Linguistics

This special issue of Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America (PLSA) contains papers presented during an organized session on teaching history of linguistics in the 21st century at the 2024 LSA Annual Meeting. The session was organized as a session of the North American Association for the History of Language Sciences (NAAHoLS) with the aim of surveying current approaches to teaching history of linguistics and the provision of resources and insights for those who wish to do so themselves.

In our doctoral program (one which largely trains students in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and L2 acquisition, rather than phonological, syntactic, and semantic theory), history of linguistics leads students to a deeper understanding of linguistics than is possible without it. Through this course, our students gain, in one semester rather than several, a broad perspective on the evolution of linguistic theories and methodologies. The course also serves as an opportunity for students to delve into the history of their own subfield and for them to frame the literature review portion of their own dissertation. The outcome of having this course is that our graduates have a broader perspe..

Teaching the history of linguistics often involves talking about a large number of people – linguists and scholars in related fields – who are only hazily recognized by students, and often the teacher is no better off. A set of graphical networks can help enormously in the task of orienting oneself and keeping track of who is exactly who. Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.

This paper considers options for positioning the present in relation to the past in teaching the history of linguistics. It proposes three approaches as having been demonstrably practiced (presentist, trajectorial and heliocentric), plus a fourth (antiquarian) that is less likely to be publicized. They are exemplified and explored through a look at how the history of linguistics has been taught within the history of linguistics, in particular by William Dwight Whitney (a presentist), Ferdinand de Saussure (a trajectorialist) and Noam Chomsky (a heliocentrist). Key questions that arise include: What strategies and tactics can be inferred from their treatment of their predecessors? And to what..

A history of linguistics course is as an opportunity to revisit some important linguistic concepts students have learned. Students are usually exposed to the larger goals of linguistic theory, but it is not the primary focus in syntax and phonology courses, for example. By examining the historical development of these concepts, e.g., phonemes, transformations, universal grammar, linguistic relativity etc., a history of linguistics course can be used to explore the nature of linguistics and the connections between linguistics and other disciplines. Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.

While once a required part of programs in Linguistics, courses in the history of the field have largely fallen into desuetude. When such courses are offered, they tend to attempt to cover thousands of years of history or a vast range of diverse related fields in a single term. There is perhaps a place for such courses, but I argue here that a rather more limited and focused offering has a particularly important role to play in the education of future linguistic theorists. Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.

This short commentary proposes that there is a need for convincing our colleagues in linguistics departments to include history of linguistics classes in our programmes. Once they are there, it is suggested that we also consider tailoring these classes to modern populations of students. Note: A video of the session in which this was presented and the associated slide deck are available in the foreword to this issue.

Many students of linguistics get their first classroom exposure to the field in courses with titles like Introduction to Linguistics or Survey of Linguistics. Such courses commonly employ textbooks that communicate the scope and methods of the discipline, and tacitly set students’ standards for what the discipline values. This article examines textbooks that have been employed from the 1950s to the early 21st century in U.S. college courses that introduce students to linguistics. The goal is to bring to light how the how the presence—or absence—of historical material shapes students’ assumptions about the value of the history of linguistics. Note: A video of the session in which this..

This paper examines the voice system of the Surakarta dialect of Javanese (SkJ) and proposes that both syntactic ergativity and a bundled C/T probe are necessary in interpreting the empirical facts in the language. We present an analysis along these facts, and further propose a decomposed voice structure based on the morphosyntactic realizations of Agents in SkJ voice system, which directly feeds the split ergativity analysis that underpins the extraction restriction observed in SkJ.

Phonological theories typically treat prefixes and suffixes as if phonological processes apply uniformly to both. However, previous studies have found clear asymmetries between the behavior of both affixes. We argue that this is due to phonological processes being easier to learn in suffix position rather than prefix position. To test this, an artificial language learning task was used to evaluate whether phonological learning is symmetrical between affixes. Results pattern in the direction of the hypothesis, namely, that phonological learning is asymmetrically facilitated in suffix position over prefix position, providing support to general cognitive mechanisms being responsible for strong ..

Research on the acquisition of complex syntactic structures in Southern English (SE) and Southern African-American English (SAAE) is near-absent, though an extensive body of literature is available on phenomena such as those of auxiliary and copula BE, and 3SG -(e)s. de Villiers et al. (2011) supported that characteristics found in AAE help avoid commonly observed developmental errors in the comprehension of wh-questions. Prior work on mainstream American English (MAE) has shown that where and what are acquired before who, how, why, which, and when. Research on passive voice revealed that children comprehend action verb passives earlier than non-action verb passives. We investigate the compr..

