A few days ago I found myself back at my old alma mater, Stanford University, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Department of Linguistics. Much was familiar to me since I left nineteen years ago—the building, the offices, a few of the faculty, the random musical equipment lying around—but there were some changes. The most notable was in the first floor break room: the built-in bookshelves that had long stood at the end of the room had been removed, replaced by a standing table and bar seating. It was a small matter of remodeling, and to be fair the contents of the bookshelf had mostly been moved around the corner into the copy room. But it was a bit of a shock to see, because I remember so vividly the wall full of old journals that adorned those shelves. There stood more peer-reviewed, scholarly studies in linguistics than I had previously seen amassed in one place without a trip to the library, all accessible at my fingertips to just flip through any time I stepped out of my office. It was an inspiring sight to make a young graduate student feel like they were part of something bigger, and much older, than whatever they were working on at the time. I sometimes pulled a random journal off the shelf just to see what was in it, part of a larger goal I had of somehow expanding my mind beyond the barriers of my own work. At that stage of my career I cannot say I understood everything or even much of what I read.

Sentences with syntactic movement out of sentential complements of manner-of-speaking (MoS) verbs (e.g. whisper, shout) are degraded in acceptability, an effect called the manner-of-speaking (MoS) island effect. Accounts variably attribute the MoS island effect to the violation of the subjacency condition, to the low frequency of MoS verbs taking sentential complements, or to a general information-structural constraint that discourse-backgrounded constituents cannot be extracted. In five acceptability judgment experiments, we find that the MoS island effect can be modulated by foregrounding or backgrounding the extracted constituent, suggesting a causal relationship between discourse backgroundedness and this effect. Our findings challenge syntactic and frequency accounts of the MoS island effect.

A central task in sound change research is to account for the emergence of new phonological categories from patterns of synchronic phonetic variation. To this end, a comparison was made of two English dialects differing in their phonologization of coarticulatory vowel nasalization using real-time magnetic resonance imaging of the velum and tongue and their synchronization with the glottal signal. This was done for coda vowel-nasal (VN) sequences preceding voiced and voiceless stops. The results showed that a later phasing of N’s oral gesture and an earlier onset of aperiodicity in the nasal consonant were two of the main physiological factors likely to lead to sound change in voiceless VNC̥ clusters. They were also consistent with models of compensatory lengthening by which the vowel is lengthened and the oral gesture of the nasal consonant is shortened as sound change progresses.

Abstract: A recurring narrative in studies of syntactic change is that hypotaxis gains ground at the expense of parataxis. This report shows that this claim—if construed as a quantitative claim about the frequency of different types of clause combining—finds little support in parsed diachronic corpora of seven languages. Genre appears to be a factor that substantially influences the proportion of hypotaxis found in a text in consistent ways, but time does not.

This article documents an evolutionary pathway from parataxis via the correlative construction to finite subordination in the Ugric languages. The first step of the emergence of finite subordination is the appearance of a paratactic precorrelative sentence pair, with an indefinite pronoun in the first sentence that is anaphorically resumed in the second sentence. This pattern, witnessed in the SOV Ob-Ugric languages, developed into a full-fledged correlative construction in Hungarian by the end of the twelfth century. In Hungarian, drifting to head-initial grammar, the correlative construction is shown to have been both the source of the evolution of finite relative clauses and the source of the grammaticalization of finite complement clauses. The path to finite relativization involved the reversal of clause order and the reanalysis of the relative clause as an adjunct of its main-clause correlate. Finite complementation evolved in the context of say-verbs by the integration of their paratactic propositional complement with the use of the correlative pattern of subordination. The relative pronoun was recategorized as a complementizer. The complement clause, first construed as an adjunct of the main clause, later came to be subordinated to the VP, eliciting verbal agreement when functioning as an object. The developmental path pointed out in the Ugric languages bears on theoretical debates concerning the status of parataxis and of nonfinite and finite subordination in the synchrony and diachrony of human language, and provides typological parallels for the interpretation of controversial data from the early history of Indo-European languages.