This article introduces the phenomenon of discontinuous harmony, where the target and trigger of harmony are separated by intervening nonharmonizing words. We present a case study from Guébie (Kru; Côte d’Ivoire) in which particle verbs are split via focus movement. Despite appearing at opposite edges of the clause, the verb controls harmony on the particle without affecting the vowels of intervening material. While discontinuous harmony would appear to violate locality, we offer an analysis that involves local harmony followed by syntactic movement that separates the trigger and target. This analysis thus relies on a cyclic interleaving of syntactic and phonological operations, where syntactic information persists through phonological evaluation and is available to later cycles of syntax.

Northern Iroquoian languages are famous for the complexities of their agreement systems, realized through three sets of ‘pronominal prefixes’. Drawing on new and existing material from Kanien’kéha (Mohawk), this article proposes a formal model that captures the range of empirical patterns using standard assumptions about argument structure and agreement, combined with the proposal that inanimate nominals have no person, number, or gender (φ) features and are thus invisible to the agreement system. This result is important in light of the fact that Kanien’kéha and its close relative Oneida have been the subject of proposals for major parametric variation among human languages. In The polysynthesis parameter, Baker (1996) draws primarily on Kanien’kéha, arguing that a macroparameter relating to the realization of agreement morphology is responsible for a range of morphosyntactic phenomena in Kanien’kéha and other polysynthetic languages. Koenig and Michelson (2015) examine agreement puzzles in Oneida and argue for a different type of macroparameter: that Northern Iroquoian languages differ from other languages in lacking a level of argument structure and local syntactic selection altogether. In this article, I argue that the core empirical patterns can be captured through the proposal that inanimate nominals are featureless, and that reference to hierarchical structure is necessary to capture the full range of facts. The absence of φ-features on inanimates in turn has implications both for the typology of nominal features and for the Polysynthesis Parameter, a parameter that requires all arguments in polysynthetic languages to be morphologically referenced on the verb.

Linear asymmetries pose a challenge for syntactic theory but may yield to an explanation in terms of sentence parsing, given the inherent left-to-right nature of this process. We therefore explore the option of a parsing-based account of Greenberg’s (1963) universal 20. Universal 20 describes a word-order asymmetry in noun phrases that can be captured if movement of the noun is exclusively leftward (Cinque 2005 and Abels & Neeleman 2012). Our account is based on the hypothesis that rightward movement of obligatory elements leads to a specific processing difficulty that we call the missing-filler effect. Independent evidence for this effect comes from self-paced reading and maze paradigm experiments that replicate and extend earlier findings by Staub et al. (2006) regarding the parsing of heavy-XP shift in the context of optionally and obligatorily transitive verbs. We conclude that the absence of rightward movement in the noun phrase need not be attributed to a syntactic constraint but can be traced back to the missing-filler effect if we assume that parsing effort affects language acquisition, which in turn affects typological frequency (as argued in Hawkins 1990, 2009 and Kirby 1999).

When children behave differently from adults in language tasks, it is often unclear if the underlying cause is non-adult-like representation of relevant information, non-adult-like deployment of adult-like representations, or both non-adult-like representations and non-adult-like deployment. We show how computational cognitive modeling can be used to identify which options could lead to specific non-adult-like language behavior, using the case study of Spanish subject pronoun interpretation by typically developing children. In a picture-selection task, children interpret subject pronouns differently from adults; modeling results suggest that both child and adult pronoun interpretation behavior is best captured by inaccuracy somewhere in the pronoun interpretation process, though how exactly children are inaccurate differs from how exactly adults are inaccurate. So, to become adult-like, children need to learn how to be inaccurate in adult-like ways. We discuss the promise and limitations of the computational cognitive modeling approach demonstrated here for evaluating specific hypotheses about the underlying cognitive computations leading to observed language behavior.

The relationship between inflectional case marking and the emergence of definite and indefinite articles has long been hypothesized but seldom examined quantitatively. This study presents a large-scale statistical analysis of the relationship across ninety-four Indo-European languages. Bayesian logistic regression models account for phylogenetic and spatiotemporal autocorrelation while integrating over phylogenetic uncertainty. The results establish a robust inverse association between case-inventory size and the presence of articles. Estimated probabilities indicate that smaller case inventories are associated with higher probabilities of definite articles. A similar association holds for indefinite articles. The posterior median predicted probability exceeds 0.5 at four cases for definite articles and between three and four cases for indefinite articles. These thresholds correspond to reduced case inventories composed primarily of grammatical cases. Even after accounting for case-inventory size, the presence of a definite article is associated with a higher probability of an indefinite article. The analysis shows that the observed association is compatible with direct, mediated, and common-cause accounts and does not uniquely identify a causal pathway. These findings sharpen the empirical basis of the debate and identify the causal and evolutionary questions that remain open.

In light of the growing number of undergraduates from racially minoritized backgrounds at newly emergent Minority-Serving Institutions and other colleges and universities, linguists have a special responsibility to engage such students, particularly through projects that connect to students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This article describes undergraduates’ learning experiences in a research collective committed to community-centered collaborative work to advance sociolinguistic justice for the Mexican Indigenous diasporic community in California. The discussion centers the voices of undergraduate team members to demonstrate the benefits of students’ learning with respect to the research process, linguistics as a discipline, and understanding of self, family, and community.

This article introduces a novel linguistics pedagogy resource called the Language Profiles Project (LPP), an open access resource for linguistics instructors and students. The goal of the LPP is to make it easier and more engaging for instructors in North American institutions to incorporate underrepresented languages into undergraduate linguistics courses. More concretely, a language profile combines data sets for use in linguistics courses with contextual information about the language and culture. In this article, I describe the resource, the motivations for creating it, and some ways in which it could be used.