processing of other-accented speech look like? Although many acquisition researchers have emphasized how other-accented speech presents a formidable challenge to young children, we argue that the field has perhaps underestimated children's early accent processing abilities. In support of this view, we present evidence that 2-year-olds’ accent processing abilities appear to be in many respects adult-like, and discuss the growing literature on children's ability to cope with multi-accent input in the natural world. We outline different theoretical outlooks on the transition children make from infancy to later childhood, and discuss how the growing sophistication of infants’ accent processing abilities feeds into their social perception of the world (and perhaps vice versa). We also argue that efficient processing and meaningful interpretation of accent variation are fundamental to human cognition, and that early proficiency with accent variation (along with all of the implied representational and learning capacities) is difficult to explain without assuming the early emergence of abstract speech representations.