Modern deep neural networks achieve impressive performance in engineering applications that require extensive linguistic skills, such as machine translation. This success has sparked interest in pr...

Though scholarly understandings of sociolinguistic variation have undergone a significant expansion in the last 70 years, variables in the realm of prosody remain severely underdescribed. It is nec...

Although the grammatical status of resumptive pronouns varies from one language to the other, these elements occur in spontaneous speech cross-linguistically, giving rise to a long-held intuition t...

Language users change their written and spoken language according to the situational characteristics and communicative purpose of production—that is, according to the register being produced. Resea...

In the past two decades, the field of language and masculinities studies has become an established part of language, gender, and sexuality research, growing in response to concerns about the limite...

Humans vary in almost every dimension imaginable, and language is no exception. In this article, we review the past research that has focused on individual differences (IDs) in first language acqui...

Distributional semantics provides multidimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown by a large body...

This review provides a state-of-the-art overview of Spanish sociolinguistics and discusses several areas, including variationist sociolinguistics, bilingual and immigrant communities, and linguisti...

Humans are remarkably efficient at parsing basic linguistic cues and show an equally impressive ability to produce and parse socially indexed cues from the language(s) they encounter. In this revie...

Determiners and bare nouns raise questions about the interface between morphosyntax and semantics. On the syntactic side, the primary issue is whether bare nouns have a null determiner making all n...

Evidence from the study of verbal argument alternations suggests that the syntactic structure of an event-denoting clause often reflects the structure of the event it denotes, in the sense that par...

This article provides an up-to-date perspective on the endangerment that contact languages around the world are facing, with a focus on pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages. While language contact...

The main goal of semantic fieldwork is to accurately capture the contribution of natural language expressions to truth conditions and to pragmatic felicity conditions, by interacting with native sp...

After explicit phrase structure rules were abandoned in government–binding theory, some account of the distribution of adverbials became necessary. This review surveys two current theories. The fir...

Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) is a model for the analysis of language in which different types of linguistic information are represented in separate dimensions, each with its own formalism. Thes...

In 1976, the German Max Planck Society established a new research enterprise in psycholinguistics, which became the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. I was fo...

Recent descriptive and typological research on antipassives has allowed many existing claims about antipassives to be reevaluated. Although there is still debate about which characteristics are nec...

This review takes a broad perspective on one of the most fundamental issues for gender research in linguistics: gender assignment (i.e., how different nouns are sorted into different genders). I fi...

African American Vernacular English (AAVE), one of the most studied dialects in American English, has undergone several changes in its label across the years. Its most recent designation, African A...

The close relationship between language variation and the nature of social ties among people has been the focus of long-standing commentary in linguistics. A central puzzle in this relationship is ...

In this review, we discuss the empirical landscape of degree constructions cross-linguistically as well as the major analytical avenues that have been pursued to account for individual languages an...

Every major theoretical approach to syntactic structure incorporates a mechanism for generating unbounded dependencies. In this article, I distinguish between some of the most commonly entertained ...

Over the last 20 years, the development of a wide range of treebanks that track the evolution of languages’ syntactic patterns through time has revolutionized the field of historical syntax. The ra...

The Austronesian language family is the second largest on Earth in number of languages, and was the largest in geographical extent before the European colonial expansions of the past five centuries...

Closest conjunct agreement is of great theoretical interest in terms of what it reveals about the structure of coordination; the locality of agreement relations; and the interaction between syntax, semantics, and morphology in the expression of agreement. We highlight recent approaches to the phenomenon, including typologically diverse case studies and experimentally elicited results, and point out

All writing systems represent speech, providing a means for recording each word of a message. This is achieved by symbolizing the phonological forms of spoken words as well as information conveying...

This autobiographical article, which began as an interview, reports some reflections by Lila Gleitman on the development of her thinking and her research—in concert with a host of esteemed collabor...

Recent advances in computational modeling have led to significant discoveries about the representation and acquisition of phonological knowledge and the limits on language learning and variation. T...

Three different foundational ideas can be identified in recent syntactic theory: structure from substitution classes, structure from dependencies among heads, and structure as the result of optimizing preferences. As formulated in this review, it is easy to see that these three ideas are completely independent. Each has a different mathematical foundation, each suggests a different natural connection

Artificial language learning methods—in which learners are taught miniature constructed languages in a controlled laboratory setting—have become a valuable experimental tool for research on languag...

This article provides an overview of current and historically important issues in the study of the syntax–prosody interface, the point of interaction between syntactic structure and phrase-level ph...

Over the past four decades, the nature of western Austronesian voice—typically subcategorized as Philippine-type and Indonesian-type—has triggered considerable debate in the typological and syntact...

This article critically reviews the main research issues raised in the study of response systems in natural languages by addressing the syntax and semantics of fragment answers and yes/no response ...

A major goal of modern syntax has been to find principles that rule out sentences that seem ungrammatical. To achieve this goal, it has been proposed that syntactically odd (or ungrammatical) sente...

Despite the difficulty of delineating the rural from the urban according to economic or demographic criteria, this distinction has powerful cultural resonances, and language plays a key role in con...

The syntactic and semantic properties of nonfinite verb categories can best be understood in relation to and distinction from the corresponding properties of finite verb categories. In order to exp...

Distributivity in natural language occurs in sentences such as John and Mary (each) took a deep breath, when a predicate that is combined with a plurality-denoting expression is understood as holdi...

Individual variation is ubiquitous and empirically observable in most phonological behaviors, yet relatively few studies aim to capture the heterogeneity of language processing among individuals, a...

This article focuses on the construct of language dominance in bilinguals and the ways in which this construct has been operationalized. Language dominance is often seen as relative proficiency in ...

All languages instantiate a consonant/vowel contrast. This contrast has processing consequences at different levels of spoken-language recognition throughout the lifespan. In adulthood, lexical pro...

Research on language and gender encompasses a variety of methods and focuses on many aspects of linguistic structure. This review traces the historical development of the field, explicating some of...

Bilingualism was once thought to result in cognitive disadvantages, but research in recent decades has demonstrated that experience with two (or more) languages confers a bilingual advantage in exe...

Speech research during recent years has moved progressively away from its traditional focus on audition toward a more multisensory approach. In addition to audition and vision, many somatosenses in...

We 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.

Crosslinguistic 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

We 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

This 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

Syntactic 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

With 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

In 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

Understanding 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

Research 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

Distributional 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

Humans 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

Inquisitive 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

The 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

This 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

Comprehending 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

I 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

Well 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