ABSTRACT Silent gesture is increasingly used in linguistics to investigate questions that are difficult or impossible to address using natural language data alone, including issues of language emergence, word order, grammatical categorisation, and iconicity. However, the interpretation of silent‐gesture findings remains methodologically complex. This paper critically examines the interpretive possibilities and limits of the silent‐gesture paradigm, focusing especially on its use in sign‐language linguistics. After discussing the assumptions underlying silent‐gesture research and the types of comparisons it enables, I review three major areas where the paradigm has been widely employed: word‐order preferences, the emergence of noun–verb distinctions, and iconicity in formational and grammatical structure. I argue that silent gesture should not be treated as direct evidence of ‘pure’ communicative or cognitive biases, nor as a proxy for language emergence itself. Rather, silent gesture is a complementary methodological tool that allows researchers to experimentally isolate communicative pressures interacting with linguistic structure under controlled conditions. Its findings can therefore only be adequately interpreted when situated within and evaluated against evidence from spoken languages, sign languages, homesign systems, and other natural communicative settings. The paper concludes with methodological recommendations for designing and interpreting silent‐gesture studies in relation to spoken languages, sign languages, and other signing varieties.
ABSTRACT Incrementality is one of the hallmarks of realtime language comprehension. It contrasts sharply with another feature of language comprehension, the high degree of context dependence exhibited by many expressions calling for global adaptations to the larger discourse context. The present article highlights the importance of the semantic notion of scope for the interpretation of operators of various sorts. We review a number of non‐incremental effects from previous literature and hypothesize that they can be better understood if we consider the processing domains in terms of scope that may be underlying their interpretation. To do so, we propose a novel account, the Scope‐Domain Account , mediating between immediate specification and local underspecification. We apply this account to findings from the literature contrasting incremental and non‐incremental effects observed for negation and quantifiers but also apply it to phenomena that have only rarely been connected to scope processing so far.
ABSTRACT The troves of speech data that have driven an increasing orientation towards large‐scale methods in linguistics have been, for the most part, available only to closed teams of researchers and their collaborators. The Archive of Pittsburgh Language and Speech (APLS, https://apls.pitt.edu ) is a new open data resource, consisting of nearly 46 h of audio from sociolinguistic interviews with 40 speakers of Pittsburgh English. Powered by the corpus management software LaBB‐CAT, APLS interviews are richly annotated with multiple layers of linguistic information at the phrase, word, and segment level. Thanks to APLS's graphical user interface, users can access powerful tools for searching the corpus and extracting acoustic measurements with relatively few technical barriers to entry. We describe how APLS fits into the current landscape of (socio)linguistic open data, exemplify APLS's capabilities via a case study of 7137 /aʊ/ tokens, and contextualise the data both in terms of how fieldwork was carried out and Pittsburgh in the early 2000s.
ABSTRACT Trauma has been front of mind for many language teachers in the tumultuous first decades of the 21st century, but until quite recently, language teaching research that names trauma as such has been relatively scarce. In this short paper, I give a brief overview of different understandings of trauma, and draw on orienting principles and frameworks to make a case for language pedagogy that is informed by local and empirical wisdom about trauma so that it can be more trauma‐responsive. I also look at how teachers and scholars of language have engaged with, and responded to, trauma as concept and reality across a variety of language learning contexts around the world, and consider trauma in light of insights from the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies to explore how we might renew our commitment to fostering conditions of linguistic safety in language teaching and learning.
ABSTRACT This paper is a state of the art paper on the linguistic phenomenon ‘semi‐lexicality’. We discuss what a semi‐lexical item is, namely an item which is typically considered to be from a lexical, open class (noun, verb, adjective) but which shows morphosyntactic and/or semantic properties that are usually associated with elements from functional, closed classes (quantifiers, auxiliaries, etc.), and its theoretical relevance for the field of generative linguistics. In the first part of the paper, we relate the notion of semi‐lexicality within generative linguistics to the notions of fuzziness and gradience in the fields of cognitive and functional linguistics. In the second part, we discuss earlier and later approaches to semi‐lexicality within the generative framework. In the third part, we discuss the connection between grammaticalisation and semi‐lexicality, with a particular focus on recent generative approaches which explicitly tie these two notions together in one formal analysis.
