The Eyak language of Alaska now has two aged speakers; Mandan has 6, Osage 5, Abenaki-Penobscot 20, and Iowa has 5 fluent speakers. According to counts in 1977, already 13 years ago, Coeur d'Alene had fewer than 20, Tuscarora fewer than 30, Menomini fewer than 50, Yokuts fewer than 10. On and on this sad litany goes, and by no means only for Native North America. Sirenikski Eskimo has two speakers, Ainu is perhaps extinct. Ubykh, the Northwest Caucasian language with the most consonants, 80-some, is nearly extinct, with perhaps only one remaining speaker. Here we might be accused of jumping the gun, prematurely announcing the extinction of a language, since—as I heard somewhere—two or three more speakers of Ubykh had reportedly been found. But what difference does it make in human history that a language became extinct in 1999 instead of 1989? What difference does it make if the youngest speaker is 90 or in fact 9? Only 81 years in the date of the inevitable extinction of the language, a mere moment in human history— though a crucial moment for linguists today, as we shall see.

In schools, from kindergarten through high school, the language of instruction was English. When students who had been taught in English left school, they were speaking English. When they married, they spoke English to their children. ‘Indians’ no longer spoke their native languages as their primary means of communication.

This was the perceived state of affairs in relation to the Hualapai language in the mid 1970s. Many members of the community thought that English was taking over their ancestral language and that their traditions were about to disappear. In response to this threat of rapid language decline, a long and tedious process of forming a community language team began, with the Hualapai Bilingual/Bicultural Program as its central force.

The scene is Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast, the eastern half of this Central American country. It is a multilingual region where, besides Spanish, English Creole and various indigenous languages are spoken by populations of speakers ranging from tens of thousands of Miskitu (Misumalpan) to thousands of Sumu (Misumalpan) to barely two dozen Rama (Chibchan) and a mere handful of Garifuna (Arawakan).

The time is the decade of the 1980s and of the Sandinista Revolution, during which the legal, educational, and social status of these coastal languages changed through the process of establishing an autonomy statute for the region, a development that is sometimes referred to as the second Sandinista Revolution. This Autonomy project was a response to the war situation that developed on the Atlantic Coast, as both indigenous and Creole people rejected the Sandinista Revolution in its original form.

This essay will deal with a special type of center devoted to the documentation and teaching of the linguistic traditions of contemporary Native American communities. In my remarks, I will concern myself with the needs that such a center would satisfy in North America—in particular the United States, with which I am most familiar, although some of what I will have to say applies in other parts of the world, of course. While centers possessing many of the qualities I wish to champion here exist in other parts of the world, an impressive example being the Centro Linguistico Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala, there is none that closely approximates this model in the United States.

Linguists working in Guatemala in recent years have had the benefit of being able to work with an increasingly linguistically sophisticated, politically aware, and culturally concerned population. Mayas have been quite forthright about informing linguists about what they believe to be the proper sort of linguistics to do. In 1985, for instance, a group of Mayas participating in the VIII Mayan Linguistics Workshop in Antigua Guatemala called on linguists ‘not to contribute to the internal division of each Mayan language, not to promote or officialize Spanish borrowings in those languages, not to marginalize speakers of Mayan languages in the investigation of their own languages, and not to monopolize or reserve for themselves linguistic methodology and knowledge’ (Cojtí Cuxil 1990:3). It was perhaps a shock to some linguists, as it was to me, to realize that good will and good relations with the individual collaborators in our past research, a dedication to sound scientific principles of linguistic research, and even instruction in literacy and linguistics on the part of many of us were not enough to avoid rather severe criticism of our role in Mayan linguistics.

Linguists typically celebrate the tension that plays between two realities of human linguistic knowledge, universality and diversity. But linguistic diversity is not something whose future can be taken for granted. Many local languages and cultures find themselves in great peril in this era, a fact well documented elsewhere in this collection.

In the following paragraphs I will be concerned with the idea that linguistic diversity is important to human intellectual life—not only in the context of scientific linguistic inquiry, but also in relation to the class of human activities belonging to the realms of culture and art.