Language can convey both objective, fact-based information and subjective, opinion-based information. Previous research has focused on linguistic contexts that are associated with subjective information, such as information embedded under find. We aim to complement this existing work by exploring whether particular linguistic contexts are specifically associated with objective information. We report two psycholinguistic experiments testing the acceptability and processing of subjective and objective predicates embedded under the fact that. As a whole, the results suggest that subjective predicates embedded under the fact that are as acceptable and as easy-to-process as objective predicates, ..

The non-polarity “positive” anymore construction (NPAM; e.g., I write letters anymore, ‘I write letters nowadays’) is a vernacular feature found in the Midland dialect region. Analyses have suggested that while its negative polarity counterpart (I don’t write letters anymore) is associated with a positive presupposition and a negative assertion, NPAM contributes a negative presupposition and a positive assertion. This paper presents an experiment testing this hypothesis. The results provide initial support for the negative presupposition—positive assertion analysis of NPAM, but suggest that regional exposure is not necessary to know this feature does not share the same meaning as..

Polish inchoative deadjectival verb forms have been noted in Bobaljik (2012) to exemplify a potentially problematic paradigm for the Comparative-Change-of-State Generalization described within the same work. While Polish causative and anticausative deadjectival verbs formed from adjectives that display suppletion in the comparative form show the expected corresponding suppletion in the verb form as well, the inchoative deadjectival verbs display what appears to be an illicit ABA pattern. We argue that in these cases, Bobaljik’s Generalization can still be upheld, due to the two deadjectival verb types, anticausative and inchoatives, belonging to two different classes of anticausatives (Ale..

Cross-linguistically, secondary predicates may be distinguished from event-modifiers (e.g. adverbs or converbs) and individual-modifiers (e.g. attributive adjectives, participles, or prepositional phrases) via the presence or absence of prosodic processes and phonetic cues. This paper examines the prosodic behavior of secondary predicates in Modern Irish, which can form bare adjectival depictive and resultative secondary predicates. We show that Mod. Irish bare AP secondary predicates are distinguished from surface distributionally equivalent attributive modifiers through the morphophonological system of initial mutation and cues such as phrase-final lengthening and pauses. These facts suppo..

English famously has both wh- and nominal exclamatives (e.g., Portner & Zanuttini 2005). For instance, both What (strange) stories Nina tells! and The (strange) stories that Nina tells! are expressive speech acts about the very high degree that the stories that Nina tells have on some—explicit or implicit—scale. However, puzzlingly enough, Russian only has wh-, but not nominal exclamatives. I propose, partially following Esipova 2021, that both wh- and nominal exclamatives are instances of expressive intensification (akin to She is damn smart), with the expressive component of the expressive intensifier promoted to being the primary speech act (not unlike in Damn {she is / is she} sm..

Amid changing ideas about sex and gender, there is a growing need to reexamine norms around their operationalization and theorization. This talk presents results from a survey exploring linguists’ practices for collecting information about research participants’ sex/gender. Based on 157 complete responses to date, we explore the popularity of different methods for gathering information about sex/gender and the methodological and theoretical implications of those choices. We closely analyze the way questions around sex/gender are formulated and differences among linguists by subfield, training, identities, and gender politics, and offer best practices for ethical and inclusive approaches.

Glide-like formants can arise either through articulation of a glide or through articulation of hiatus, which often results in similar formant movements (e.g. she yachts, she ought). Davidson & Erker (2014) established that the glide-like formant movements are measurably different from actual, phonological glides. The current study compares a wider range of vowel environments to investigate the different realizations of [j]. Analysis of modal V#(j)V sequences finds significant differences in intensity change and duration in most vowel environments examined, and additionally finds significant differences in formant movements for one ambiguous vowel environment. However, the large degree o..

English Coronal Stop Deletion (CSD) has been a subject of debate in terms of whether it is categorical or gradient. Previous studies have overlooked the possibility that tongue tip raising during inaudible coronal stop may come from neutral tongue tip position rather than gradient CSD. The current study found that in sentence reading, that much involves word-initial tongue tip raising just prior to [m] that is significantly similar to the tongue tip behavior of much in isolation. We argue that English CSD should be analyzed as categorical deletion and that one can only argue for gradient deletion after considering the neutral position of the tongue tip. More generally, this study suggests th..

As for the order of verb (V), object (O), and oblique (X), Dryer (with Gensler) (2013) finds the asymmetry between VO and OV languages in terms of the position of X: VO languages are almost exclusively VOX, and OV languages are of all three types (XOV, OXV, and OVX). Hawkins (2008) argues that “[t]he OVX languages should be more head-initial and have head ordering correlations more like those of VO” (e.g., preposition: OVX 33%, VO 86%). However, we claim that high percentages of OVX languages have head-final orders unlike VO languages in complement-head orders (e.g., postposition: OVX 67%, VO 14%). We also claim that OVX languages have more head-initial orders than XOV and OXV languages ..

