The main descriptive and analytical goal of this article is to unify under the umbrella of epenthesis +/- the insertion of meaningless phonological material +/- a number of lexically and morphosyntactically conditioned phenomena that have been treated disparately in past research. Many previous analyses of what we call non-canonical epenthesis degrees have resorted to extra devices such as listed allomorphs and abstract segments. We reanalyze the data as instances of epenthesis with morphosyntactic and lexical conditioning, without resorting to such devices. Throughout, we separate the phonological fact of epenthesis from the lexical and morphosyntactic conditions that determine precisely what segment is epenthesized. Finally, we model the interactions between variously conditioned forms of epenthesis using Boolean Monadic Recursive Schemes (Bhaskar et al. 2020; Chandlee & Jardine 2021).

Blocking and elsewhere distribution have been at the forefront of morphological theory for half a century. Each involves the preemption of one word by another. Neither is fundamental. A combination of Gause's Principle of Competitive Exclusion and Yang's Tolerance Principle, both devised for other reasons and both formalized mathematically, provides an explanatory basis for both blocking and elsewhere distribution.

I investigate whether there is a systematic relation in present-day English between words of the form Xify and those of the form Xific (e.g., terrify and terrific). Data gathered from the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OEDO) do not support any such relation. The same method does support positing a systematic relation among the sets Xification, Xificatory, and Xificative. More generally, the OEDO is shown to be a useful tool for investigating the morphology of patterns borrowed into English from other languages, notably French and Latin, in order to discover which apparent patterns are viable in the language.

Abstract:LIN 200 ‘Language in the United States’ is a large general-education course dealing with linguistic diversity in the United States. It is taught online in an asynchronous format and attracts hundreds of students each semester. The pedagogical innovations adopted in this course include the use of guest lectures by leading experts in the field, the design of discussion board activities to facilitate interaction among students and with instructors, and the organization of the material into adaptable learning modules. We adopt a learner-centered approach using the backward-design framework and applying the community-of-inquiry model. The result is a course that succeeds in achieving its main learning goals: to introduce students to the vast linguistic diversity in the United States and to the basic principles of linguistics, in particular, that human language is primarily spoken or signed (not written), that every human group has its own language, and that all languages are equally capable of expressing any human thought or emotion, although their social prestige may differ.

The emergence of sign language is of special interest because sign languages are the only human languages that can emerge de novo at any time [...]

The factors influencing the insertion of non-etymological material (epenthesis) may extend beyond phonetics and phonology to include morphological and morphosyntactic considerations. We analyse cases from a wide variety of Romance languages where more than one epenthetic segment may satisfy a phonological constraint. We show that the choice of segment may be influenced by morphology or morphosyntax. We also investigate the insertion of a meaningless syllable where there may be little or no phonological motivation for insertion, but morphology plays a role in its distribution. In all of the cases examined, the inserted material (segment or syllable) has no semantic value and so is not a morph. Many of these phenomena have been accounted for in terms of lexically listed allomorphs; however, such an approach misses generalizations about the form and presence of the epenthetic material. We conclude that the notion of epenthesis should be broadened to include morphological and morphosyntactic conditions.

Spoken and signed languages differ because of the affordances of the human body and the limits of each medium. But can commonalities between the two be compared to find abstract language universals?

The graphemic distinctiveness of simple word stems in written English (henceforth stems) is usually discussed in terms of the discrimination of homophones: Two or more distinct stems that share a phonological form each have a unique graphemic form (e.g., meat / meet ; pair / pear / pare ) and in some cases we cannot ascribe the different spellings to etymology: scent ‘should’ be spelled sent given its history (borrowed from French sentir and Latin sentire ). The lists in Carney (1994) and Venezky (1999) of heterographic words show that there is a considerable number of homophones that are discriminated in spelling. But there are also many homographic cases (e.g., bank , can ), so any stipulated ‘principle of heterography’ is not universal. In this paper, we determine the scope and limitations of this principle empirically. Using the CELEX corpus as well as printed dictionaries, we first determine the number of homophonous simple stems in our data (like bank / bank or pair / pear / pare ). Of these, we determine the fraction that has a distinct spelling (like pair / pear / pare ). The overall ratio is well below 50%, which means that the principle is not as far-reaching as often assumed. Historically, it appears that in many cases we are not dealing with a graphemic differentiation of stems, but with a conservation of spellings. As a consequence, most distinctive spellings probably corresponded to distinctive sound forms at some point in their history. Sound change then led to homophony, but the graphemic form often remained distinct (as with e.g. loan / lone ). Expressing lexical differences in the written form of stems does not seem to be overly important to English writers; there is no widespread lexical or morphological principle at work when it comes to the spelling of English stems.

In a 2017 Language paper (Berg and Aronoff 2017), we demonstrated on structural linguistic grounds that the spelling of English derivational suffixes is largely morphographic.For example, the word-final coda /1s/ is reliably spelled as when the word is an adjective (the spelling is uniform) and as e.g. or otherwise.Compare nervous vs. service: at least in spoken American English, both words have identical final rhymes.That means the ous-spelling is also unique in that it encodes morphological information ('this word here is an adjective, and it is probably morphologically complex').We also show that these morphological spellings emerged and regularized gradually over the last five centuries, without external guidance.The findings immediately lead to at least three questions:

