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Forthcoming Articles


Listed here are articles that are to appear in upcoming issues.

Click on any title to jump to the abstract, if available.

To appear in September 2008 (84.3)

Time and thyme are not homophones: The effect of lemma frequency on word durations in a corpus of spontaneous speech
Susanne Gahl

Words in the world: How and why meanings can matter
Sally McConnell-Ginet

The verbs for and in Walman, a Torricelli language of Papua New Guinea
Lea Brown & Matthew S. Dryer

Free to bound to free? Interactions between pragmatics and syntax in the development of Australian pronominal systems
Ilana Mushin & Jane Simpson

Review Article: Dayal & Mahajan (eds.): Clause structure in South Asian languages
Josef Bayer

Obituary: Winfred P. Lehmann
Joseph Salmons

In the Works

The logical structure of linguistic theory
Stephen R. Anderson

Structural phylogeny in historical linguistics: Methodological explorations applied in Island Melanesia
Michael Dunn, Stephen C. Levinson, Ger Reesink, & Angela Terrill

Coordinate grammars
D. Terence Langendoen

Modeling compound stress in English
Ingo Plag, Gero Kunter, Sabine Lappe, & Maria Braun

Review Article: McGilvray: Cambridge companion to Chomsky
Robert A. Chametzky

Review Article: Rethinking structuralism: The posthumous publications of Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960)
John Hewson

 

Time and thyme are not homophones: The effect of lemma frequency on word durations in a corpus of spontaneous speech
Susanne Gahl

Frequent words tend to shorten. The shortening of frequent forms is of interest for two lines of research: First, an influential model of language production (Levelt et al., 1999) maintains that the locus of frequency in the lexicon is the phonological form. A corollary of that position is that homophone pairs such as thyme and time, which have identical forms, should behave as though they had identical frequencies - and should therefore shorten equally. Secondly, the shortening of frequent forms has played a key role in debates about the place of frequency information in linguistic competence. Researchers on opposing sides of the debate have appealed to the shortening of frequent forms in support of their position and have attributed shortening to increased articulatory routinization. Homophone durations can shed light on this issue: If articulatory routinization is indeed the source of shortening of frequent forms, then articulatory practice with a high-frequency word such as time should cause a low-frequency homophone such as thyme to shorten as well.

This study reports an analysis of roughly 90,000 tokens of homophones in the Switchboard corpus of American English telephone conversations. I find that high-frequency words like time are significantly shorter than their low-frequency homophones such as thyme. The effect of lemma frequency persisted when local speaking rate, predictability from neighboring words, position relative to pauses, syntactic category, and orthographic regularity were brought under statistical control. The results suggest that the phonological form is not the sole locus of frequency information in the lexicon, and that articulatory routinization cannot be the prime source of shortening. I argue in support of a conception of language production in which frequency information pervades multiple levels of linguistic representations and mechanisms.

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Words in the world: How and why meanings can matter
Sally McConnell-Ginet

Why do people care about the meaning(s)/significance associated with a word? Does it make sense to advocate or to criticize a certain form-meaning association? This paper argues that words do real cognitive and social work as they are deployed in social practice and that it is primarily through words and their histories of use that culture links to language. It is not semantic representations as such that matter but the (mostly extralinguistic) reference and conceptual baggage words acquire in their discursive world travels. Word meaning complexes shift and are contested as part of shifting and contested customs, institutions, and ideologies.

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The verbs for and in Walman, a Torricelli language of Papua New Guinea
Lea Brown & Matthew S. Dryer

In Walman, a language in the Torricelli family spoken in Papua New Guinea, there are two words which have the function of conjoining noun phrases but which have the morphology of transitive verbs, exhibiting subject agreement with the first conjunct and object agreement with the second conjunct. We discuss two interrelated issues concerning these words: (1) Do these words behave syntactically like conjunctions in other languages, in combining with two noun phrases to form a single noun phrase, or are they really verbs in a serial verb construction? and (2) Do these words have a meaning that is closer to 'and' in English, or do they have a more basic (verbal) meaning of '(be) with'? We show that the evidence on the first of these questions is somewhat contradictory, but that even in cases where the syntactic evidence argues that these verbs do not combine with two noun phrases to form a single noun phrase, they still have a meaning closer to 'and' than to '(be) with'.

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Free to bound to free? Interactions between pragmatics and syntax in the development of Australian pronominal systems
Ilana Mushin & Jane Simpson

Data from dual pronoun systems in Australian languages is used to show the pragmatic basis for a cycle of pronoun creation - reduced pronouns from free forms and free from reduced - and the motivation to maintain both types in a linguistic system. Free pronouns become positionally restricted reduced forms by association of clause-initial position with discourse prominence (Swartz 1988, Choi 1999). The same pragmatic motivations result in the creation of new free pronouns, and the divergence of free and reduced pronouns with respect to Ergative case-marking. Examples of languages at different stages of the cycle include Garrwa, (one set of 'free' pronouns, with a strong preference for second position); Djambarrpuyngu and Gupapuyngu (two sets of pronouns transparently related in form and in complementary distribution); Ritharrngu, Djinang, and Djinba (two sets of pronouns transparently related in form but in which the reduced pronouns are becoming obligatory); Warlpiri (two sets of pronouns, which diverge in form, and the reduced set is obligatory) and Warumungu, (one set of reduced pronouns, indicating how new free pronouns might emerge based on information packaging principles). The creation of free pronouns from reduced pronouns argues against strict unidirectionality of change.