Morphological marking of grammatical relations may appear on either the head or the dependent member of the constituent (or on both, or on neither). Grammatical relations—and whole languages—may be classified according to their propensity for using one of these types of marking. Implicational relations among various marking patterns can be stated: languages display a tendency to use one type consistently throughout their grammar. The difference in patterns provides a typological metric and a functional explanation for certain word-order preferences. For historical linguistics, it provides a diagnostically conservative feature and a clue to genetic relatedness. Although the head-marked pattern is cross-linguistically favored, grammatical theory is strongly biased toward the dependent-marked patterns that happen to dominate in Indo-European.

Locally free reflexives in British English are best analyzed as intensified nonnominative pronouns, subject to two conditions that regulate English intensive NPs generally: (a) a contrastiveness requirement and (b) a requirement that the character being referred to be more important or more central than other characters included in the contrast set. The latter ‘discourse prominence’ requirement is similar to the one that regulates proximate marking in the Algonquian languages. The extent to which discourse prominence marking can mimic locality marking may explain historical conversions of intensives to anaphors, as well as certain anomalies in child language. This frequent formal overlapping makes it necessary to take marking for discourse prominence into account whenever locality-marking is under investigation.

Discussion of Indo-European origins and dispersal focuses on two hypotheses. Qualitative evidence from reconstructed vocabulary and correlations with archaeological data suggest that Indo-European languages originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and spread together with cultural innovations associated with pastoralism, beginning c. 6500-5500 bp. An alternative hypothesis, according to which Indo-European languages spread with the diffusion of farming from Anatolia, beginning c. 9500-8000 bp, is supported by statistical phylogenetic and phylogeographic analyses of lexical traits. The time and place of the Indo-European ancestor language therefore remain disputed. Here we present a phylogenetic analysis in which ancestry constraints permit more accurate inference of rates of change, based on observed changes between ancient or medieval languages and their modern descendants, and we show that the result strongly supports the steppe hypothesis. Positing ancestry constraints also reveals that homoplasy is common in lexical traits, contrary to the assumptions of previous work. We show that lexical traits undergo recurrent evolution due to recurring patterns of semantic and morphological change.

This article deals with the claim that the MAGNITUDE ESTIMATION (ME) method of gathering acceptability judgments produces data that are more informative for linguists than binary or n-point scale judgments. We performed three acceptability-rating experiments that directly compared ME data to binary and seven-point scale data. The results clearly falsify the hypothesis that data gathered by the ME method carry a larger amount of information about the acceptability of a given linguistic phenomenon. The three measures are largely equivalent with respect to informativity. Moreover, ME judgments are shown to be more liable to producing spurious variance under certain circumstances.

The introduction of the psychophysical technique of MAGNITUDE ESTIMATION to the study of acceptability judgments (Bard et al. 1996) has led to a surge of interest in formal acceptability-judgment experiments over the past fifteen years. One of the primary reasons for its popularity is that it was developed as a tool to measure actual units of perception, offering the possibility of data that is inherently more informative than previous scaling tasks. However, there are several untested cognitive assumptions that must hold in order for ME to be the perceptual measurement test that it is purported to be. Building on the recent formalization of these assumptions in the psychophysics literature (Narens 1996, Luce 2002), this article presents two experiments designed to test whether these assumptions hold for acceptability-judgment experiments. The results suggest that the cognitive assumptions of magnitude estimation do not hold for participants in acceptability-judgment experiments, eliminating any reason to believe that ME could deliver inherently more meaningful data than other acceptability-judgment tasks.

In this paper we propose six implicationally related cognitive statuses relevant for explicating the use of referring expressions in natural language discourse. These statuses are the conventional meanings signalled by determiners and pronouns, and interaction of the statuses with Grice's Maxim of Quantity accounts for the actual distribution and interpretation of forms when necessary conditions for the use of more than one form are met. This proposal is supported by an empirical study of the distribution of referring expressions in naturally occurring discourse in five languages—English, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and Spanish.

