Annual Review of Linguistics
Datos de la Revista
| Tipo | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Editorial | Annual Reviews Inc. (US) |
| ISSN | 2333-9683 / 2333-9691 |
| Scopus | 21100778765 |
| OpenAlex | S4210191548 |
| MAG | 4210191548 |
| Sitio web | https://api.elsevier.com/content/serial/title/issn/2333-9683 |
| Total de publicaciones | 245 |
| Periodo de cobertura | 2014 - 2026 |
| País | US |
| Idioma | EN |
| Indexación | Indexada en Scopus |
| Citada por | 826 |
| Factor de impacto | 2.957 |
| SJR | 1.824 (Q1) |
| SNIP | 4.138 |
| CiteScore | 10.6 |
| Índice h | 12 |
| Índice i10 | 22 |
| Media de citas en 2 años | 0.087 |
| Participación femenina en la autoría | 65.2% |
This journal provides review articles in the broad field of linguistics. While linguistic anthropology is a core subfield, this venue's general linguistic focus means it may include formal or theoretical linguistics less directly relevant to social anthropology, making it a cognate discipline
Linguistics and Language · Advanced Algebra and Logic · Categorization, perception, and language · Child and Animal Learning Development · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Gender Studies in Language · Hand Gesture Recognition Systems · Hearing Impairment and Communication · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies
The Meaning and Grammar of Pure Gestures
While studies of gestures generally focus on their cospeech use, gestures can sometimes be produced on their own, with a dedicated time slot. Such “pure gestures” have yielded three key findings. First, their iconic content can be divided “on the fly” among traditional slots of the inferential typology of language. This finding extends to novel gestures, visual animations, and (iconically modulated) sign language classifiers, which suggests that …
Computational Methods for Language Documentation and Description
In this era of rapid artificial intelligence (AI) expansion, computational approaches are reshaping methods for language documentation and description. We survey the history of computational methods that have been applied to research in languages with limited digital resources and also present cutting-edge methods, such as large language models (LLMs), that have the potential to benefit documentary and descriptive fieldwork. We highlight how thes…
How Well Do Large Language Models Understand African American Language? Causes and Implications
We focus on studying large language models (LLMs) and their ability to successfully interpret African American Language (AAL) in ways that do not distort the communicative intent of the speakers or writers. We discuss research that quantifies the gap between how well LLMs interpret AAL and how well they interpret White Mainstream English as well as research identifying the causes of this difference. This difference has an impact both on users of …
Linguistics in Germany
This autobiographical article describes key elements of Manfred Bierwisch's scientific work and life. It was completed only after his death and contains parts that he wrote himself, together with excerpts from other texts and interviews. The article outlines the main features of his linguistic work and in addition sheds light on the difficult political circumstances under which it was accomplished
Prosody and Information Structure
In speech, information is conveyed using words, syntactic structures, and prosody to distinguish new information from discourse-given or inferable information and link the meanings of words and phrases to discourse antecedents. This review examines the role of prosody in communicating information structure. The point of departure is seminal work on information structure developed with reference to English, and corresponding work laying the founda…
Keeping Humans in the Loop
Human skills in the form of data annotation and generation have long been the cornerstone of building and testing machine learning algorithms. With the advent of large language models (LLMs) and their unsupervised learning on large quantities of data, the role of human data experts has been called into question. This article examines the changing role of human data annotation and linguistic analysis and provides an overview of past, current, and …
The Lexical Typology of Sensory Perception
Sensory language has fascinated researchers, as it is here that meaning most clearly straddles biology and culture. Since the seminal work on color vocabularies, typologists have attempted to describe and explain worldwide linguistic patterns in this area. One proposal that has captured the attention of many is the idea that there is a hierarchy of the senses that can account for phenomena as diverse as lexicalization patterns, frequency of use, …
Variability, Its Limits, and the Performance–Competence Debate
This article provides an overview of variability in natural language by looking at the limits of intraindividual, interindividual, and cross-linguistic variability at all levels of grammar. We review evidence for the hypothesis that variability forms an integral part of natural language and often provides valuable insights into speakers’ linguistic competence. We discuss in turn ( a ) different subtypes of variability; ( b ) the difference betwee…
Prosodic Intensification
The study of scalar meanings or intensification has focused primarily on morphological means, yet there are many spoken languages where these concepts are expressed systematically by iconic prosody. Languages employ a combination of prosodic cues, including increased duration, raised pitch, special pitch patterns, and special voice quality, to signal scalar increases of property concepts, quantity, exhaustivity, duration, and so forth. In some la…
Constructing Meaning from Language
