Why do nominalizations mean what they do? I investigate two deverbal nominalizers in Northern Paiute (Uto-Aztecan, Numic: Western United States), -na and -, which create nominalizations that describe either an event (like the poss-ing gerund in English) or an individual (like agent nominalizations with -er). I propose a syntax and semantics for these deverbal nominalizations that account for their interpretive variability. On the syntax side, I argue that -na and - overtly realize the nominal functional head that canonically assigns case to possessors when this head takes a vP complement. On the semantics side, I propose that Northern Paiute has operators that abstract over a variable inside nominalizations. This accounts for the meanings that deverbal nominalizations in Northern Paiute have, and it highlights their relationship to nominalization patterns in other languages.

The empirical facts about Right-Node Raising (RNR) lead to fundamentally conflicting analytical conclusions. There is strong evidence that RNR does not obey syntactic constraints of any kind, which in turn suggests that RNR is not a syntactic operation, but there is also evidence that strongly favors a syntactic analysis. The idiosyncratic and almost paradoxical nature of the phenomena indicates that no simple unified analysis of RNR can be formulated. In order to resolve this empirical and theoretical impasse, I propose that what is usually called RNR is best seen as the conflation of three completely unrelated kinds of phenomena: VP/N’-Ellipsis, Extraposition, and (Backward) Periphery Deletion. Although they are fundamentally different, these phenomena can yield structures that are superficially similar and, in some cases, apply to the same strings. The latter is one of the major factors that has misled previous accounts. Once this threeway confound between ellipsis, extraposition, and deletion is taken into account, the contradictory idiosyncrasies about RNR vanish, and a wide range of cases are obtained as predictions of independently motivated accounts of VP/N’-ellipsis and ATB extraposition phenomena. This article offers an explicit formalization of the phenomena under discussion in sign-based construction grammar (Sag 2012), a framework that combines insights from head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG; Pollard & Sag 1994) and Berkeley construction grammar (Fillmore & Kay 1996).

Since Merchant 2001, it has been widely agreed that the licensing condition on sluicing is at least partially semantic in nature. This article argues that the semantics this condition operates on must include not only truth conditions, but also the Issues introduced by existential quantification and disjunction. In the account presented here, the special role these elements play in antecedents for sluicing derives from the deep semantic connections between these elements and questions. In addition to accounting for well-known facts about sluicing in a natural way, this article also analyzes novel facts such as the interaction of sluicing with appositives and double negation, and handles recalcitrant cases such as disjunctive antecedents. The account can readily be extended to so-called ‘sprouting’ cases where the crucial material in the antecedent is an implicit argument or is missing altogether.

It is a well-known fact that across the world's languages there is a fairly strong asymmetry in the affixation of grammatical material, in that suffixes considerably outnumber prefixes in typological databases. This article argues that prosody, specifically prosodic phrasing, plays an important part in bringing about this asymmetry. Prosodic word and phrase boundaries may occur after a clitic function word preceding its lexical host with sufficient frequency so as to impede the fusion required for affixhood. Conversely, prosodic boundaries rarely, if ever, occur between a lexical host and a clitic function word following it. Hence, prosody does not impede the fusion process between lexical hosts and postposed function words, which therefore become affixes more easily.

Evidence for the asymmetry in prosodic phrasing is provided from two sources: disfluencies, and ditropic cliticization, that is, the fact that grammatical PRoclitics may be phonological ENclitics (i.e. phrased with a preceding host), but grammatical enclitics are never phonological proclitics. Earlier explanations for the suffixing preference have neglected prosody almost completely and thus also missed the related asymmetry in ditropic cliticization. More importantly, the evidence from prosodic phrasing suggests a new venue for explaining the suffixing preference. The asymmetry in prosodic phrasing, which, according to the hypothesis proposed here, is a major factor underlying the suffixing preference, has a natural basis in the mechanics of turn-taking as well as in the mechanics of speech production.