I provide an account of the Summer Institute of Linguistics’s (SIL) relationship with the University of Oklahoma (OU) from 1942–1987. SIL ended its linguistics summer sessions at OU in 1987 when legal issues were brought up about a public institution supporting an organization with openly evangelical roots. I conclude by revisiting questions raised in Dobrin’s (2009) collection on the relationship between SIL and secular linguistics.

We investigate the processing of accusative-marked NPs in Turkish, compared to genitive- and locative-marked NPs. We use psycholinguistic methods (a lexical decision task) to test competing predictions derived from frequency effects in lexical processing on the one hand, and morphosyntactic theories of case containment on the other hand. Our experimental outcomes support a case containment approach to Turkish morphology.

This study investigates the perception of the question tune in Guanzhong Mandarin and the interaction between tone and tune using the AX paradigm. Our findings reveal a complex interplay between lexical tones and question tunes, in which when the lexical tone is rising, it is more difficult to perceive question tunes. Furthermore, the research argues that the question tune retrieval requires extra working memory load and cognitive processing, because of the tune information brought by a high register and a high boundary tone.

This paper discusses differences between each and every with regard to (a) pair-list readings; (b) subject/object asymmetries seen with every but not with each; and (c) the long-held intuition that each is more individualistic whereas every is friendlier to groups. We propose that these phenomena can be captured by prior accounts of the Mandarin Chinese distributive universal quantifier mei. In particular, we consider the Double Variable Hypothesis (the idea that in DUQ, for every x, there must be a y) (S.-Z. Huang 1995; 1996), and the Skolemized Topicality Hypothesis (the idea that topical quantifiers are Skolemized, resulting in the required x-y pairings) (S.-Z. Huang 2022b). We argue that..

Swahili relative clauses have three different constructions, characterized by different linear positions of a relative marker. The relative marker follows C, T and the verbal complex in each case. While some previous analyses propose construction-specific operations such as T to C or V to C movement in amba-less relatives, this study shows that the distribution of the relative marker can in fact be derived from a set of independently motivated assumptions without substantial ad-hoc proposals. I argue that the relative marker is an operator that undergoes cyclic A' movement to Spec,CP, and its various linear position results from Landau (2006)’s chain resolution algorithm conditioned by a d..

This study investigates the effect of coordination on the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity in English and Italian. We also examined the interplay of RC length and DP positions on attachment preferences in coordinate structures, conducting a partial replication of previous results on English (Hemforth et al. 2015). In two offline force-choice tasks, English speakers favored local attachment, while Italian speakers showed a strong preference for non-local attachment across all conditions. This pattern aligns with established variation across the two languages, but interestingly deviates from earlier reports showing the effects of RC-Head type, RC length, and DP position on at..

In this paper, we report on what we are calling “Missionary Voice,” or a particular way of speaking characteristic to missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The first study elicits perceptions of Missionary Voice by Latter-day Saints in the Intermountain West without reference to any particular recording or person. We find a complex, multifaceted indexical field as well as potential linguistic features, uses for Missionary Voice, and speculative origins. In the second study, we play audio clips and ask listeners to identify the missionaries among them. While people did no better than chance, we zero in on certain speakers and compile a tentative list of acoustic..

This paper investigates the effects of (ongoing) standardization on linguistic attitudes and representations in the French Caribbean island of Martinique, where traditionally stigmatized Martinican Creole (MC) boasts a quasi-official orthography and some representation in formal domains. We use socio-biographical, perceptual and attitudinal data from a questionnaire-based study to investigate the relation between respondents’ (i) exposure to ‘activist’ MC – as a proxy for standardization; (ii) attitudes to MC on the status dimension; (iii) purism and (iv) breaking away from traditional MC indexicalities. Two findings are particularly noteworthy. First, exposure to activist MC fails t..

We bring to light here two case studies from Albanian that show interesting semantic change, and we argue that in order to understand the particular changes involved, the concept of “milieu” (Christiansen and Joseph 2016: 56-7) should be invoked.

This paper updates the analysis of rhythmic reversal in Axininca with a more economical one using serial/directional evaluation that dispenses with alignment constraints. The serial/directional evaluation is more superior to a parallel/directional counterpart with respect to quantity-sensitivity, as adopting directionally evaluated constraints for parallelism cannot avoid overgeneration problems.