This article is a response to commentaries on the article, "Microvariation in Multilingual Situations: The Importance of Property-by-Property Acquisition" (EJ1300541). This response is divided into sections focusing on the following issues: (1) full transfer and the notion of copying; (2) the definition of linguistic proximity; (3) some…

The goal of this dissertation is to explore the phonetic bases of intervocalic lenition--specifically, voicing and spirantization of intervocalic stops. A traditional understanding of phonological patterns like these is that they involve articulatory effort reduction, in that speakers substitute an easy sound for a hard one. Experiment 1 uses a…

The central claim of this paper is that Vantage Theory is able to provide a much-needed explanatory account of the seemingly unrelated differences between lexical and morphological antonyms of dimensional adjectives in Slavic languages. In a case study, I compare two antonyms of the Russian adjective "vysokij" "high", a morphologically unrelated…

Shows that the categorical processes brought to light by MacLaury (1995, 1997) make it possible to account for differentiated activations of social representation. Considers the issue of unified versus dichotomized interpretations of data when these foster more than one view of a topic, and suggests that vantage theory settles the question in…

In response to problems in classifying grammaticality judgments in linguistic theory, a psychological model of speakers' performance on grammaticality judgment tasks is presented. The model departs significantly from notions of metalinguistic performance outlined in previous research, and is derived principally from recent work in category theory.…

A discussion of Indo-European languages proposes that this language family is not genetically isolated but is distantly related to certain other language families of northern and central Eurasia, the Indian subcontinent, and the ancient Near East. The history of research into this macrofamily of languages, termed Nostratic, is reviewed, with notes…

Original version of this paper presented at Indiana University, Bloomington, on February 7, 1972. (VM)

Revised version of a paper presented at the 1970 summer meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Columbus, Ohio. Research leading to the paper supported in part by a National Science Foundation grant to the Phonology Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley. (VM)

The comments presented here were made after the presentation of four papers and commentary by two other symposium participants. They address issues in language comparison and classification. First, comments are made on the papers ("An African Test Case in Comparative Methodology,""The Mathematics of Multilateral Comparison,""Testing a Basic…

Five prominent issues in quantitative sociolinguistic discussions of speaker classification are summarized and discussed, and a case study that attempts to extend the available methodology is examined. The five issues include the following: (1) to what extent are speaker categories emic or etic? (2) do speaker categories encode local inter-speaker…

The authors of a previous paper on aspects of generalized phrase structure grammar respond to criticism of that paper and clarify elements in the discussion. The original paper addressed the problem of expressing relevant generalizations about the order of complements that a lexical item subcategorizes for. (MSE)

In this paper, the multilateral comparison method of classifying languages is described and analyzed. It is suggested that while it is espoused as a simple and reasonable approach to language classification, the method has serious flaws. "Multilateral" or "mass" comparison (MC) is not a method of genetic language…

This article considers arguments for and against the use of coding systems in classroom-based language research and touches on some relevant considerations from ethnographic and conversational analysis approaches. The four authors each explain and elaborate on their practical decision to code or not to code events or utterances at a specific point…

It is argued that the analysis of stress placement in Piraha offers important new evidence on the proper characterization of prosodic organization and the notational devices necessary to express this organization. It is shown that Piraha stress placement is intractable to either a grid account or a binary branching analysis, but that an insightful…

This paper discusses research and developments in the study of Papuan languages, a designation formerly used to group those languages which were geographically close to, but structurally quite different from, the Austronesian languages; the grouping had nothing to do with relationships among the Papuan languages themselves. Increasing knowledge…