Jasmine was an American seventh grader whose first language (L1) is Punjabi and second language (L2) is English. A good speller, she tied for first place at her regional spelling bee. She maintains that she then correctly spelled the tie-breaking word: tomography. After requesting an instant video replay of her word, the judges declared Jasmine's spelling incorrect: <d-o-m-o-g-r-a-p-h-y>. We examine three questions: Is Jasmine's presumed-high word-recognition ability consistent with such an error? Did her L1 interfere with her L2 pronunciation? Did an L1-influenced pronunciation cause the judges to perceive her word-initial /t/ as [d]? After inquiring of Jasmine about the spelling event itself, we examined the considerable research on Indian English, spelling, speech production, and speech perception; we also audio-recorded Jasmine's spoken language at various style levels to assess the degree to which Punjabi may be influencing her English pronunciation. The first question remains without a confirmed answer, though our assumption is that it is ‘no’. Work on Indian English indicates a probable ‘yes’ to the latter two questions. Spectrographic analysis of Jasmine's word-initial English [th]-sounds demonstrates the shorter voice onset times associated with the nonaspirated /t/-sounds of Punjabi and Indian English. It is probable that Jasmine pronounced the ‘t’ [th] of tomography with little or no aspiration, and that the judges heard the near-unaspirated [t] as a [d]. Jasmine's experience demonstrates that the Scripps National Spelling Bee's sole reliance on dictionary pronunciations of Standard American English might well be adjusted to accommodate contestants who speak a nonstandard, or a standard but non-American, variety of English.

Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, language management has been a central activity of the party and government, interrupted during the years of the Cultural Revolution. It has focused on the spread of Putonghua as a national language, the simplification of the script, and the auxiliary use of Pinyin. Associated has been a policy of modernization and terminological development. There have been studies of bilingualism and topolects (regional varieties like Cantonese and Hokkien) and some recognition and varied implementation of the needs of non-Han minority languages and dialects, including script development and modernization. Asserting the status of Chinese in a globalizing world, a major campaign of language diffusion has led to the establishment of Confucius Institutes all over the world. Within China, there have been significant efforts in foreign language education, at first stressing Russian but now covering a wide range of languages, though with a growing emphasis on English. Despite the size of the country, the complexity of its language situations, and the tension between competing goals, there has been progress with these language-management tasks. At the same time, nonlinguistic forces have shown even more substantial results. Computers are adding to the challenge of maintaining even the simplified character writing system. As even more striking evidence of the effect of politics and demography on language policy, the enormous internal rural-to-urban rate of migration promises to have more influence on weakening regional and minority varieties than campaigns to spread Putonghua. Overall, linguists and a strongly developed cadre of sociolinguists have played a useful role, but the driving force has been the Communist leadership.

This article details a high school English teacher's experiences teaching a semester-long elective course on linguistics to tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade students in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Students explore units covering an introduction to linguistics, phonetics, morphology, language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and the history of English. The article reviews related primary and secondary school projects that have been done in the United States and abroad, the curriculum of this specific survey course, successes and challenges encountered while teaching, and recommended resources relevant to secondary school students and their teachers.

This article describes a tool that can be used by blind and visually impaired students in phonetics and phonology classrooms: a tactile International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) magnet-board system. This tool consists of IPA magnets and phonological rule symbols that are printed and embossed, so as to be readable by both sighted and visually impaired individuals. A user of the tool can lay out phonetic and phonological data on the magnet board for communicative, organizational, or problem-solving purposes. Since the magnet board can be read both visually and tactually, it can serve as a collaborative space that can be used by both sighted and visually impaired members of the classroom. Potential uses include group work in class and as an augmentation to chalkboard problem-solving demonstrations. The tool can complement already extant options for blind and visually impaired students and facilitate collaboration between sighted and visually impaired students. Here, we describe the tool, exemplify some potential uses, and offer suggestions for further improvement.