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In the Works

The logical structure of linguistic theory
Stephen R. Anderson

The object of inquiry in Linguistics is the human ability to acquire and use a natural language, and the goal of linguistic theory is an explicit characterization of that ability. Looking at the communicative abilities of other species, it becomes clear that our linguistic ability is specific to our species, undoubtedly a product of our biology. But how do we go about determining the specifics of this Language Faculty? There are two primary ways in which we infer the nature of Language from the properties of individual languages: arguments from the Poverty of the Stimulus, and the search for universals that characterize every natural language. Arguments of the first sort are not easy to construct (though not as difficult as sometimes suggested), and apply only to a tiny part of Language as a whole. Arguments from universals or typological generalizations are also quite problematic. In phonology, morphology, and syntax, factors of historical development, functional under-pinnings, limitations of the learning situation, among others conspire to compromise the explanatory value of arguments from observed cross-linguistic regularities. Confounding the situation is the likelihood that properties found across languages as a consequence of such external forces have been incorporated into the Language Faculty evolutionarily through the "Baldwin Effect." The conflict between the biologically based specificity of the human Language Faculty and the difficulty of establishing most of its properties in a secure way cannot, however, be avoided by ignoring or denying the reality of either of its poles.

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Structural phylogeny in historical linguistics: Methodological explorations applied in Island Melanesia
Michael Dunn, Stephen C. Levinson, Ger Reesink, & Angela Terrill

Using various methods derived from evolutionary biology, including maximum parsimony and Bayesian analysis, we tackle the question of the relationships among a group of Papuan isolate languages which have hitherto resisted accepted attempts at demonstration of inter-relatedness. Instead of using existing vocabulary-based methods, which cannot be applied to these languages due to the paucity of shared lexemes, we created a database of "structural features" - abstract phonological and grammatical features apart from their form. The methods are first tested on the well-understood and closely related Oceanic languages spoken in the same region as the Papuan languages under question. We find that using biological methods on structural features can recapitulate the results of the Comparative Method tree for the Oceanic languages; thus showing structural features can be a valid way of extracting linguistic history. Application of the same methods to the otherwise unrelatable Papuan languages is thus likely to be similarly valid.

Because languages that have been in contact for protracted periods may also converge, we outline additional methods for distinguishing convergence from inherited relatedness.

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Coordinate grammars
D. Terence Langendoen

Chomsky 1959 presented an algorithm for constructing a finite transducer that is strongly equivalent to a Chomsky-normal-form context-free grammar for all sentences generated by that grammar with up to any specified finite degree of center embedding. I present in this article a new solution using a variety of COORDINATE GRAMMARS to assign nonembedding structures equivalent to those assigned by an embedding grammar, which can in turn be directly computed by a finite transducer. I propose that the bound on apparent center-embedding is really a consequence of a bound on apparent alternation between right- and left-embedding, called here ZIGZAG EMBEDDING. Coordinate grammars can also be used to assign nonembedding structures equivalent to those with up to any specified finite degree of coordinate embedding (the occurrence of a coordinate structure as a member of a coordinate structure). It concludes that coordinate grammars or the finite-transducers strongly equivalent to them are psychologically real, and that the existence of a finite bound on the degree of apparent zigzag and coordinate embedding is a consequence of the finiteness of such grammars or transducers.

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Modeling compound stress in English
Ingo Plag, Gero Kunter, Sabine Lappe, & Maria Braun

It is generally assumed that noun-noun compounds in English are stressed on the left-hand member (e.g. cóurtroom, wátchmaker). However, there is a large amount of variation in stress assignment (e.g. silk tíe, Madison Ávenue, singer-sóngwriter) whose significance and sources are largely unaccounted for in the literature. This paper presents a study in which three kinds of factors held to play a role in compound stress assignment are tested: argument structure, lexicalization and semantics. Although often mentioned as influential, systematic empirical studies of these factors are scarce and those that are available have mostly produced unclear or contradictory results. Furthermore, this is the first study using speech data. The analysis of 4,353 noun-noun compounds extracted from the Boston University Radio Speech Corpus shows that there is indeed a considerable amount of variation in stress assignment. Overall, semantics turns out to have the strongest effect on compound stress assignment, whereas an approach relying on argument structure is much less successful in predicting compound stress. The paper also presents for the first time large-scale empirical evidence for the assumption that lexicalization has an effect on compound stress assignment. However, the influence of semantic factors and lexicalization is far from categorical, which speaks against rule-based approaches to compound stress. This is in line with recent findings on the semi-regular behavior of compounds in English and in other languages. The paper also makes a methodological contribution to the debate in showing that (and how) corpus-based studies using acoustic measurements can shed new light on the issue of variable compound stress.

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