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- Volume 4, 2018
Annual Review of Linguistics - Volume 4, 2018
Volume 4, 2018
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Words in Edgewise
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 1–19More LessWell before I turned pro linguist, words were my life. In my career I have been not just a word consumer (or word processor) but a periodic donor, a supplier of lexical utensils for the semanticist's arsenal. My proposed coinages have experienced varying degrees of success and ignominy within several overlapping areas of the field—the “Border Wars” between semantics and pragmatics, the nature of negation and polarity, and the exploration of lexical pragmatics, where context and speakers’ intentions and beliefs inform the lexicon in domains from word formation to the etymological urban legend. The coinages on display here are intended to trace my half-century journey through the vibrant (if motley) landscape of meaning and to show how the pursuit of linguistic byways can not only inform but delight. The article concludes with a chronology of landmark events and people that have shaped my thoughts about words and meanings.
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Phonological Knowledge and Speech Comprehension
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 21–47More LessComprehending speech in our native language is an impressionistically effortless and routine task. We often give little consideration to its complexity. Only in particularly challenging situations (e.g., in noisy environments, when hearing significantly accented speech) do some of these intricacies become apparent. Higher-order knowledge constrains sensory perception and has been demonstrated to play a crucial role in other domains of human language processing. Moreover, incorporating measures of brain activity during online speech comprehension has just begun to highlight the extent to which top-down information flow and predictive processes are integral to sensory perception. This review argues that our phonological system, at a relatively abstract level, is one such source of higher-order knowledge. In particular, I discuss the extent to which phonological distinctive features play a role in perception and predictive processing during speech comprehension with reference to behavioral and neurophysiological data. This line of research represents a tractable linking of linguistic theory with models of perception and speech comprehension in the brain.
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The Minimalist Program After 25 Years
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 49–65More LessThe Minimalist Program (MP) has been around for about 25 years, and anecdotal evidence suggests that conventional wisdom thinks it a failure. This review argues that MP has been a tremendous success and has more than met the very high goals it had set for itself. This does not imply that there is not more to be done. There is, a lot more. But the problems are those characteristic of successful and ongoing research programs. Why the perception of failure? It arises from a misunderstanding concerning the aims of the minimalist project and what, given these aims, it is reasonable to expect. Once we clear up the nature of MP's goals, we will be better placed to judge (and appreciate) how far it has come.
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Minimizing Syntactic Dependency Lengths: Typological/Cognitive Universal?
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 67–80More LessSyntactic dependencies are head/modifier relations between words in a sentence that organize sentences into a syntactic tree structure. The general principle that languages have a preference to group syntactically related words close together can be made precise as a preference for shorter dependencies. We examine evidence for this principle in the development of languages’ grammars as well as in the choices made by individual speakers where syntactic variation is licensed. We survey evidence from corpus studies, computational simulations, and experiments on comprehension; altogether, this evidence makes a compelling case for dependency length minimization as an important factor in language structure and cognition.
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Reflexives and Reflexivity
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 81–107More LessThis article provides an overview of the various means that languages use to represent interpretive dependencies and reflexive predicates. These means are exemplified on the basis of a broad variety of languages. The patterns are prima facie complex, involving semireflexives, full reflexives, and affixal reflexives. Yet they can be accounted for on the basis of the morphosyntactic properties of the elements involved, together with the way these elements interact with a number of universal principles and the syntactic environment. The central principles involved are (a) a principle restricting chain formation by Agree and (b) a general principle applying to reflexive predicates that requires them to be licensed, either through the addition of structural complexity for protection or through a lexical bundling operation, governed by (c) an economy principle. Although I conclude that there is no unified notion of what a reflexive is, reflexives do have a shared core, namely their role in the licensing of reflexivity.
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Semantic Typology and Efficient Communication
Charles Kemp, Yang Xu, and Terry RegierVol. 4 (2018), pp. 109–128More LessCrosslinguistic research on domains including kinship, color, folk biology, number, and spatial relations has documented the different ways in which languages carve up the world into named categories. Although word meanings vary widely across languages, unrelated languages often have words with similar or identical meanings, and many logically possible meanings are never observed. We review research suggesting that this pattern of constrained variation is explained in part by the need for words to support efficient communication. This research includes several recent studies that have formalized efficient communication in computational terms and a larger set of studies, both classic and recent, that do not explicitly appeal to efficient communication but are nevertheless consistent with this notion. The efficient communication framework has implications for the relationship between language and culture and for theories of language change, and we draw out some of these connections.
