Annual Review of Linguistics - Current Issue

My autobiographical essay begins with a brief section on my high school experience, then goes into more substantive detail about my research and publications over the past 55 years at the universities I attended (University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Pennsylvania) or at which I worked (University of Guyana, Stanford University) and since I retired in 2019. I mention my key mentors and influencers, including Roger Keesing, J. Herman Blake, Robert Le Page, and William Labov. And I identify some of the foci of my research over the years, including vowel laxing in Guyanese personal pronouns, prior creolization in the history of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), the Ebonics controversy, stylistic variation in sociolinguistics, quotative all, and racial disparities in automated speech recognition. Finally, I focus on “Activist Sociolinguistics,” including fighting for increased success for AAVE and other vernacular speakers in schools and for increased justice for them in the courtroom.

Surprisal theory proposes that a word's predictability influences processing difficulty because each word requires the comprehender to update a probability distribution over possible sentences. This article first considers the theory's detailed predictions regarding the effects of predictability on reading time and N400 amplitude. Two rather unintuitive predictions appear to be correct based on the current evidence: There is no specific cost when an unpredictable word is encountered in a context where another word is predictable, and the function relating predictability to processing difficulty is logarithmic, not linear. Next, the article addresses the viability of the claim, also associated with Surprisal, that conditional probability is the “causal bottleneck” mediating all effects on incremental processing difficulty. This claim fares less well as conditional probability does not account for the difficulty associated with encountering a low-frequency word or the difficulty associated with garden path disambiguation. Surprisal provides a compelling account of predictability effects but does not provide a complete account of incremental processing difficulty.

Much of pragmatics is founded on the assumption that interlocutors are disposed to be cooperative. However, communication can still proceed in cases where this assumption is not tenable. In this article I review the extent to which cooperativity is essential to accounts of communication, with particular reference to pragmatic meaning. I discuss how hearers negotiate situations in which speakers are fully or partially uncooperative and how these situations relate to notions such as lying and misleading. I then consider some subtler cases of potentially misleading behavior that involve speakers departing from typical patterns of usage, motivated by specific argumentative agendas. Finally, I briefly consider the prospects for encompassing all these situations within a single coherent model of pragmatic inference.

This article explores the nature of International Sign (IS), a linguistic phenomenon emerging from international deaf interactions. It examines various terms such as Gestuno, cross-signing, International Sign, and International Sign Language, revealing differing perspectives on IS as a lexicon, a language, or a dynamic process. The debate on IS's classification draws parallels with contact languages, lingua francas, and national sign languages. The discussion extends to methodological approaches in IS research, contrasting studies focused on IS as a product with those exploring IS as a process and considering how the combination of experimental and ethnographic studies enriches the understanding of IS's nature. I conclude that despite ongoing debates regarding its linguistic status, the role of IS as a lingua franca indicates a future in which it may gain broader recognition and wider influence.

This article provides an overview of research on African Urban Youth Languages focusing on common linguistic features identified in existing studies. It outlines a distinction between urban vernaculars that form the base languages of youth styles, and youth styles themselves, that draw on strategies of play or manipulation. It describes morphosyntactic, phonological, and lexical features that may be specific to youth language practices and that support deeper pragmatic analysis. The article also discusses the theoretical developments that led to expanded interest in this field—namely, the third wave of variation studies, the sociolinguistics of mobility, and the decolonial turn—and discusses the field's implications for variation studies and sociolinguistics.

The distinction between categorical phonological alternations and gradual phonetic processes is an important one in the study of sound systems. However, the correct classification of specific phenomena as belonging to phonology or to phonetics is often difficult. In recent years some researchers have argued that many processes traditionally understood as phonological alternations actually belong to the realm of gradient phonetics. Here I focus on consonant lenition phenomena in Spanish and other Romance languages and examine the potential arguments for their traditional analysis as alternations between phonological categories.

Aphasia, a neurological condition primarily resulting from stroke, significantly impairs communication and quality of life. This review focuses on aphasia recovery and emphasizes the interplay of clinical impairment, neural adaptation, and therapeutic intervention. Natural recovery varies with factors such as lesion characteristics, white matter integrity, and demographics, and neuroplasticity and cognitive compensation play crucial roles. Treatment-induced recovery encompasses traditional language therapies and innovative strategies, including the integration of advanced neurological techniques like neuromodulation and neurofeedback. Emerging trends, such as self-managed digital therapeutics and precision medicine approaches, offer promising avenues for enhancing language recovery. By bridging the gap between neurological understanding and clinical application, this review highlights the multifaceted nature of aphasia recovery and the latest advancements in treatment strategies, paving the way for more targeted and effective rehabilitation approaches.

