This article describes in detail several explicit computational methods for approaching such questions in phonology as the vowel/consonant distinction, the nature of vowel harmony systems, and syllable structure, appealing solely to distributional information. Beginning with the vowel/consonant distinction, we consider a method for its discovery…

Backward control is an obligatory interpretational dependency between an overt controller and a nonovert controllee in which the controllee is structurally superior to the controller: "Meg persuaded [Delta]i" ["Roni to give up"]. It contrasts with ordinary forward control, in which the controller is structurally higher: "Meg persuaded Roni"…

Phonological constraints can, in principle, be classified according to whether they are natural (founded in principles of universal grammar (UG)) or unnatural (arbitrary, learned inductively from the language data). Recent work has used this distinction as the basis for arguments about the role of UG in learning. Some languages have phonological…

There is a long-standing debate about the principles constraining the combinatorial properties of suffixes. Hay 2002 and Hay & Plag 2004 proposed a model in which suffixes can be ordered along a hierarchy of processing complexity. We show that this model generalizes to a larger set of suffixes, and we provide independent evidence supporting the…

The reconstruction of genealogical relationships between languages is traditionally performed through lexical comparison and the establishment of regular sound changes. The historical analysis of other aspects of linguistic structure, like syntactic patterns or the function of grammatical elements, is normally understood to depend on a previously…

Noun-class prefixes are obligatory in most Bantu languages. However, the Sotho languages (Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi) permit a subset of prefixes to be realized as null at the intersection of "unmarked" phonological, syntactic, and discourse conditions. This raises the question of how and when the licensing of null prefixes is learned. Using…

Argues that the mismatches that often exist between a word's morphological structure and its semantics can be resolved by a model-based theory in which morphological rules are formulated as operations on morphological expression, in which formal relationships exist between the model root, and the words in that example are defined by a set of model…

Discusses a theory that quotations are demonstrations that are component parts of language use. Demonstrations are described as unlike descriptions in two main ways: they are serious rather than nonserious, and they depict rather than describe their referents. (69 references) (JL)

Presents an integrated theory of the syntactic and semantic representation of complements where the unexpressed subjects of the embedded verb-phrase complement are subject to certain interpretation restrictions. It is argued that the grammar of English controlled complements can be derived from the interaction of semantically based principles of…

Four building blocks of a theory of linguistic diversity are presented here: a classification and measures of diversity, an account of the causes of diversity, measures of rates of differentiation, and means of estimating the age of a linguistic population. (69 references) (JL)

Argues that there is phonological gemination in English based on distribution of vowel qualities in medial and final syllables. The analysis, cast in terms of optimality theory, has implications in several domains: (1) ambisyllabicity is not the right way to capture aspiration and flapping; (2) languages in which stress depends on vowel quality…