The physician-patient relationship has evolved significantly in the past century. Physician authority has been reduced while patients have been empowered. This review focuses on face-to-face clinical care and argues that current physician-patient relations range from partnerships between social actors who each play critical roles in negotiating care to a more adversarial duel in which both participants

Ross (1967) observed that “island” structures like “Who do you think [NP the gift from__] prompted the rumor?” or “Who did you hear [NP the statement [S that the CEO promoted__]]?” are not acceptable, despite having what seem to be plausible meanings in some contexts. Ross (1967) and Chomsky (1973) hypothesized that the source of the unacceptability is in the syntax. Here, we summarize how theories

While it is clear that children are more successful at learning language than adults are—whether first language or second—there is no agreement as to why. Is it due to greater neural plasticity, greater motivation, more ample opportunity for learning, superior cognitive function, lack of interference from a first language, or something else? A difficulty in teasing apart these theories is that while

Adult processing of other-accented speech is fast, dependent on lexical access, and readily generalizable to new words. But what does children's processing of other-accented speech look like? Although many acquisition researchers have emphasized how other-accented speech presents a formidable challenge to young children, we argue that the field has perhaps underestimated children's early accent processing

Although sign languages are crucial for research on the human linguistic capacity, argument structure in these languages is rarely addressed in theoretical and typological studies. This article provides an overview of existing research on argument structure and argument structure alternations in sign languages. It demonstrates that there are many fundamental similarities between the two modalities

Nominalization (e.g., sleeping, that we slept, sleepiness) allows speakers to refer and ascribe properties to whatever sorts of entities clauses, verbs, or adjectives typically denote. Characterizing these relatively abstract entities has challenged semanticists and philosophers of language for over 50 years, thanks especially to Zeno Vendler's early work. Vendler took different kinds of English nominalization

Research on the prosody and intonation of creole languages has largely remained an untapped resource, yet it is important for enriching our understanding of how or if their phonological systems changed or developed under contact. Further, their hybrid histories and current linguistic ecologies present descriptive and analytical treasure troves. This has the potential to inform many areas of linguistic

This article provides an overview of graded and probabilistic approaches in semantics and pragmatics. These approaches share a common set of core research goals: ( a) a concern with phenomena that are best described as graded, including a vast lexicon of words whose meanings adapt flexibly to the contexts in which they are used, as well as reasoning under uncertainty about interlocutors, their goals

Corpus-based studies have become increasingly common in linguistic typology over recent years, amounting to the emergence of a new field that we call corpus-based typology. The core idea of corpus-based typology is to take languages as populations of utterances and to systematically investigate text production across languages in this sense. From a usage-based perspective, investigations of variation

In this review, I assess a variety of constraint-based formal frameworks that can treat variable phenomena, such as well-formedness intuitions, outputs in free variation, and lexical frequency-matching. The idea behind this assessment is that data in gradient linguistics fall into natural mathematical patterns, which I call quantitative signatures. The key signatures treated here are the sigmoid curve

My career falls into two distinct periods. The first two decades featured insecurity combined with the luck of wandering into situations that ultimately helped me become a better linguist and a better teacher. I had the insecurity mostly under control by the watershed year of 1988, when I published a favorably reviewed coauthored book on language contact and also became editor of Language. Language

The primary goal of coherence theory is to provide an explanation for the coherence properties of discourse: what properties distinguish a discourse from a mere collection of utterances, and what drives comprehenders to draw inferences in service of establishing coherence. However, the importance of coherence theory goes well beyond that; it also plays a crucial role in theories of a variety of discourse-dependent

Deep learning has recently come to dominate computational linguistics, leading to claims of human-level performance in a range of language processing tasks. Like much previous computational work, deep learning–based linguistic representations adhere to the distributional meaning-in-use hypothesis, deriving semantic representations from word co-occurrence statistics. However, current deep learning methods

Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children

In recent years, construction-based approaches to morphology have gained ground in the research community. This framework is characterized by the assumption that the mental lexicon is extensive and richly structured, containing not only a large number of stored words but also a wide variety of generalizations in the form of schemas. This review explores two construction-based theories, Construction

Cochlear implants (CIs) represent a significant engineering and medical milestone in the treatment of hearing loss for both adults and children. In this review, we provide a brief overview of CI technology, describe the benefits that CIs can provide to adults and children who receive them, and discuss the specific limitations and issues faced by CI users. We emphasize the relevance of CIs to the linguistics