This second paper in a two‐part methodological guide demonstrates how Generalised Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) tree analysis can be used to explore linguistic conditioning in sociolinguistic variation. Building on Part 1, which introduced the dataset and illustrated how GLMM trees reveal social patterning in (ING) variation, Part 2 focuses on the internal linguistic factors governing the alternation between [ɪn] and [ɪŋ] in Canadian Maritime English (CME). Using over 10,000 tokens from more than 300 speakers—the largest single‐dialect (ING) dataset to date—this study shows how GLMM trees accommodate overlapping or collinear predictors such as grammatical category, phonological context, and lexical frequency. The analysis confirms the dominant morphological constraint (verbs favouring [ɪn], non‐verbal forms favouring [ɪŋ]) and identifies additional phonological and frequency effects that emerge only in specific prosodic and lexical environments. These results demonstrate that GLMM trees offer a straightforward, statistically robust way to model complex sociolinguistic data while maintaining interpretability. The paper concludes by comparing hierarchical tree‐based and ‘flat’ regression models, validating the stability of the GLMM trees through cross‐validation, and highlighting how this approach can clarify the interplay of linguistic and social constraints in variationist research.
Voiceless nasals are cross‐linguistically rare speech sounds that remain understudied compared to their voiced counterparts. However, they offer insights that could refine our understanding of nasal consonant production and voicing patterns. This study provides an overview of the phonetic and phonological characteristics of voiceless nasals in the world's languages. First, we show the distribution of voiceless nasals in the world's languages, revealing that voiceless nasals are found in a variety of language families, although not in many languages. Next, we demonstrate the realization of voiceless nasals, showing that (i) at least two types can be observed from a phonetic perspective, (ii) voiceless nasal phonemes in several languages have allophonic variants, and (iii) several acoustic correlates—such as duration, strength of excitation, and fundamental frequency—are related to the production of voiceless nasals. We also discuss whether a voiceless nasal is a single phoneme or a consonant cluster. In addition, we illustrate that voiceless nasals can occur phonetically even in languages without phonemic voiceless nasals. Lastly, we present a case study of voiceless nasals in Tibeto‐Burman languages of Northeast India, concluding that they are purely voiceless nasals, although several studies have noted that they are aspirated or breathy nasals.
In recent years, much research has focused on what happens in the human brain when a perceptual stimulus, such as a picture, is converted into linguistic content, a word. This process is commonly referred to as object naming and is considered a crucial aspect of language processing, production, and cognition. It refers to the identification of an object with a word or phrase, as well as the psychometric method of investigating this human behavior to obtain insights into different aspects of human cognition and language, such as the organization of the mental lexicon, language acquisition, disorders, or cognitive aging. The ability to name objects is considered a fundamental skill in interpersonal communication and has long been studied in numerous disciplines, such as cognitive science, psycholinguistics, psychology, and, more recently, in computer vision and research on language and vision. In the latter two, object naming has become an extremely powerful tool, especially in the development and fine‐tuning of multi‐modal models, facilitating tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning tasks, object detection, or visual scene understanding. Our comprehensive, cross‐linguistic review explores the key findings, commonly cited, and prominent datasets and their applications that establish object naming both in the past and now, as well as discusses its chances and challenges in future work.
Podcasting is now an established entertainment medium, and is a useful platform for content that can find a niche global audience outside of traditional broadcast media. Linguistics is one topic that benefits from this model of internet distribution. Linguistics podcasting can serve both educational and entertainment aims, with audiences that encompass non‐linguists interested in scicomm‐adjacent topics as well as linguistics students and educators in secondary and tertiary education. To better understand these heterogeneous audience(s) for linguistics podcasts, this article presents survey data for listeners of the Lingthusiasm podcast (2024, 963 participants). We explore survey participant demographic data, as well as people's relationship to both formal linguistics education and linguistics as a topic of general interest. We show that the distinction between general and academic audiences is complex, and that there are audience segments that are highly‐engaged auto‐didacts. These results demonstrate the value of linguistics podcasting both as an educational resource and in advancing awareness of linguistics for new audiences.
The Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) has been highly influential in the study of adult second language (L2) acquisition. With respect to L2 sentence processing, the essential claim is that L2 speakers rely less on syntactic information and more on alternative sources of information (e.g., lexical semantics and discourse) than adult first-language (L1) speakers. This idea, however, has been controversial, and the ample body of empirical research on it has produced a pattern of indeterminate, mixed, and contested results, potentially due to important theoretical and methodological differences in the studies. This article reviews the SSH as a theory of L2 sentence processing and considers the ongoing story that prominent work seems to be telling about it. Whatever amount of truth the SSH may turn out to capture, we find overall that the hypothesis and extant research on it have played a beneficial role in driving forward the field's understanding of L2 sentence processing in general. We are optimistic that future work will as well—especially if it continues to trend towards greater theoretical and methodological acuity—and we provide recommendations for advancing the state of the science.
Inter-turn silences are silences that occur at turn transitions in conversation. They mark the gap between the end of one speaker's turn and the beginning of the next speaker's turn. We provide a brief review of the literature on inter-turn silences. The literature suggests that inter-turn silences tend to be short (< 1 s in duration), with a large proportion of the silences being less than half a second in length. A range of cultural and contextual factors affect the length of inter-turn silences. Interlocutors have expectations about the lengths of inter-turn silences, and silences that are longer than expected tend to be given a negative interpretation (e.g., assumptions of dishonesty, disinterest, or disagreement). We suggest that prediction-based accounts of language processing can provide a reasonable starting point for understanding both the variation that exists in the duration of inter-turn silences and the way that the silences are interpreted. We also suggest that theories of time perception could be used to better understand the interpretation of inter-turn silences as well as potential brain regions involved in both timing and turn transitions.
The last three decades have seen a large increase in attempts to explain phonetic and phonological patterns using information theoretic properties such as frequency and predictability. One recurring theme is the attempt to explain phonetic and phonological weakening as following directly from low information content. I argue that the actuation of weakening processes is not consistent with a direct causal route, but is consistent with indirect causal route in which low information content is causally related only to durational reduction, and that downstream effects of low information content may actually hinder communicative efficiency. These findings contradict the expectations of many authors, including my own, going back at least to Zipf.
Knowledge of public attitudes towards language-based diversity can help uncover wider societal prejudices. Nonetheless, sociolinguists are increasingly aware of the limitations of using traditional explicit self-report measures to gauge attitudes towards linguistic variation. Accordingly, a growing number of studies have adapted more recently developed socio-psychological techniques—most particularly the implicit association test (IAT)—to access more deeply embedded, and durable, implicit evaluations of linguistic stimuli. This article provides a critical review of the methodological approaches undertaken and findings of existing prior explicit and implicit language attitude research, and examines the nature of the relationship between the two levels of linguistic evaluation. The methodological and theoretical merits of employing both implicit and explicit attitudinal measures in future language attitude research is discussed, in particular regarding more fine-grained assessment of language attitude change in progress and to better understand the relationship between any changes underway in linguistic attitudes and patterns of language use and language change within the speech community under investigation.
The formal semantic analysis of African languages is still a young subfield within theoretical linguistics. Starting with general overviews of the quantifier systems of individual African languages around two decades ago, there now exists a substantial body of fieldwork-based and autochthonous formal semantic research conducted by both African and non-African scholars. A major objective of these studies is to describe and analyse semantic phenomena in under-researched African languages. A second important aim is to examine the extent to which leading semantic theories—mostly developed on the basis of European languages—can be applied to non-European languages, and to determine what broader theoretical insights can be gained from formal semantic analyses of African languages. Research in this field has fostered the emergence of a new generation of African semanticists who will carry this enterprise forward. This is the first of two articles on formal semantics of African languages. The central aim of these articles is to provide scholars with a background in formal semantics with a general overview of semantic research activities focused on African languages. At the same time, the two articles will also be valuable to readers with a broader interest in African languages, offering them a range of empirical and theoretical questions as well as diagnostic tools to begin their own semantic investigations in the languages of their choice. This first article begins with a brief historical sketch of semantic research on African languages and then introduces formal-semantic approaches to interpretive phenomena associated with the nominal domain (NP, DP), such as definiteness, indefiniteness, universal quantification, and number.
