Whereas previous work established the link between linguistic features, norms, identity, and personae, little is formalized regarding the extent to which speakers use linguistic variables that are already socially indexed. This article aims to clarify how one socially indexed phonetic feature is used to create linguistic norms and personae by Québécois singers. Music offers a unique context in which to probe these interactions because singing is independent from yet based on speech, and, moreover, because singers put on personae in performance. I hypothesize that singers form personae by using linguistic variants that index the identities in speech with which they wish to associate themselves and their music; these identities are dictated by their genre affiliation because genres and identity are closely intertwined.

Dans cet article, nous étudions l’alternance entre deux formes concurrentes au sein du paradigme du verbe « aller », où les formes ALLER coexistent avec les formes ÊTRE (issues du paradigme du verbe « être »). Grâce à un travail approfondi et minutieux sur des données de corpus oraux, associé à des analyses inférentielles robustes combinant des forêts aléatoires et la modélisation bayésienne, nous montrons que cette concurrence est influencée par plusieurs variables linguistiques telles que le type de sujet, la personne, la négation, le type de complément, mais aussi – et surtout – par des variables concernant le locuteur et l’interaction, telles que l’âge, le genre, la région d’origine ou le nombre de participants présents. Allant plus loin que les travaux précédents sur cette alternance, nos analyses montrent des interactions significatives entre ces deux ensembles de facteurs. Nous défendons la nécessité de prendre en compte les règles prescriptives lors de l’étude de la concurrence morphologique, mais aussi leur intégration différenciée par les locuteurs en fonction de leur profil social.

This study examines the relationship between code-switching (CS) experience, as measured by the Bilingual Code-Switching Profile (BCSP), and ratings from an acceptability judgment task (AJT). Although the BCSP offers a structured way to quantify bilinguals’ CS behavior, its application in grammaticality studies and its ability to reflect bilingual heterogeneity have been underexamined. We address this by asking: (1) How do BCSP scores predict acceptability ratings of Spanish–English CS sentences? and (2) How do BCSP scores reflect the social heterogeneity of US bilingual populations, focusing on age, gender, region, place of birth, and national origin? A total of 137 Latinx bilinguals across the USA completed an online survey including the BCSP and 40 reggaetón-inspired CS sentences, balanced for grammaticality and experimental label (i.e., Source: Reggaetón lyrics). Results from multilevel and linear regression models indicate that higher BCSP scores are associated with higher AJT ratings, particularly among participants who report frequent CS use, greater proficiency, and positive attitudes. Social variables had limited impact, although age and place of birth emerged as modest predictors. These findings highlight the BCSP’s value in capturing CS experience and stress the need to account for bilingual variability in studies of acceptability judgments.

District magnitude, the number of seats per district, is a critical component of electoral systems. It affects key outcomes such as accountability, legislative fragmentation, and disproportionality in representation by providing incentives for voters, candidates, and representatives. Some democracies have identical-magnitude districts (whether under majoritarian or districted proportional representation), yet many elect their representatives through districts of varying magnitudes. Thus, in cross-country analyses, researchers first come up with a summary score of district magnitudes per country. This is often considered merely a mechanical, pre-analysis step of preparing the data. We show that the national score of district magnitude is a thorny business, consequential for inference on substantive questions. Specifically, different conceptualizations and measurements of district magnitude lead to different scores, and those, in turn, may both mischaracterize countries and lead to different inferences. Moreover, the status quo in the measurement of district magnitude – equally weighing all districts – is often misleading, and the problem is compounded by within-country variation in magnitude and malapportionment, common in Europe and Latin America, respectively. We propose two alternative measures of district magnitude – weighing districts by the share of representatives or voters in them – and provide guidance on the circumstances under which each measure should be utilized. Our analysis has implications for how this key component of electoral systems should be conceptualized, measured, and employed in cross-country analyses.

In this response to the target article by Law, Power, and Quinto-Pozos, which correctly points out that phonological change is a characteristic of both spoken and signed language, I note that we have more to learn from sign languages. Since sign languages are all very young in comparison to oral languages, linguists have an opportunity to observe phonological change as it occurs. Law et al. do not take into account the winding path of phonological change and the social and structural factors that influence this path. Conditions for such changes can be determined in part by the modality (oral or signed) in each type of language, as I discuss here.

