Phrases in a number of syntactic contexts are required, in a variety of languages, to end in their heads. This article offers a unified theory of the relevant properties of these contexts and of why the phenomena in question, while widespread, are not completely universal. The theory makes use of proposals made independently in CONTIGUITY THEORY (Richards 2010, 2016): the relevant syntactic contexts are argued to involve a prosodically dependent element that must attach prosodically to the head of the phrase to its immediate left, and this attachment is often blocked if the phrase in question is not head-final.

Vowels vary systematically in F0 based on intrinsic properties of the vowel (e.g. height: VF0) and preceding obstruent (e.g. voicing: CF0). These patterns have been attested in most languages studied, raising the possibility that they stem from physiological sources. However, previous results show a range of variability in maximum effect size and duration. One explanation is that variation could be learned and increased to enhance phonological contrasts or suppressed for functional reasons (e.g. for tone languages). Alternatively, differences could be due to physiological factors such as laryngeal contrast type. We map out the distribution of intrinsic F0 effects across twenty languages, using large corpora of read speech, operationalizing CF0 as the difference between stop series that most closely approximate phonologically ‘voiced’ and ‘voiceless’ stops. We find that both VF0 and CF0 effects are present and are in the same direction in all languages examined, but languages vary greatly in effect size. While some of this variability may be due to phonological properties of the languages (e.g. tone), and some variability in CF0 may be due to the diverse phonetic realizations of ‘voicing’ across languages, much of this variability remains to be explained. We find that the CF0 effect is consistently at least as large as the VF0 effect and is more variable across languages, suggesting a possible explanation for the tendency for CF0 effects to lead to sound change much more often than VF0 effects do. While our results on variability in CF0 effects rely on the validity of ‘lumping’ together diverse phonetic realizations, those on the robustness of CF0 and VF0 and on the variability in VF0 hold regardless. These results motivate further investigation to deepen our understanding of intrinsic F0 effects, their crosslinguistic distribution, and their role as precursors to sound change.

In many languages, finite-clause-embedding verbs vary in whether they allow WH-dependencies to cross from the embedded to the matrix clause—a phenomenon we call ‘bridge effects’. Why bridge effects exist has been the subject of much debate; we argue that contributing to the lack of consensus are the relatively small samples of verbs (from twelve to seventy-five for English) previously tested in the literature. To resolve this issue, we report two new data sets of bridge effects covering a nearly exhaustive sample of 640 English verbs. We use these data sets to address three research questions: Are there bridge effects at all? How well do leading theories of bridge effects explain observed variation across the full range of verbs? And are there new patterns emerging from our data that could lead to a better theory? We ultimately argue in favor of a multivariate approach, drawing upon existing ideas while including a novel morphosyntactic licensing component identified from our data. We also discuss implications for theories of locality and explore how context might affect the acceptability of WH-dependencies.

Podcasts are an immensely popular medium for news, documentaries, interviews, and many other genres. They are also an effective pedagogical tool, both as texts for learners to consume and as assignments for students to create. In this article we present findings from our students' experiences of creating podcasts in upper-level Language and Gender courses and reflect on the affordances and possible risks of this kind of project. We argue that podcasting projects, which center student learning and produce accessible, public-facing scholarship, can also provide a means of resisting injustice in linguistics, in the academy, and in the wider community.

The organization of taking turns to talk is fundamental to conversation, as well as to other speech-exchange systems. A model for the turn-taking organization for conversation is proposed, and is examined for its compatibility with a list of grossly observable facts about conversation. The results of the examination suggest that, at least, a model for turn-taking in conversation will be characterized as locally managed, party-administered, interactionally controlled, and sensitive to recipient design. Several general consequences of the model are explicated, and contrasts are sketched with turn-taking organizations for other speech-exchange systems.

Cross-category harmony is one of the most well-known typological universals. It describes a trend of consistent alignment of different syntactic categories across phrases within a language. Explanations for this universal vary as to whether cognitive factors play a role or the tendency is instead due to mechanisms of language change alone. In this article we report a series of artificial language learning experiments that aim to test a hypothesized link between cognition and cross-category harmony. As with the typological tendency itself, we find mixed evidence for harmony across different types of phrases. Specifically, learners are biased in favor of consistent alignment of the verb in the verb phrase and the adposition in the adpositional phrase. However, the bias for consistent alignment of the verb in the verb phrase and the adjective in the noun phrase depends on the semantic similarity between adjectives and verbs. When adjectives are active and therefore more verb-like (e.g. broken ), we find harmony; when they are stative and therefore less verb-like (e.g. blue ), we do not. These results suggest that the bias for cross-category harmony is not purely based on the syntactic notions of head and dependent, but reflects the interaction between a general cognitive bias favoring consistent order and cross-category similarity.