A key function of language is to enable concept construction, but empirically disentangling the contribution of language from the contribution of other (e.g., sensory) experiences is challenging. Comparing visual knowledge across sighted people, people born blind, and artificial intelligence (AI) trained exclusively on text provides rare insight. Blind people acquire rich visual knowledge, including normative meanings of light emission and visual…
Common Ground
Common ground is the information that the participants in a conversation treat as background information for the purposes of their interaction. We review two traditions of research on common ground. The formal tradition, consisting mainly of theoretical linguists and philosophers of language, has developed increasingly sophisticated formal models of common ground to generate predictions about an expanding range of empirical phenomena. Meanwhile, …
Constraints on Agreement
Minimalist research on syntactic dependencies over the past two decades has sought a unified understanding of the behavior of φ-agreement (such as subject–verb agreement) and of more traditionally studied long-distance dependencies, such as wh -movement. Both have been attributed to a single abstract operation, Agree. In this review, I discuss proposed constraints on Agree-based dependencies arising from the structures in which Agree operates, fr…
Equative Sentences
Equative sentences like Hesperus is Phosphorus are interesting not only because they convey information about identity but also because of the atypical linguistic means they employ to do so. An equative sentence appears to be composed of a pair of referential singular terms (grammatical arguments) and to lack a logical predicate. Yet in the absence of such a predicate, how can equatives constitute well-formed, meaningful sentences? This rarely ac…
Social Meaning
In this review, I describe two research programs in the study of social meaning, both of which feature prominently in current-day sociolinguistics. The first one—social meaning as reasoning—seeks to understand the reasoning processes involved in the use and interpretation of sociolinguistic variants. The second one—social meaning as link between language and power — seeks to understand the ways in which language is related to power and the reprod…
What Can Typing Tell Us About Language Production
Although research on typing has not exactly been sparse, studying typing within a psycholinguistic framework has not been a common approach. This article argues in favor of this practice. By reviewing findings on patterns of typing errors and statistical learning in typed production, as well as influences of various factors on typing, including the similarity between the target word and its context, we show that typing has much in common with oth…
From Contact to Conversation
Protactile language, a tactile language that has emerged within the DeafBlind community in the United States over the past two decades, challenges conventional assumptions about language, modality, and communication. Originating from a grassroots movement to center touch as a valid epistemology, protactile has developed distinct linguistic structures grounded in contact space, reciprocity, and embodied intersubjectivity. This article reviews the …
Causation and Causal Relations
This article examines the relationship between natural language and causal cognition and argues that linguistic expressions both reflect and constrain the ways in which humans conceptualize and represent causation. It opens with a survey of foundational philosophical theories of causation, focusing on the tension between metaphysical accounts and judgment-based approaches. The discussion then turns to a range of linguistic phenomena—including cau…
The Semantics of Degree Relatives
Relative clauses can range over degrees, just as they can range over individuals. But this class of degree relatives is rarely studied uniformly across the diverse constructions they help form. As a result, there have been a number of construction-specific proposals to model the semantics of degree relatives: in equatives, amount relatives, and wh -exclamatives. The goals of this article are to review a standard semantics of relativization writ l…
A Life of Science
Many linguists choose their discipline because of childhood experiences with languages. I had grown up using American Sign Language and had spent my childhood with Deaf people, but I had no models of how to become a linguist working with sign languages. This area of linguistics was just coming into being, and my models were other scientists who were just as new to this field as I was. This is not a complete account of my work over the course of m…
Allocutivity and the Syntax of Honorifics
Allocutive markers (AMs) (i.e., markers that encode addressee features in syntax) and honorifics (which encode the social relation in syntax) raise questions about the interface between morphosyntax and discourse. On the AM side, the founding literature suggests that AMs are unembeddable. However, recent studies reveal that AMs are freely available in embedded contexts in some languages. This raises questions about where exactly discourse partici…
Counterfactuality and Mood
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
How I Fell in Love with Language, Linguistics, and “Activist Sociolinguistics”
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 …
The Linguistics of Urban Youth Languages in Africa
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 s…
Actuality Entailments
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 modali…
Charting the Course of Aphasia Recovery
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. Treatm…
Distributional Models of Word Meaning