In this article we extend the model of language evolution exemplified in Ringe et al. 2002, which recovers phylogenetic trees optimized according to a criterion of weighted maximum compatibility, to include cases in which languages remain in contact and trade linguistic material as they evolve. We describe our analysis of an Indo-European (IE) dataset (originally assembled by Ringe and Taylor) based on this new model. Our study shows that this new model fits the IE family well and suggests that the early evolution of IE involved only limited contact between distinct lineages. Furthermore, the candidate histories we obtain appear to be consistent with archaeological findings, which suggests that this method may be of practical use. The case at hand provides no opportunity to explore the problem of conflict between network optimization criteria; that problem must be left to future research.

This paper argues that the phonetic interpretation of phonological representations may be controlled as well as automatic, because contextual variation in the realization of distinctive feature values is a flexible and adaptive response to variation in the demands on the production or perception of these values between contexts. The principal evidence presented in support of this argument is that the variation in the phonetic realization of speech sounds between contexts or languages involves reorganization of articulations into distinct phonetic categories. Extensive evidence of such reorganization in the realization of the feature [voice] is presented.

In the literature of generative grammar, idiomaticity has been widely identified with noncompositionality. Such a definition fails to recognize several important dimensions of idiomaticity, including, among others, conventionality and figuration. We propose to distinguish IDIOMATICALLY COMBINING EXPRESSIONS (e.g. take advantage, pull strings), whose meanings—while conventional—are distributed among their parts, from IDIOMATIC PHRASES (e.g. kick the hucket, saw logs), which do not distribute their meanings to their components. Most syntactic arguments based on idioms are flawed, we argue, because they treat all idioms as noncompositional. A careful examination of the semantic properties of idioms and the metaphors that many of them employ helps to explain certain intriguing asymmetries in the grammatical and thematic roles of idiomatic noun phrases.

Through the detailed investigation of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of one grammatical construction, that containing the conjunction let alone, we explore the view that the realm of idiomaticity in a language includes a great deal that is productive, highly structured, and worthy of serious grammatical investigation. It is suggested that an explanatory model of grammar will include principles whereby a language can associate semantic and pragmatic interpretation principles with syntactic configurations larger and more complex than those definable by means of single phrase structure rules.

As a novel attack on the perennially vexing questions of the theoretical status of thematic roles and the inventory of possible roles, this paper defends a strategy of basing accounts of roles on more unified domains of linguistic data than have been used in the past to motivate roles, addressing in particular the problem of ARGUMENT SELECTION (principles determining which roles are associated with which grammatical relations). It is concluded that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO-PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it. Both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes of verbal arguments (corresponding to traditional thematic roles and other classes as well) follow automatically, as do desired ‘role hierarchies’. By examining occurrences of the ‘same’ verb with different argument configurations—e.g. two forms of psych predicates and object-oblique alternations as in the familiar spray/load class—it can also be argued that proto-roles act as defaults in the learning of lexical meanings. Are proto-role categories manifested elsewhere in language or as cognitive categories? If so, they might be a means of making grammar acquisition easier for the child, they might explain certain other typological and acquisitional observations, and they may lead to an account of contrasts between unaccusative and unergative intransitive verbs that does not rely on deriving unaccusatives from underlying direct objects.

In addition to providing an account of the empirical facts of language, a theory that aspires to account for language as a biologically based human faculty should seek a graceful integration of linguistic phenomena with what is known about other human cognitive capacities and about the character of brain computation. The present discussion note compares the theoretical stance of biolinguistics (Chomsky 2005, Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011) with a constraint-based parallel architecture approach to the language faculty (Jackendoff 2002, Culicover & Jackendoff 2005). The issues considered include the necessity of redundancy in the lexicon and the rule system, the ubiquity of recursion in cognition, derivational vs. constraint-based formalisms, the relation between lexical items and grammatical rules, the roles of phonology and semantics in the grammar, the combinatorial character of thought in humans and nonhumans, the interfaces between language, thought, and vision, and the possible course of evolution of the language faculty. In each of these areas, the parallel architecture offers a superior account both of the linguistic facts and of the relation of language to the rest of the mind/brain.