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An Inquisitive Perspective on Modals and Quantifiers
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 129–149More LessInquisitive semantics enriches the standard truth-conditional notion of meaning, in order to facilitate an integrated semantic analysis of statements and questions. Taking this richer view on meaning as a starting point, this review presents a new perspective on modal operators and quantifiers, one that has the potential to address a number of challenges for standard semantic analyses of such operators. To illustrate the new perspective, we present an inquisitive take on the semantics of attitude verbs and on quantifiers taking scope out of questions.
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Distributional Models of Word Meaning
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 151–171More LessDistributional semantics is a usage-based model of meaning, based on the assumption that the statistical distribution of linguistic items in context plays a key role in characterizing their semantic behavior. Distributional models build semantic representations by extracting co-occurrences from corpora and have become a mainstream research paradigm in computational linguistics. In this review, I present the state of the art in distributional semantics, focusing on its assets and limits as a model of meaning and as a method for semantic analysis.
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Game-Theoretic Approaches to Pragmatics
Anton Benz, and Jon StevensVol. 4 (2018), pp. 173–191More LessWe present an overview and comparison of different game-theoretic approaches to Gricean pragmatics, including games of partial information, optimal answer models, error models, iterated best response models, and rational speech act models. We address phenomena of disambiguation, scalar implicature, and relevance implicature.
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Creole Tense–Mood–Aspect Systems
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 193–212More LessResearch on creole tense–mood–aspect (TMA) systems began in earnest as a response to Bickerton's claim that there was a prototypical system shaped by a language bioprogram. This article presents an overview of such research, as well as a comparison of TMA systems across creoles of different lexical affiliations. A growing body of research in the last 20 years has employed typological and semantic frameworks to demonstrate the diversity and complexity of creole TMA systems. Creoles employ rich inventories of temporal and modal categories whose core meanings interact with the discourse context to produce different interpretations. The syntax of creole TMA also closely follows the universal hierarchy of functional heads proposed by Cinque. The emergence and development of the TMA categories themselves follow general principles of internally and externally motivated change.
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Creolization in Context: Historical and Typological Perspectives
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 213–232More LessWe provide a selective overview of the state of pidgin and creole language studies, with a focus on the different ways in which the question of creole genesis—especially of European-lexifier creoles—is approached: from the perspective of the demographics and periodization of the (early) life of the colonies and from the perspective of the role of typological concepts such as analyticity/syntheticity and simplicity/complexity in the mechanisms of creolization and their linguistic outcomes. We conclude that substrate speakers are most likely to have an impact on the grammar of a creole language if they are among the first to shift to the incipient contact variety, and we find that processes of early second language acquisition and of functional transfer in creolization favor free rather than bound expression of grammatical categories.
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The Relationship Between Parsing and Generation
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 233–254More LessHumans use their linguistic knowledge in at least two ways: on the one hand, to convey what they mean to others or to themselves, and on the other hand, to understand what others say or what they themselves say. In either case, they must assemble the syntactic structures of sentences in a systematic fashion, in accordance with the grammar of their language. In this article, we advance the view that a single mechanism for building sentence structure may be sufficient for structure building in comprehension and production. We argue that differing behaviors reduce to differences in the available information in either task. This view has broad implications for the architecture of the human language system and provides a useful framework for integrating largely independent research programs on comprehension and production by both constraining the models and uncovering new questions that can drive further research.
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The Biology and Evolution of Speech: A Comparative Analysis
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 255–279More LessI analyze the biological underpinnings of human speech from a comparative perspective. By first identifying mechanisms that are evolutionarily derived relative to other primates, we obtain members of the faculty of language, derived components (FLD). Understanding when and why these evolved is central to understanding the evolution of speech. There is little evidence for human-specific mechanisms in auditory perception, and the hypothesis that speech perception is “special” is poorly supported by comparative data. Regarding speech production, human peripheral vocal anatomy includes several derived characteristics (permanently descended larynx, loss of air sacs), but their importance has been overestimated. In contrast, the central neural mechanisms underlying speech production involve crucial derived characteristics (direct monosynaptic connections from motor cortex to laryngeal motor neurons, derived intracortical dorsal circuitry between auditory and motor regions). Paleo-DNA from fossil hominins provides an exciting new opportunity to determine when these derived speech production mechanisms arose during evolution.