Distributional semantics is a usage-based model of meaning, based on the assumption that the statistical distribution of linguistic items in context plays a key role in characterizing their semantic behavior. Distributional models build semantic representations by extracting co-occurrences from corpora and have become a mainstream research paradigm in computational linguistics. In this review, I present the state of the art in distributional sema…
The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives
Archaeological evidence and linguistic evidence converge in support of an origin of Indo-European languages on the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 4,000 years BCE. The evidence is so strong that arguments in support of other hypotheses should be reexamined
Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory
Distributional semantics provides multi-dimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown in a large body of work 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 of rel…
Phonological Representation
Phonological representations capture information about individual word forms and about the general characteristics of word forms in a language. To support the processing of novel word forms as well as familiar word forms in novel contexts, an abstract level of representation is needed in which many phonetic details and contextual features are disregarded. At the same time, evidence has accumulated that such details are retained in memory and used…
From African American Vernacular English to African American Language
African 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 relation…
Identifying Pathways Between Socioeconomic Status and Language Development
Children from low-income backgrounds consistently perform below their more advantaged peers on standardized measures of language ability, setting long-term trajectories that translate into gaps in academic achievement. Our primary goals in this review are to describe how and why this is so, in order to focus attention on ways to enrich early language experiences across socioeconomic strata. We first review the literature on the relation between s…
The Syntax-Prosody Interface
This article provides an overview of current and historically important issues in the study of the syntax-prosody interface, the point of interaction between syntactic structure and phrase-level phonology. We take a broad view of the syntax-prosody interface, surveying both direct and indirect reference theories, with a focus on evaluating the continuing prominent role of prosodic hierarchy theory in shaping our understanding of this area of ling…
Functional Categories and Syntactic Theory
The distinction between lexical and functional elements plays a major role in current research in syntax and neighboring aspects of the study of language. In this article, we review the motivations of a progressive shift of emphasis from lexical to functional elements in syntactic research: the identification of the functional lexicon as the locus of the triggering of syntactic actions and of syntactic variation, and the description and analysis …
The Advantages of Bilingualism Debate
Bilingualism was once thought to result in cognitive disadvantages, but research in recent decades has demonstrated that experience with two (or more) languages confers a bilingual advantage in executive functions and may delay the incidence of Alzheimer's disease. However, conflicting evidence has emerged leading to questions concerning the robustness of the bilingual advantage for both executive functions and dementia incidence. Some investigat…
Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain
The use of two or more languages is common in most of the world. Yet, until recently, bilingualism was considered to be a complicating factor for language processing, cognition, and the brain. The past 20 years have witnessed an upsurge of research on bilingualism to examine language acquisition and processing, their cognitive and neural bases, and the consequences that bilingualism holds for cognition and the brain over the life span. Contrary t…
Individual Differences in Language Processing
Individual variation is ubiquitous and empirically observable in most phonological behaviors, yet relatively few studies aim to capture the heterogeneity of language processing among individuals, as opposed to those focusing primarily on group-level patterns. The study of individual differences can shed light on the nature of the cognitive representations and mechanisms involved in phonological processing. To guide our review of individual variat…
Language and Discrimination
Humans 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 lingui…
Cracking Prosody in Articulatory Phonology
Articulatory Phonology advances an account of phonological structure in which dynamically defined vocal tract tasks—gestures—are simultaneously and isomorphically units of cognitive representation and units of physical action. This paradigm has fundamentally altered our understanding of the linguistic representation of words. This article reviews the relatively recent incorporation of prosody into Articulatory Phonology. A capsule review of the A…
What Defines Language Dominance in Bilinguals
This article focuses on the construct of language dominance in bilinguals and the ways in which this construct has been operationalized. Language dominance is often seen as relative proficiency in two languages, but it can also be analyzed in terms of language use—that is, how frequently bilinguals use their languages and how these are divided across domains. Assessing language dominance is important because it has become clear that the level of …
Semantic Typology and Efficient Communication