This paper responds to commentaries by several authors on our target article, ‘Bringing signed languages into the study of regular sound change’ (Law et al. 2025a). We provide some additional context on the research program that spurred the target article and draw on several themes discussed in both the target article and commentaries, specifically (i) the affordances and effects of modality in (theories of) language change, (ii) iconicity (and indexicality), (iii) variation and irregularity in language change, and (iv) language transmission. We highlight the methodological advances afforded by new technologies to study phonetic variation in signed languages and advocate for increased attention to the systematic and comparative study of phonetic variation in signed languages as a window into processes of phonetic and phonological change in signed languages.

We use the variationist method to elucidate the expression of future time in English, examining multiple grammaticalization in the same domain (will and going to). Usage patterns show that the choice of form is not determined by invariant semantic readings such as proximity, certainty, willingness, or intention. Rather, particular instances of each general construction occupy lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic niches. While putative differences in meaning are largely neutralized in discourse, grammaticalization paths are reflected in particular constructions of different degrees of lexical specificity, which bear different nuances of meaning or tenacious patterns of distribution inherited from once-meaningful associations. We conclude that collocations contribute to the shape of grammatical variation.

While affix ordering often reflects general syntactic or semantic principles, it can also be arbitrary or variable. This article develops a theory of morpheme ordering based on local morphotactic restrictions encoded as weighted bigram constraints. I examine the formal properties of morphotactic systems, including arbitrariness, nontransitivity, context-sensitivity, analogy, and variation. Several variable systems are surveyed before turning to a detailed corpus study of a variable affix in Tagalog. Bigram morphotactics is shown to cover Tagalog and the typology, while other formalisms, such as alignment, precedence, and position classes, undergenerate. Moreover, learning simulations reveal that affix ordering under bigram morphotactics is subject to analogical pressures, providing a learning-theoretic motivation for the specific patterns of variation observed in Tagalog. I raise a different set of objections to rule-based approaches invoking affix movement. Finally, I demonstrate that bigram morphotactics is restrictive, being unable to generate unattested scenarios such as nonlocal contingency in ordering.

Phonological constraints can, in principle, be classified according to whether they are natural (founded in principles of universal grammar (UG)) or unnatural (arbitrary, learned inductively from the language data). Recent work has used this distinction as the basis for arguments about the role of UG in learning. Some languages have phonological patterns that arguably reflect unnatural constraints. With experimental testing, one can assess whether such patterns are actually learned by native speakers. Becker, Ketrez, and Nevins (2007), testing speakers of Turkish, suggest that they do indeed go unlearned. They interpret this result with a strong UG position: humans are unable to learn data patterns not backed by UG principles.

This article pursues the same research line, locating similarly unnatural data patterns in the vowel harmony system of Hungarian, such as the tendency (among certain stem types) for a final bilabial stop to favor front harmony. Our own test leads to the opposite conclusion of Becker and colleagues': Hungarians evidently do learn the unnatural patterns.

To conclude we consider a bias account—that speakers are able to learn unnatural environments, but devalue them relative to natural ones. We outline a method for testing the strength of constraints as learned by speakers against the strength of the corresponding patterns in the lexicon, and show that it offers tentative support for the hypothesis that unnatural constraints are disfavored by language learners.

The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers' of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers' knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pairs of experiments, Australians and Americans responded reliably to corpus model probabilities in rating the naturalness of alternative dative constructions, their lexical-decision latencies during reading varied inversely with the syntactic probabilities of the construction, and they showed subtle covariation in these tasks, which is in line with quantitative differences in the choices of datives produced in the same contexts.

This article revisits the diachrony of the genitive alternation, the alternation between ’s and prepositional phrases headed by of in Present-Day English. It is usually assumed to have developed around 1400 CE. For Old English (c. 650–1000 CE), a different alternation between pre-modifying and post-modifying genitive-case-marked noun phrases is suggested to be the genitive alternation. Building on descriptions of competition between genitive-case-marked noun phrases (gen) and prepositional phrases with of (of) in Old English, and unpicking some of the preconceptions about the alternation in Old English, we propose a bottom-up method for systematically identifying possible alternation between of and gen in the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et al. 2003). Our findings indicate that there is plausibly an alternation in Old English that stands in continuity with Present-Day English and suggest a more complex diachrony for the alternation characterized by continuity and discontinuity in the alternants and the envelope of variation.