Language use in everyday life can be studied using lightweight, wearable recorders that collect long-form recordings—that is, audio (including speech) over whole days. The hardware and software underlying this technique are increasingly accessible and inexpensive, and these data are revolutionizing the language acquisition field. We first place this technique into the broader context of the current

Efforts to understand the brain bases of language face the Mapping Problem: At what level do linguistic computations and representations connect to human neurobiology? We review one approach to this problem that relies on rigorously defined computational models to specify the links between linguistic features and neural signals. Such tools can be used to estimate linguistic predictions, model linguistic

Children's linguistic knowledge and the learning mechanisms by which they acquire it grow substantially in infancy and toddlerhood, yet theories of word learning largely fail to incorporate these shifts. Moreover, researchers' often-siloed focus on either familiar word recognition or novel word learning limits the critical consideration of how these two relate. As a step toward a mechanistic theory

Articulatory Phonology advances an account of phonological structure in which dynamically defined vocal tract tasks—gestures—are simultaneously and isomorphically units of cognitive representation and units of physical action. This paradigm has fundamentally altered our understanding of the linguistic representation of words. This article reviews the relatively recent incorporation of prosody into

Repeatedly in recent years, phylogenetic analyses of linguistic data have reached the world's leading scientific journals, but in ways hugely controversial within linguistics itself. Phylogenetic analysis methods, taken from the biological sciences, have been applied to date and track how major language families dispersed through prehistory, with implications also for archaeology and genetics. As this

Recent progress in comparative linguistics, distributional typology, and linguistic geography allows a unified model of Uralic prehistory to take shape. Proto-Uralic first introduced an eastern grammatical profile to central and western Eurasia, where it has remained quite stable. Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic had no connection, either genealogical or areal, until the spreading Indo-Iranian

Over the past decade, the idea of using corpus linguistics in legal interpretation has attracted interest on the part of judges, lawyers, and legal academics in the United States. This review provides an introduction to this nascent movement, which is generally referred to as Law and Corpus Linguistics (LCL). After briefly summarizing LCL's origin and development, I situate LCL within legal interpretation

Whistled forms of languages are distributed worldwide and survive only in some of the most remote villages on the planet. They are not limited to a given continent, language family, or language structure, but they have been detected only sporadically by researchers and travelers, partly because they can be taken for nonlinguistic phenomena, such as simple signaling. Whistled speech consists of speaking

Language change as a result of language contact is studied in many different ways using a number of different methodologies. This article provides an overview of the main approaches to syntactic change in contact (CIC), focusing on the Romance language group. Romance languages are widely documented both synchronically and diachronically. They have been in extensive contact with other language families

Unlike many species, song learning birds and humans have independently evolved the ability to communicate via learned vocalizations. Both birdsong and spoken language are culturally transmitted across generations, within species-specific constraints that leave room for considerable variation. We review the commonalities and differences between vocal learning bird species and humans, across behavioral

The Voynich Manuscript is a fifteenth-century illustrated cipher manuscript. In this overview of recent approaches to the Voynich Manuscript, we summarize and evaluate current work on the language that underlies this document. We provide arguments for treating the document as natural language (rather than a medieval hoax) and show how statistical arguments can be made about the phonology, morphology

In cases of indexical shift, so-called indexical pronouns like I, you, here, and now refer to the speaker, addressee, location, and time of some context other than the utterance context. In cases of perspectival anaphora, an anaphor tracks the perspective of some individual other than the utterance speaker [or addressee(s)]. Thus, both phenomena involve referential obviation of a pronoun or anaphor

With some 108 independent genealogical units, South America is the linguistically most diverse region of our planet and presents a particular challenge to linguists seeking to understand the genealogical relationships among human languages. Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the internal classification of South American language families, and this article provides a critical overview

This article reviews the work on frames in the last decade by a Düsseldorf research group. The research is based on Barsalou's notion of frames and the hypothesis that the frame is the general format of categorization in human cognition. The Düsseldorf frame group developed formal definitions and interpretations of Barsalou frames and applied the theory in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. This

By mid-twentieth century, a working consensus had been reached in the linguistics community, based on the great achievements of preceding years. Synchronic linguistics had been established as a science, a “taxonomic” science, with sophisticated procedures of analysis of data. Taxonomic science has limits. It does not ask “why?” The time was ripe to seek explanatory theories, using insights provided

Why is breathing relevant in linguistics? In this review, we approach this question from different perspectives. The most popular view is that breathing adapts to speech because respiratory behavior has astonishing flexibility. We review research that shows that breathing pauses occur mostly at meaningful places, that breathing adapts to cognitive load during speech perception, and that breathing adapts