Crosslinguistic research on domains including kinship, color, folk biology, number, and spatial relations has documented the different ways in which languages carve up the world into named categories. Although word meanings vary widely across languages, unrelated languages often have words with similar or identical meanings, and many logically possible meanings are never observed. We review research suggesting that this pattern of constrained var…
Sign Language Typology
Since the 1990s, the field of sign language typology has shown that sign languages exhibit typological variation at all relevant levels of linguistic description. These initial typological comparisons were heavily skewed toward the urban sign languages of developed countries, mostly in the Western world. This review reports on the recent contributions made by rural signing varieties, that is, sign languages that have evolved in village communitie…
Heritage Languages
A heritage language is a sociopolitically minority and/or minoritized language acquired as the first or one of the first languages in a bilingual or multilingual context. Heritage languages are typically acquired under conditions of reduced exposure and are often used less than the majority language during late childhood and adolescence. Heritage languages show structural differences and changes at all levels of linguistic analysis from baseline …
Language Variation and Change in Rural Communities
Despite the difficulty of delineating the rural from the urban according to economic or demographic criteria, this distinction has powerful cultural resonances, and language plays a key role in constructing the cultural divide between rural and urban. Sociolinguists have generally devoted more attention to urban communities, but substantial research has explored language variation and change in rural areas, and this scholarship complements the pe…
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is a growing field at the intersection of linguistics and computer science that attempts to automatically determine the sentiment contained in text. Sentiment can be characterized as positive or negative evaluation expressed through language. Common applications of sentiment analysis include the automatic determination of whether a review posted online (of a movie, a book, or a consumer product) is positive or negative toward t…
How Nature Meets Nurture
Evidence of children’s sensitivity to statistical features of their input in language acquisition is often used to argue against learning mechanisms driven by innate knowledge. At the same time, evidence of children acquiring knowledge that is richer than the input supports arguments in favor of such mechanisms. This tension can be resolved by separating the inferential and deductive components of the language learning mechanism. Universal Gramma…
Correlational Studies in Typological and Historical Linguistics
We review a number of recent studies that have identified either correlations between different linguistic features (e.g., implicational universals) or correlations between linguistic features and nonlinguistic properties of speakers or their environment (e.g., effects of geography on vocabulary). We compare large-scale quantitative studies with more traditional theoretical and historical linguistic research and identify divergent assumptions and…
Language Emergence
Language emergence describes moments in historical time when nonlinguistic systems become linguistic. Because language can be invented de novo in the manual modality, this offers insight into the emergence of language in ways that the oral modality cannot. Here we focus on homesign, gestures developed by deaf individuals who cannot acquire spoken language and have not been exposed to sign language. We contrast homesign with (a) gestures that hear…
Language Abilities in Neanderthals
Neanderthal language abilities cannot be directly observed, but indirect evidence is available in their anatomy, archeology, and DNA. Neanderthal anatomy shows possible speech adaptations, and their archeology contains enough indicators of behavioral modernity, including symbols and ornaments, to conclude that their minds could handle symbolic communication. Neanderthal DNA, finally, indicates both that they possessed some of the language-relevan…
Advances in Dialectometry
Dialectometry applies computational and statistical analyses within dialectology, making work more easily replicable and understandable. This survey article first reviews the field briefly in order to focus on developments in the past five years. Dialectometry no longer focuses exclusively on aggregate analyses, but rather deploys various techniques to identify representative and distinctive features with respect to areal classifications. Analyse…
Language Socialization at the Intersection of the Local and the Global
This article provides a critical review of the theoretical underpinnings of two core concepts in language socialization research: input and communicative competence. We organize our discussion along two major lines of inquiry: ( a) the historical-local and ( b) the language contact–globalization bodies of work. The first part of the article contests the persistent view that input reduces to vocabulary and grammatical structures. To this end, it p…
Vagueness and Imprecision
Vagueness is a pervasive feature of natural language, which has been studied from a range of perspectives. This review focuses on recent empirical insights into vagueness that have come out of the field of linguistic semantics, as well as the theoretical developments that these have prompted. Topics covered include the distinction between vagueness and imprecision, or what I refer to as Type 1 and Type 2 vagueness; the complex manifestations of v…
Bringing Machine Learning and Compositional Semantics Together