The formal semantic analysis of African languages is still a young subfield within theoretical linguistics. Starting with general overviews of the quantifier systems of individual African languages around two decades ago, there now exists a substantial body of fieldwork-based and autochthonous formal semantic research conducted by both African and non-African scholars. A major objective of these studies is to describe and analyse semantic phenomena in under-researched African languages. A second important aim is to examine the extent to which leading semantic theories—mostly developed on the basis of European languages—can be applied to non-European languages, and to determine what broader theoretical insights can be gained from formal semantic analyses of African languages. Research in this field has fostered the emergence of a new generation of African semanticists who will carry this enterprise forward. This is the second of two articles on formal semantics of African languages. The central aim of these articles is to provide scholars with a background in formal semantics with a general overview of semantic research activities focused on African languages. At the same time, the two articles will also be valuable to readers with a broader interest in African languages, offering them a range of empirical and theoretical questions as well as diagnostic tools to begin their own semantic investigations in the languages of their choice. This sequel article discusses formal-semantic approaches to interpretive phenomena associated with the extended verbal and the clausal domain (VP, TP, CP), such as exceed -based comparatives, serial verb constructions, tense-aspect phenomena, modality, focus exhaustivity, focus particles, and clause embedding.
Reading comprehension in people with aphasia (PWA) remains an underexplored area despite its critical importance for daily functioning. Aphasia often results in diverse reading deficits that impair the ability to process written input. These deficits are linked to damage in language and cognitive mechanisms, including working memory, attention, and syntactic processing. This review examines the nature of reading impairments in aphasia and evaluates treatment approaches, highlighting gaps in current research. While current treatment approaches show promise for improving reading comprehension, evidence supporting generalization to other language skills and long-term maintenance of gains remains limited. Future research should investigate implicit learning-based approaches, which leverage preserved cognitive abilities in PWA, and explore how cognitive and environmental factors influence treatment outcomes. Emerging technologies, such as text augmentation tools, offer more avenues for intervention, though their efficacy in aphasia-specific contexts is not yet well-established. Advancing our understanding of reading comprehension is essential to enhancing quality of life for individuals with aphasia. To that end, we offer several recommendations for future research, which include examination of the effects of cognitive variables, investigation of implicit learning-based treatment approaches, and validation of emerging technologies.
Conjoined comparisons, consisting of two clauses containing antonymous or positive-negative predicate pairs, are among the most common comparison construction types in the world's languages. As research on degree constructions from a cross-linguistic perspective has increased, so too has the number of studies focused on conjoined comparisons. Although the number of languages that have received in-depth treatment is still fairly small, this growing body of research has already uncovered important aspects of cross-linguistic variation, to the point where we can now begin to hypothesize about the typology of conjoined comparisons. This article summarizes these findings, and takes the first steps towards developing a typology of conjoined comparison constructions, taking into account not only differences between conjoined comparisons, but also the overall degree-behaviour of the languages. It will be emphasized that the existence of conjoined comparison is not diagnostic of the absence of degrees in a language more generally.
Language diversification and change can be studied using phylogenetic modelling of families over thousands of years, or by close observation of changes unfolding over a few decades at the community level. While the phylogenetic approach uses data from hundreds of languages to make cross-linguistic generalisations, community-level studies of sociolinguistic variation have until recently been limited to a very narrow language sample. However this is now changing, with variationist studies published on a wider range of languages. In this article I assemble a sample of variationist studies encompassing 63 languages from 26 families, and explore potential patterns regarding rates of change in linguistic features, and which features are associated with social identity signalling, which may lead to diversification. These observations largely converge with results obtained from phylogenetic methods, suggesting that more systematic meta-analysis of variationist studies will provide a new way to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of language.
This paper provides a focused review of truth-value judgment tasks (TVJTs) as a method for eliciting interpretations in adult second language learners. We present the historical perspectives, the rationale for their use, the nature of the knowledge they target, and critical design considerations. Additionally, we discuss their effectiveness in uncovering how second language learners access and compute meaning, as well as emerging directions for research and pedagogy using this method. We advocate for refining TVJTs to more accurately capture linguistic competence by empirically validating relevant crucial design features. Moreover, we highlight some of the advantages of incorporating web-based TVJT experiments, which enhance transparency, facilitate replication, and accommodate a diverse learner population.
Scholarship in the field of sign historical linguistics has made important progress in recent years. Here we survey this progress in three areas of research that have received the most attention to date, namely, (i) qualitative approaches to understanding the typical pathways of diachronic change in signed languages, (ii) quantitative approaches to signed language classification, and (iii) archival approaches to historical sociolinguistic research on signing communities and their languages. We also discuss how early work on sign historical linguistics has shaped the field's current questions and approaches, and we look forward to future advances that can tap into underutilized sources of historical video data on signed languages.