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Computational Phylogenetics
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 281–296More LessAlthough there have long been links between research in historical linguistics and research in biological evolution, the last few years have witnessed growth in historical linguistic research that treats languages as evolutionary systems that can be investigated using tools from computational phylogenetics. In this review, I explore some of the advantages and disadvantages of using computational tools for historical linguistics. I describe the theory that underlies treating languages as evolutionary systems (in general terms), present the results of classifying languages lexically, and review some of the implications of this research.
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Language Change Across the Lifespan
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 297–316More LessUnderstanding the relationship between language change and variation has progressed considerably over the last several decades, but less is known about how speakers at different life stages deal with ongoing change in their speech communities. Longitudinal studies of individuals and groups reveal three trajectory types postadolescence: stability (the most common), adopting (to some degree) a change led by younger people (the next most common trajectory), or swimming against the community current by reverting to an older pattern in later life (the least common trajectory). Declining plasticity over the life course places limits on possible trajectories, which are also subject to social and cultural influences. This article reviews relevant studies from historical linguistics as well as panel studies on African American English and dialect contact, proposing that future progress will be made by interdisciplinary research combining psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Lifespan trajectories in situations of community stability are also discussed.
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Assessing Language Revitalization: Methods and Priorities
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 317–336More LessWith the rapid growth of interest in language revitalization and the development of hundreds of programs around the world, there is now a recognized need for ways to assess progress and identify problems. The primary objectives of this review are to outline the form that assessments of oral proficiency can take and to illustrate ways in which revitalization programs can begin to monitor their progress, by means of a combination of holistic appraisals of fluency and techniques that target individual features of language.
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The Interpretation of Legal Language
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 337–355More LessIn everyday interactions, we do our best to resolve linguistic vagueness, ambiguity, and other indeterminacies contextually. When these problems arise in the interpretation of authoritative legal texts, by contrast, it is not abundantly clear what context is relevant, or even legitimate. This article discusses approaches that legal analysts take in resolving linguistic indeterminacy. The most basic principle is reliance on the “ordinary meaning” of a term in dispute, on the assumption that this default interpretation is most likely to be within the intention of the drafters. However, there is no clear understanding of what “ordinary meaning” means or how to find it. Most recently, judges and legal scholars have turned to using linguistic corpora to assist in determining ordinary meaning in such cases. Other cases, focusing on the resolution of syntactic or semantic ambiguity, are less common. Courts in these cases sometimes resort to legally based “tiebreakers,” such as the rule of lenity, which requires courts to resolve ambiguity in favor of the accused in criminal cases.
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The Linguistics of Lying
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 357–375More LessThis review deals with the communicative act of lying from a linguistic point of view, linguistics comprising both grammar and pragmatics. Integrating findings from the philosophy of language and from psychology, I show that the potential for lying is rooted in the language system. The tasks of providing an adequate definition of lying and of distinguishing lying from other concepts of deception (such as bald-faced lying and bullshitting) can be solved when interfaces between grammar and pragmatics are taken into account and when experimental results are used to narrow down theoretical approaches. Assuming a broadly neo-Gricean background, this review focuses on four theoretical topics: the role of the truth in lying, the scalarity and imprecision of lying, the speaker's intent to deceive, and the possibility of producing deceptive implicatures. I also briefly discuss questions of lying and neuroscience, the acquisition of lying, and prosocial and cross-cultural contexts of lying.
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Linguistic Aspects of Primary Progressive Aphasia
Vol. 4 (2018), pp. 377–403More LessPrimary progressive aphasia (PPA) refers to a disorder of declining language associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal degeneration and Alzheimer disease. Variants of PPA are important to recognize from a medical perspective because these syndromes are clinical markers suggesting specific underlying pathology. In this review, I discuss linguistic aspects of PPA syndromes that may prove informative for parsing our language mechanism and identifying the neural representation of fundamental elements of language. I focus on the representation of word meaning in a discussion of semantic variant PPA, grammatical comprehension and expression in a discussion of nonfluent/agrammatic variant PPA, the supporting role of short-term memory in a discussion of logopenic variant PPA, and components of language associated with discourse in a discussion of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. PPA provides a novel perspective that uniquely addresses facets of language and its disorders while complementing traditional aphasia syndromes that follow stroke.
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