Computational semantics has long been considered a field divided between logical and statistical approaches, but this divide is rapidly eroding with the development of statistical models that learn compositional semantic theories from corpora and databases. This review presents a simple discriminative learning framework for defining such models and relating them to logical theories. Within this framework, we discuss the task of learning to map ut…
Quotation and Advances in Understanding Syntactic Systems
At first glance, the syntax of quotation appears to be a rather straightforward matter of transitivity and complementation. However, quotation raises a number of intriguing and perplexing questions for the functioning, structure, and development of syntactic systems, and for their interactions with the semantic–interpretative interface. The purpose of this review is to articulate and exemplify these challenges as raised in the literature of vario…
Nonsyntactic Explanations of Island Constraints
The explanation of island phenomena has been a central feature of formal grammatical theory practically since its inception. However, a growing number of linguists have provided explanations for these phenomena that are not based on purely syntactic constraints. Some have proposed alternative explanations that appeal to information structure or to semantic information, and others find the basis for island constraints to lie in processing. This re…
Sociophonetics of Consonantal Variation
Although consonantal variation has traditionally been studied using auditory coding, techniques now exist for measuring any kind of consonants acoustically and/or articulatorily. These methods have already been employed extensively for studying variation in many languages. Techniques and past studies using them are reviewed for rhotics, laterals, fricatives, stops, weakening and strengthening processes, and voicing. These methods are becoming wel…
The Semantic Properties of Free Indirect Discourse
Free indirect discourse has traditionally been described as a form of reported speech or thought. It seems to be a mixture of both direct discourse (in allowing exclamatives, interrogatives, etc.) and indirect discourse (in following sequences of tenses and pronouns). It has been the object of more interest from literary theorists than from linguists, though Banfield (1982) offered what is still the best syntactic description of the phenomenon, a…
Morris Halle
Morris Halle has been one of the most influential figures in modern linguistics. This is partly due to his scientific contributions in many areas: insights into the sound patterns of English and Russian, ideas about the nature of metered verse, ways of thinking about phonological features and rules, and models for argumentation about phonological description and phonological theory. But he has had an equally profound influence through his role as…
Contrast in Phonology, 1867–1967
This article surveys the history of contrast in phonology from Bell's Visible Speech ( 1867 ) until Chomsky & Halle's Sound Pattern of English ( 1968 ). Phonological contrast can be viewed at the segmental and subsegmental (feature) levels. As contrast at the segmental level involves the phoneme, whose later history has been extensively documented, I concentrate on the origins of the concept in the work of Sweet. Subsequently, I focus on subsegme…
Expressives Across Languages
This article presents a review of works on expressive linguistic objects in the Principles and Parameters framework ( Chomsky 1995a , b ; 2001 ). It discusses case studies of expressives in Russian, German, Halkomelem, Maale, Walman (Valman), Kolyma Yukaghir, Itelmen, Tongan, and Spanish, as well as in Breton and Yiddish. The article demonstrates that two semantic types (size and attitude) of expressives correspond to a great variety of syntactic…
Constructing a Proto-Lexicon
Infants begin learning the phonological structure of their native language remarkably early and use this information to extract word-sized chunks from the speech signal. While acquiring the language-specific segmentation strategies appropriate for their native language, infants are simultaneously beginning to form word–object pairings and learning which sound contrasts are meaningful in the native language. They are also working out how to assign…
Syntactic Ergativity
Some languages showing morphological ergativity in case and/or agreement also show ergative patterns in core syntactic domains—syntactic ergativity. The most-studied type of syntactic ergativity is a ban on the Ā movement of ergative subjects; an additional type concerns the distribution of absolutives in nonfinite clauses. This article first presents the standard view of syntactic ergativity, which is closely connected to the treatment of ergati…
Existential Sentences Crosslinguistically
Though the term “existential sentence” goes back at least as far as Jespersen (1924 , p. 155) and is used in descriptions of many languages to refer to a designated construction, it is difficult to identify exactly what these constructions have in common crosslinguistically. Following McNally (2011 , p. 1829), the term is used here to refer to sentence types that are “noncanonical,” whether due to some aspect of their syntax or the presence of a …
Negation and Negative Dependencies
Languages may vary greatly in the way they express negation. Most languages exploit specifically designated negative markers, such as English not. Many languages may also use negative indefinites (such as English nobody or nothing) to express negation. The behavior of these negative indefinites is subject to crosslinguistic variation: In some languages, negative markers and negative indefinites cannot express a single semantic negation (nobody di…
So Much Research, So Little Change”
