Why is it preferable to say salt and pepper over pepper and salt? Based on an analysis of 692 binomial tokens from online corpora, we show that a number of semantic, metrical, and frequency constraints contribute significantly to ordering preferences, overshadowing the phonological factors that have traditionally been considered important. The ordering of binomials exhibits a considerable amount of variation. For example, although principal and interest is the more frequent order, interest and principal also occurs. We consider three frameworks for analysis of this variation: traditional optimality theory, stochastic optimality theory, and logistic regression. Our best models—using logistic regression—predict 79.2% of the binomial tokens and 76.7% of types, and the remainder are predicted as less frequent—but not ungrammatical—variants.

A usage-based view takes grammar to be the cognitive organization of one's experience with language. Aspects of that experience, for instance, the frequency of use of certain constructions or particular instances of constructions, have an impact on representation that is evidenced in speaker knowledge of conventionalized phrases and in language variation and change. It is shown that particular instances of constructions can acquire their own pragmatic, semantic, and phonological characteristics. In addition, it is argued that high-frequency instances of constructions undergo grammaticization processes (which produce further change), function as the central members of categories formed by constructions, and retain their old forms longer than lower-frequency instances under the pressure of newer formations. An exemplar model that accommodates both phonological and semantic representation is elaborated to describe the data considered.

Heteroclisis is the property of a lexeme whose inflectional paradigm involves two or more distinct inflection classes. Although heteroclisis is widely observable, its implications for grammatical theory remain underexplored, perhaps because its canonical instances have the appearance of sporadic lexical exceptions. But heteroclisis cannot be assumed to lack any role in the definition of a language's morphology, since (i) it is sometimes highly systematic, involving whole classes of lexemes, and (ii) it obeys a universal constraint. These two facts show that heteroclisis is rule-governed. On the assumption that inflectional morphology involves a linkage of content-paradigms with form-paradigms (Stump 2002), heteroclisis can be seen as a kind of mismatch regulated by rules of paradigm linkage. Such rules account for the range of empirical phenomena subsumed by observations (i) and (ii).

A usage-based analysis of four constructions in Spanish, each with a different verb meaning ‘become’ used with an animate subject and an adjective, provides evidence for exemplar representations of constructions, with analogy to these representations accounting for productive use. We analyze 423 tokens from spoken and written corpora, which we take to represent a subset of a speaker's experience with these constructions. The analysis, based on token frequency and semantic similarity, leads to the organization of tokens with two of the verbs into dense clusters of semantically related adjectives centered on a high-frequency exemplar. The other two verbs are used with more diverse sets of adjectives. We supplement the initial analysis with an experiment in which speakers were asked to rate the semantic similarity of pairs of adjectives. When subjected to multidimensional scaling, the results of the experiment support the initial analysis. We argue that novel instances of verb + adjective sequences are based on analogies to previous experience and not on rules that refer to abstract features. In a second experiment, speakers judged the acceptability of sentences taken from the corpora; the results showed that high-frequency expressions and expressions semantically similar to the high-frequency ones lead to an expression being judged more acceptable. Overall the results support exemplar representations, which are heavily based on usage experience.

According to the PRONOMINAL ARGUMENT HYPOTHESIS, the characteristic features of many so-called nonconfigurational languages may be accounted for on the assumption that affixes of verbs or auxiliaries in such languages either function as syntactic arguments or identify null pronouns that fill this role. Overt NPs then stand as adjuncts to clauses that are formally complete without them. Several studies have proposed analyses of Algonquian languages that incorporate versions of this hypothesis. This article explores data from several areas of the morphology and syntax of the Eastern Algonquian language Maliseet-Passamaquoddy that suggest that it is not such a pronominal argument language.

This article shows that a VP in English is only a VP at the outset of a derivation, and that VP-preposing in English is in fact preposing of the internal arguments of the verb, followed by remnant movement of the original VP, making English and German (Müller 1998) more similar than they might appear at first glance. The evidence for the nonconstituency of the verb and its original arguments in preposed position comes from its solution to what has been termed Pesetsky's paradox, in that an object of a preposed VP can bind into an adverbial at the end of a sentence, creating an apparent conflict between the assumptions that binding requires c-command and that only constituents move. This article also provides evidence for c-command as the prominence constraint on binding, rather than o-command (Pollard & Sag 1994) or f-command (Dalrymple 1999).