The spelling of an English word may reflect its part of speech, not just the sounds within it. In 2 preregistered experiments, we asked whether university students are sensitive to 1 effect of part of speech that has been observed by linguists: that content words (e.g., the noun inn) must be spelled with at least 3 letters, whereas function words (e.g., the preposition in) may have only 2 letters. Participants heard VC (vowel-consonant) and consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC; consonant-vowel-consonant) nonwords that were used as nouns (content words) or prepositions (function words). Participants either spelled the items on their own or chose between options with single and double final consonants (e.g., ib vs. ibb). Participants in the choice task favored final consonant doubling for VCs that were used as nouns. They usually chose single final consonants for VCs that were used as prepositions and for CVCs. Effects of word class were also found in the spelling production task. Final consonant doubling was less common in the production task than the choice task, reflecting participants' reluctance to produce this relatively uncommon spelling pattern. Our results support the view that spelling performance reflects the combined influences of multiple patterns, both phonological and nonphonological. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

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Complementary distribution is a consequence of a general principle of evolutionary biology, competitive exclusion, which further provides a uniform account of both allomorphic variation and the rivalry between affixes in terms of competition for distributional resources. The distribution of inflectional competitors is a type of spatial partitioning, restricted by the morphosyntactic system of a language, while derivational rivals benefit from having to name externally driven concepts. The English suffixes -ce, -cy, and -ntial are analyzed in detail as examples of competition for distribution.

Further evidence for self-organization in English spelling Kristian Berg and Mark Aronoff Geoffrey Sampson (2018) makes two claims in his response to our article about self-organization in spelling (Berg & Aronoff 2017): our explanation is redundant, and the phenomena we address can be better captured in more traditional terms. In our article, we showed first that the relation between graphemic form and morphological function is isomorphic for some suffixes, for example, the adjectival suffix -ous: in today’s English, all and only adjectives with this morpheme are spelled with final , even though phonographically, more words could be spelled that way in American varieties (cf. nervous/service). We also demonstrated that this system evolved gradually in an unsupervised process of self-organization. Sampson does not contest our synchronic statement, but brings forth a variety of distinct accounts for our diachronic findings. Overall, he suggests that phonology and etymology are sufficient to explain why the spellings are the way they are: in British English, nervous and service have (and more importantly, had) distinct reduced vowels. The distinct spelling is thus explicable from phonology here. Other spellings, Sampson argues, follow a widespread convention preferring etymological spellings: service has an in Latin, and stems from Latin -os-; that is why * is not the accepted form. No need for a distinct principle of self-organization, says Sampson, because all the data are accounted for already. There are three misunderstandings in Sampson’s response. We take responsibility for the first, though not for the second and third. Let us start with the first. Synchronically, we showed that graphemic form and morphological function are isomorphic. We then ask how this situation arose historically, but the fact is that we looked at only half of the historical story. To show this, we need to step back a little and look at the relation between form and function. It is fine to talk about isomorphism as above—but it can be helpful to take the relation apart: we can distinguish between uniformity and uniqueness. Uniformity denotes the degree of consistency with which a function is represented in its form: is there more than one spelling for the suffix? Today, -ous is spelled (almost) uniformly ,1 but in earlier stages of English, there were variants (e.g. , ), so we can say that the spelling of this adjective suffix has become more uniform over the centuries. Uniqueness flips the perspective; it denotes the degree of consistency with which a form represents a function. Is there more than one interpretation for this string of graphemes? While is unique in representing this one adjective suffix, other suffix spellings are not; represents (among others) the agentive nominal suffix in and the comparative suffix in , but also a nonmorphological word ending in . Both uniformity and uniqueness are independent of phonology: they deal with the relation between spelling and morphology. When we take phonology into account, it is as circumstantial evidence: the fact that a number of words in today’s American English could potentially be spelled with (e.g. service) is a further argument for the uniqueness. [End Page e48] Synchronically, we showed that -ous/ is both unique and uniform—but diachronically, we investigated only the uniformity of the suffix. We asked whether Latinate loans like status were responsible for the decline of the -variant of -ous like (short answer: probably not)—that is a question of uniqueness. But we did not investigate the uniqueness of each spelling variant in each time period, simply because the investigation was extensive enough already. That does not mean the question is uninteresting. A superficial search in the Helsinki corpus (a selection of English texts produced before 1710) indeed shows a number of words whose endings are like variant spellings of the suffix -ous (, ), but that did not contain the suffix, for example, ‘alms’, ‘fellows’, ‘alehouse’, or ‘sparrows’. It remains an open question how unique the respective spellings were at any given time. We now have data that show a striking case of the emergence of uniqueness over time in the spelling of the nominal...

Substantial research has been undertaken to understand the relationship between spelling and sound, but we know little about the relationship between spelling and meaning in alphabetic writing systems. We present a computational analysis of English writing in which we develop new constructs to describe this relationship. Diagnosticity captures the amount of meaningful information in a given spelling, whereas specificity estimates the degree of dispersion of this meaning across different spellings for a particular sound sequence. Using these two constructs, we demonstrate that particular suffix spellings tend to be reserved for particular meaningful functions. We then show across three paradigms (nonword classification, spelling, and eye tracking during sentence reading) that this form of regularity between spelling and meaning influences the behaviour of skilled readers, and that the degree of this behavioural sensitivity mirrors the strength of spelling-to-meaning regularities in the writing system. We close by arguing that English spelling may have become fractionated such that the high degree of spelling-sound inconsistency maximises the transmission of meaningful information.

English spelling is unphonetic: the same sounds can be spelled in various and often idiosyncratic ways. It is also ungoverned: there is no authority guiding its development. However, it is not as arbitrary as one might conclude. Investigating the spelling of four derivational suffixes, we show that the spelling of English suffixes is quite consistent. Homophonous endings of morphologically simple words are spelled differently, keeping the suffix spelling distinct (cf. e.g. vs. /*). English spelling thus provides morphological cues for the reader. Diachronically, we show that this system emerged without explicit regulation, but as a result of self-organization. We use the Helsinki corpus to show how variation was gradually reduced for each of the suffixes. The regular spellings of today emerged gradually, through a sorting-out process of competition between alternate spellings.