Since the 1950s, in analyzing the reasons US schools fail African American learners, sociolinguists have located dialectal difference as central to the educational theater of operations. Recognizing that African American Vernacular English (AAVE) was not itself an obstacle to learning, linguists instead identified “ignorance of nonstandard English rules on the part of teachers and text writers” as the culprit ( Labov 1969 , p. 29). This article r…
Phonological Neighborhood Effects in Spoken Word Perception and Production
Research on spoken word perception and production has identified two hallmarks of spoken word processing: multiple activation of representations of the sound patterns of words in memory and subsequent competition among these patterns. Evidence for this activation-competition process has come, in part, from experimental studies examining the effects of phonological neighborhoods, which are collections of similar-sounding words that are activated i…
Language and Speech in Autism
Autism is a developmental disability characterized by atypical social interaction, interests or body movements, and communication. Our review examines the empirical status of three communication phenomena believed to be unique to autism: pronoun reversal (using the pronoun you when the pronoun I is intended, and vice versa), echolalia (repeating what someone has said), and a reduced or even reversed production-comprehension lag (a reduction or re…
Phonological Representation
Phonological representations capture information about individual word forms and about the general characteristics of word forms in a language. To support the processing of novel word forms as well as familiar word forms in novel contexts, an abstract level of representation is needed in which many phonetic details and contextual features are disregarded. At the same time, evidence has accumulated that such details are retained in memory and used…
Functional Categories and Syntactic Theory
The distinction between lexical and functional elements plays a major role in current research in syntax and neighboring aspects of the study of language. In this article, we review the motivations of a progressive shift of emphasis from lexical to functional elements in syntactic research: the identification of the functional lexicon as the locus of the triggering of syntactic actions and of syntactic variation, and the description and analysis …
The Count/Mass Distinction in Grammar and Cognition
The count/mass distinction is a domain of human language that is strongly related to human cognition. This review starts with an overview of recent research on individuation in relation to core knowledge systems (in particular the systems of object representation, agent representation, and number representation), followed by a brief overview of the role these representations play in the acquisition of count meaning. I then discuss linguistic aspe…
Scalar Implicatures and Their Interface with Grammar
Scalar implicatures (SIs) and, more generally, quantity-based implicatures (QBIs) have been intensely investigated since Grice's seminal work. Recently, SIs and QBIs have been at the center of an intense debate. Some researchers, following Grice's original insight, argue that they should be captured solely in terms of principles of rational action (the pragmatic approach). Others argue that they cannot be analyzed in purely pragmatic terms but ca…
The Role of Phonology in Phonetic Change
This article reviews the role phonology plays in phonetic changes. After first establishing what kinds of changes qualify as phonetic changes for the purposes of discussion, and laying out the theoretical outlook that is adopted here, I review the most obvious cases in which phonology plays a role in phonetic change. These include (a) the way phonological contrast can lead to phonetic dispersion, (b) the way phonological natural classes can defin…
Experimental Studies on the Cultural Evolution of Language
Why are languages the way they are? The biases and constraints that explain why languages display the traits they do—instead of other possible ones—include human cognition, social dynamics, communicative function, the structure of meanings, and the interactions between these. Cultural language evolution is concerned with explaining the causal pathways that link these biases and constraints with fundamental linguistic traits, such as combinatorial…
Questions Under Discussion
We discuss problems familiar from the literature on presupposition and information structure, and illustrate how a synthesis using the Question Under Discussion (QUD) framework yields fresh insight. In this framework, discourse is analyzed in terms of the strategy of inquiry pursued by the interlocutors, and individual utterances are interpreted relative to the question being addressed. This way of thinking offers a new perspective on diverse phe…
Computational Learning of Morphology
This article reviews research on the unsupervised learning of morphology, that is, the induction of morphological knowledge with no prior knowledge of the language beyond the training texts. This is an area of considerable activity over the period from the mid 1990s to the present. It is of particular interest to linguists because it provides a good example of a domain in which complex structures must be induced by the language learner, and succe…
Acquisition of Quantifiers
Explaining children's nonadult interpretations of sentences with quantifiers has been the objective of extensive research for more than 50 years. This article reviews four areas of research, each of which began with the observation that children and adults respond differently to sentences with quantifiers. The observed differences have been subject to considerable debate, often drawing upon linguistic theory for answers and sometimes resulting in…