Evidential constructions have two main semantic effects: They contribute information about an individual's source of evidence, and they potentially modify the force of a sentence. In this article, I review the at-issue status of the evidential information, the indexical and anaphoric properties of evidentials, their force-modifying effect, and the connection throughout to epistemic modality. In some

Within Distributed Morphology, it has been proposed that the lexical vocabulary consists of Roots: category-less primitives. The motivation for Roots is connected with a line of argument reaching back to Chomsky concerning the representation of lexical categories and their role in syntax. At the center of the theory of Roots is the Two Domains Intuition: the idea that there are two different types

Noncanonical passives crosslinguistically exhaust the space of possible variation, supporting an approach whereby Universal Grammar is underspecified for the characteristics of voice and the properties of any particular construction are learned through experience. Languages considered include Passamaquoddy and Oji-Cree (Algonquian); Dutch and Icelandic (Germanic); Ukrainian (Slavic); Welsh and Irish

This article provides a critical review of the theoretical underpinnings of two core concepts in language socialization research: input and communicative competence. We organize our discussion along two major lines of inquiry: ( a) the historical-local and ( b) the language contact–globalization bodies of work. The first part of the article contests the persistent view that input reduces to vocabulary

Modern deep neural networks achieve impressive performance in engineering applications that require extensive linguistic skills, such as machine translation. This success has sparked interest in pr...

Though scholarly understandings of sociolinguistic variation have undergone a significant expansion in the last 70 years, variables in the realm of prosody remain severely underdescribed. It is nec...

Although the grammatical status of resumptive pronouns varies from one language to the other, these elements occur in spontaneous speech cross-linguistically, giving rise to a long-held intuition t...

Language users change their written and spoken language according to the situational characteristics and communicative purpose of production—that is, according to the register being produced. Resea...

In the past two decades, the field of language and masculinities studies has become an established part of language, gender, and sexuality research, growing in response to concerns about the limite...

Humans vary in almost every dimension imaginable, and language is no exception. In this article, we review the past research that has focused on individual differences (IDs) in first language acqui...

Distributional semantics provides multidimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown by a large body...

This review provides a state-of-the-art overview of Spanish sociolinguistics and discusses several areas, including variationist sociolinguistics, bilingual and immigrant communities, and linguisti...

Humans are remarkably efficient at parsing basic linguistic cues and show an equally impressive ability to produce and parse socially indexed cues from the language(s) they encounter. In this revie...

Determiners and bare nouns raise questions about the interface between morphosyntax and semantics. On the syntactic side, the primary issue is whether bare nouns have a null determiner making all n...

Evidence from the study of verbal argument alternations suggests that the syntactic structure of an event-denoting clause often reflects the structure of the event it denotes, in the sense that par...

This article provides an up-to-date perspective on the endangerment that contact languages around the world are facing, with a focus on pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages. While language contact...

The main goal of semantic fieldwork is to accurately capture the contribution of natural language expressions to truth conditions and to pragmatic felicity conditions, by interacting with native sp...

After explicit phrase structure rules were abandoned in government–binding theory, some account of the distribution of adverbials became necessary. This review surveys two current theories. The fir...

Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) is a model for the analysis of language in which different types of linguistic information are represented in separate dimensions, each with its own formalism. Thes...

In 1976, the German Max Planck Society established a new research enterprise in psycholinguistics, which became the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. I was fo...

Recent descriptive and typological research on antipassives has allowed many existing claims about antipassives to be reevaluated. Although there is still debate about which characteristics are nec...

This review takes a broad perspective on one of the most fundamental issues for gender research in linguistics: gender assignment (i.e., how different nouns are sorted into different genders). I fi...

African American Vernacular English (AAVE), one of the most studied dialects in American English, has undergone several changes in its label across the years. Its most recent designation, African A...

The close relationship between language variation and the nature of social ties among people has been the focus of long-standing commentary in linguistics. A central puzzle in this relationship is ...

In this review, we discuss the empirical landscape of degree constructions cross-linguistically as well as the major analytical avenues that have been pursued to account for individual languages an...

Every major theoretical approach to syntactic structure incorporates a mechanism for generating unbounded dependencies. In this article, I distinguish between some of the most commonly entertained ...

Over the last 20 years, the development of a wide range of treebanks that track the evolution of languages’ syntactic patterns through time has revolutionized the field of historical syntax. The ra...

The Austronesian language family is the second largest on Earth in number of languages, and was the largest in geographical extent before the European colonial expansions of the past five centuries...