The relationship between inflectional case marking and the emergence of definite and indefinite articles has long been hypothesized but seldom examined quantitatively. This study presents a large-scale statistical analysis of the relationship across ninety-four Indo-European languages. Bayesian logistic regression models account for phylogenetic and spatiotemporal autocorrelation while integrating over phylogenetic uncertainty. The results establish a robust inverse association between case-inventory size and the presence of articles. Estimated probabilities indicate that smaller case inventories are associated with higher probabilities of definite articles. A similar association holds for indefinite articles. The posterior median predicted probability exceeds 0.5 at four cases for definite articles and between three and four cases for indefinite articles. These thresholds correspond to reduced case inventories composed primarily of grammatical cases. Even after accounting for case-inventory size, the presence of a definite article is associated with a higher probability of an indefinite article. The analysis shows that the observed association is compatible with direct, mediated, and common-cause accounts and does not uniquely identify a causal pathway. These findings sharpen the empirical basis of the debate and identify the causal and evolutionary questions that remain open.
Abstract All linguistic research has the potential to reproduce or challenge racial notions. —Linguistic Society of America Statement on Race (2019) The LSA Statement on Race stems from a larger conversation around undertheorized treatment of race and ethnicity in linguistics research and practice. In this commentary, we define racial identity and ethnicity and explain their relevance for linguistic research. We discuss considerations that linguistic researchers should take prior to research, during study design, and following research, and we offer specific recommendations when soliciting or using race and ethnicity data. These recommendations aim to help researchers avoid social harm, ensure ethical compliance and research integrity, and improve descriptive accuracy, especially for undersampled groups, by balancing research transparency with generalizability. We consider issues germane to collecting self-disclosures of ethnicity and racial identity in a range of study types spanning several subfields of linguistics. We give concrete examples of questions that may arise in planning studies in computational and corpus-based linguistics, formal linguistics, experimental linguistics, and qualitative linguistics. We speak to ethical considerations, including the importance of using locally constructed labels, analyst positionality, and respect for communities. Our goals are to provide linguistic researchers with a firmer basis for conceptualizing racial identity and ethnicity particularly as pertains to linguistics, and to supply a guide that aids linguists in reflecting on their own study design, positionality, and responsibility to participants and communities.
The effect of sound change and analogy upon inflectional paradigms has been traditionally described through Sturtevant's Paradox, which states that sound change is regular but generates irregularity, whereas analogy is irregular but generates regularity. While past work has explored trends in sound change and analogy qualitatively, quantitative investigation with large data sets remains underexploited. We tackle this by exploring the effects of sound change and analogy from Latin to French in large etymologically paired inflected lexicons containing the complete paradigms of 310 verbs with 11,593 total forms. We employ a novel method combining the automated application of historical sound changes and entropy-based quantitative analysis to examine separately the effects of sound change and analogy. The results confirm the role of some oft-cited predictors of analogy like token frequency and morphological regularity, but offer no support for others like markedness. Results also confirm the complexifying role of sound change, and the simplifying role of analogy, on aspects of morphological complexity like the number of inflection classes and the amount of allomorphy, but suggest that these forces have no comparable effect on more modern measures of complexity like average conditional entropies between inflected forms.
Inflectional morphology refers to the mapping from grammatical information to surface forms, which are typically realized as morphemes. This mapping often exhibits fusion, where several abstract features are expressed in a single morpheme that cannot be decomposed into meaningful parts. Here, we discuss crosslinguistic generalizations of morphological fusion. We argue that fusion reflects principles of efficient processing, as formalized by the memory-surprisal tradeoff (Hahn, Degen, & Futrell 2021), which is based on information-theoretic models of language processing from psycholinguistics. We first show that the existence of fusion itself can, in some situations, lead communicative codes to be more efficient under our processing model. Particularly, we reveal via simulation that the fusion of highly correlated features is more efficient for processing, whereas agglutination is more efficient when features are less correlated. We next discuss crosslinguistic patterns of fusion in real languages. First, we analyze well-known generalizations about features that are commonly fused across languages (e.g. tense, aspect, and mood), as well as a typological pattern regarding suppletion. In both cases, we find that the universals we study tend to reflect a tendency toward more efficient structure under our model of language processing. Finally, we use paradigm and frequency data from four languages to study informational fusion, a gradable measure of fusion defined in Rathi et al. 2021. We find that informational fusion is higher when features are highly correlated, which suggests that gradable fusion is also influenced by optimization for the memory-surprisal tradeoff.
This article introduces the phenomenon of discontinuous harmony, where the target and trigger of harmony are separated by intervening nonharmonizing words. We present a case study from Gu & eacute;bie (Kru; C & ocirc;te d'Ivoire) in which particle verbs are split via focus movement. Despite appearing at opposite edges of the clause, the verb controls harmony on the particle without affecting the vowels of intervening material. While discontinuous harmony would appear to violate locality, we offer an analysis that involves local harmony followed by syntactic movement that separates the trigger and target. This analysis thus relies on a cyclic interleaving of syntactic and phonological operations, where syntactic information persists through phonological evaluation and is available to later cycles of syntax.