This article examines the distribution of accusative case morphology in Kannada, detailing the syntactic, semantic, and morphological factors that contribute to its occurrence. Accusative case morphology is optional on inanimate direct objects. When optional, its presence indicates a specific reading, which I argue is best modeled as a choice function. The specific readings due to morphological form are distinct from specific readings that arise from syntactic position. Positional specificity is detectable only on morphologically noncasemarked object NPs. When the accusative case morpheme is obligatory, specificity effects are positional and not due to the presence of the morpheme. In this situation, additional morphology is required to achieve an inherently specific interpretation, suggesting a separation between morphological signals and meaning.

Although proximity between arguments and verbs (locality) is a relatively robust determinant of sentence-processing difficulty (Hawkins 1998, 2001, Gibson 2000), increasing argument-verb distance can also facilitate processing (Konieczny 2000). We present two self-paced reading (SPR) experiments involving Hindi that provide further evidence of antilocality, and a third SPR experiment which suggests that similarity-based interference can attenuate this distance-based facilitation. A unified explanation of interference, locality, and antilocality effects is proposed via an independently motivated theory of activation decay and retrieval interference (Anderson et al. 2004).

A history of the notion of properhood in philosophy and linguistics is given. Two long-standing ideas, (i) that proper names have no sense, and (ii) that they are expressions whose purpose is to refer to individuals, cannot be made to work comprehensively while proper is understood as a subcategory of linguistic units, whether of lexemes or phrases. Phrases of the type the old vicarage, which are potentially ambiguous with regard to properhood, encourage the suggestion that proper is best understood as a mode of reference contrasting with semantic reference; in the former, the intension/sense of any lexical items within the referring expression, and any entailments they give rise to, are canceled. Proper names are all those expressions that refer nonintensionally. Linguistic evidence is given that this opposition can be grammaticalized, a speculation is made about its neurological basis, and psycholinguistic evidence is adduced in support. The proper noun, as a lexical category, is argued to be epiphenomenal on proper names as newly defined. Some consequences of the view that proper names have no sense in the act of reference are explored; they are not debarred from having senses (better: synchronic etymologies) accessible during other (meta)linguistic activities.

A key mechanism in the organization of turns at talk in conversation is the ability to anticipate or PROJECT the moment of completion of a current speaker's turn. Some authors suggest that this is achieved via lexicosyntactic cues, while others argue that projection is based on intonational contours. We tested these hypotheses in an on-line experiment, manipulating the presence of symbolic (lexicosyntactic) content and intonational contour of utterances recorded in natural conversations. When hearing the original recordings, subjects can anticipate turn endings with the same degree of accuracy attested in real conversation. With intonational contour entirely removed (leaving intact words and syntax, with a completely flat pitch), there is no change in subjects' accuracy of end-of-turn projection. But in the opposite case (with original intonational contour intact, but with no recognizable words), subjects' performance deteriorates significantly. These results establish that the symbolic (i.e. lexicosyntactic) content of an utterance is necessary (and possibly sufficient) for projecting the moment of its completion, and thus for regulating conversational turn-taking. By contrast, and perhaps surprisingly, intonational contour is neither necessary nor sufficient for end-of-turn projection.

A model of speech production is proposed in which the input is a planning stage at which lexical items are arrayed, accompanied by the full panoply of phonological representations from distinctive features to their attendant tree structures. A set of instructions for control of the vocal tract is calculated leading to a sound output. Two parallel processes are involved in the calculation of these instructions, both of which replace the planning-stage representation by the appropriate motoric instructions. One of these processes is universal and involves replacing each distinctive feature with an appropriate set of motoric instructions, either unmodified or modified by the process of overlap. We postulate a parallel language-specific process that is sensitive to those features in danger of losing their perceptual saliency as a consequence of the environment in which they appear. This process, referred to as enhancement, adds additional motoric instructions to enhance the saliency of the jeopardized features. We provide a number of examples to illustrate how enhancement works. We conclude from these examples that whereas defining gestures related to distinctive features are, in many instances, weakened or even absented from the speech stream, enhancement gestures, once added to the set of motoric instructions, appear never to be subject to obliteration by overlap.