Word order provides important clues to underlying syntactic structure. Despite great crosslinguistic variation, some generalizations are robust enough to inform theory development. This article reviews patterns of major clause elements and their derivation and discusses a pair of generalizations relating syntactic hierarchy to surface order—namely, the Universal 20 generalization (U20) and the Final-over-Final Constraint (FOFC). U20 rules out basic orders in which a lower modifier precedes a higher modifier to the left of the head, as in ^*adjective-demonstrative-noun (^*Adj-Dem-N). FOFC rules out basic orders in which a head-final projection contains a head-initial one, as in ^*verb-object-auxiliary (^*V-O-Aux). In each case, there are two frequent orders (Aux-V-O and O-V-Aux, Dem-Adj-N and N-Adj-Dem) that reveal the underlying hierarchies transparently. The two constraints differ, however: In the order ruled out by U20, ^*Adj-Dem-N, the middle element is structurally the highest, while FOFC rules out an order, ^*V-O-Aux, in which the middle element is lowest.

This review article presents the current state of research on counterfactual expressions and contexts. It focuses on the relationship between formal semantic and typological approaches. This leads to a special emphasis on counterfactual expressions outside of conditional clauses and the role of counterfactual expressions in modal meanings such as weak necessity.

There is increasing interest in the way that the size, composition, and environment of populations influence the way that their languages evolve. There are two reasons why an exploration of population and language change from the perspective of evolutionary biology might be useful. First, some of the relevant hypotheses rest explicitly or implicitly on theories developed in evolutionary biology, so it is important to critically evaluate the fit of these theories to language change. Second, methods developed in evolutionary biology have been applied to evaluating these hypotheses. Instead of aiming for a comprehensive review of the interaction between population size and language change, the focus of this review is on analogies drawn to processes in biological evolution (e.g., founder effects), processes that may have interesting parallels in both species and languages (e.g., evolution of complexity in small populations), and techniques from evolutionary biology that have been applied to language data (e.g., Wright-Fisher models).

Understanding the computational algorithm that gives rise to human language is a shared endeavor among neuroscience, linguistics, and machine learning. We propose a conceptual framework for making measurable progress toward this goal by studying the subcomponents of the processing system: its underlying representations, operations, and information flow. We review evidence from neurophysiology, neuropsychology, linguistic theory, and computational modeling and suggest future directions to push the field forward in developing a precise characterization of spoken language understanding. Overall, we claim that representations of speech properties, and the operations that generate and manipulate those representations, exist within a highly parallel, highly redundant spatiotemporal regime.

What does it mean to acquire an endangered language as a child? How does acquisition manifest across different endangered language scenarios? We propose a view of language acquisition and transmission that encompasses a broad range of language endangerment contexts beyond monolingual settings and thus reframes language endangerment through insights from children's speech, across learning contexts, and in relation to community ideologies. We consider how children's language practices affect and are affected by two interrelated projects: (a) institutional definitions of language endangerment and (b) community processes of self-determination. We conclude that attention to child language teases apart the socially constructed dimensions of languages and linguistic boundaries and highlights the vitalities that emerge through children's participation in acts of language reclamation.

Understanding the range and limits of crosslinguistic variation stands at the core of linguistic typology and, more broadly, the scientific inquiry of human language. Linguistic typology is concerned with the relevant dimensions along which languages can vary and those along which they remain stable; an overarching goal is to understand the cognitive, physical, social, and historical factors that shape language. Phonetics is no exception to this enterprise, but it has faced obstacles in crosslinguistic data collection and processing power. The field has nevertheless established a solid foundation regarding the relevant dimensions of stability, revealing strong phonetic tendencies across languages (i.e., universals). This article provides an overview of phonetic universals with a summary of previously attested descriptive and analytic phonetic universals and consideration of methodological aspects when investigating phonetic universals. The increasing availability of multilingual speech data along with advanced speech processing tools promises a new era for investigations into crosslinguistic phonetic variation and systematicity.

In 1999, Rajesh Bhatt observed a curious interaction between modality and grammatical aspect: Under imperfective marking, ability modals describe “pure,” potentially unrealized abilities, but their perfectively marked counterparts instead describe actual events. These apparently nonmodal interpretations are known as actuality entailments. The effect has resisted straightforward explanation on standard semantic approaches to both aspect and modality: Perfective aspect is typically taken to introduce a bounded or episodic temporal perspective, and there is no obvious reason that this should erase the core contribution (i.e., hypotheticality) of a modal predicate. This article discusses the scope and distribution of actuality entailments, including their extension to nonabilitative and necessity modals. I survey a number of proposed accounts of the phenomenon, focusing in turn on the structural (compositional) interaction between modality and aspect and on the individual semantic contributions of the implicated elements. I conclude by noting some aspects of the phenomenon that—despite a wealth of literature—have yet to be thoroughly explored and may thus help to adjudicate between existing analyses.

Recent publications in historical linguistics tend to express a near certainty about the structure of the Bantu language family and explicitly draw on archaeological and genetic studies as support for the emerging historical scenario of the Bantu expansion. In this review, I explain that the actual empirical picture is far more complicated and uncertain. A detailed examination of linguistic, archaeological, and genetic data reveals common faulty assumptions and misinterpretations and shows that no coherent narrative of Bantu history can be supported by the data at the moment. At the same time, the open questions and contradictions challenge us to move away from simplistic answers and to look for fine detail when analyzing the history of Bantu-speaking Africa: Many facts are in fact certain; they just do not fall neatly into the existing models.