Professor Erich Round

International audience; Inflectional classes are ubiquitous in the world’s inflectional systems, but where do they come from? We introduce a simple, computational iterated learning model in which inflectional classes emerge spontaneously; this contrasts with a prominent earlier model (Ackerman & Malouf 2015) which reliably evolves orderliness and eventual uniformity, but never stable inflectional classes.Inflectional classes are a ‘morphomic’ morphological-organisational structure, mediating the mapping between content and form in inflectional systems. In natural language, they are common, productive, psychologically real for speakers (Enger 2014, Maiden 2018), and limit the complexity of the inflectional system by increasing the systematicity of exponent distribution (cf. Carstairs-McCarthy 2010, Round 2015, Blevins 2016). We contribute to ongoing debate over the dynamics that could lead to inflectional class structure (Maiden 2018, Carstairs-McCarthy 2010), by identifying a key evolutionary ingredient: change based on dissimilarity. Since attraction-only models (in which lexemes only grow more similar to each other) inevitably remove all variation, they cannot evolve the stable, structured diversity characteristic of inflectional systems; by contrast, models with both an attraction and repulsion dynamic enable stable, morphome-like structure to emerge consistently.A model implementing a simple paradigm cell filling task (Ackerman, Blevins & Malouf 2009), is described in Ackerman and Malouf (2015) and illustrated in Figure 1. Within this attraction-only model, lexemes only ever change to be more like others. The core dynamic is one of preferential attraction towards exponents that are already more frequent than their competitors, ensuring that all lexemes eventually converge on a single class. Thus, the model exhibits self-organisation, but only of a radically homogenising kind. We investigated a family of minimally different dynamics, introducing modulable parameters for the paradigm cell filling task: prediction based on multiple forms (Stump & Finkel 2013, Bonami & Beniamine 2016); frequency weighting (Blevins, Milin et al 2016); and a repulsion dynamic, by which already dissimilar lexemes can increase in dissimilarity.

An automated method is presented for the commensurable, reproducible measurement of duration and lenition of segment types ranging from fully occluded stops to highly lenited variants, in acoustic data. The method is motivated with respect to the relationship between acoustic and articulatory phonetics and, through subsequent evaluation, is argued to correspond well to articulation. It is then applied to the phonemic stops of casual speech in Gurindji (Pama-Nyungan, Australia) to investigate the nature of their articulatory targets. The degree of stop lenition is found to vary widely. Contrary to expectations, no evidence is found of a positive effect on lenition due to word-medial (relative to word-initial) position, beyond that attributable to duration; nor do non-coronals lenite more than their apical counterparts, which freely lenite along a continuum towards taps. No significant effect is found of preceding or following vocalic environment. Taken together, the observed lenition, duration, and peak intensity velocities are argued to be inconsistent with a single, fully-occluded articulatory 'stop' target which is undershot at short durations, rather targets can be understood to span a range or 'window' of values in the sense of Keating (1990), from fully-occluded stop-like targets to more approximant-like targets. It is an open question to what degree the patterns found in Gurindji are language particular, or can be related to the organization of obstruent systems in Australian languages more broadly. Precisely comparable studies of additional languages will be especially valuable in addressing these questions and others, and are possible using the method we introduce.

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What is the full range of ways in which morphomes can figure in the organization of a morphological system? If we believe that arguments for the existence of morphomes are compelling, then this question demands attention. It is argued that morphomic organization can extend even to morphotactics. Earlier research (Round 2013, 2015) establishes that the realization of morphosyntactic feature-values in Kayardild requires a morphomic analysis if empirical generalizations are to be adequately expressed within a formal account. Here it is demonstrated that morphotactic constraints, which determine licit and illicit morphological strings in Kayardild, operate in terms of the same morphomic categories motivated by other aspects of the inflectional system. Consequences and priorities for future morphomic research are discussed.

The chapter looks at language variation and change, and the relation of these processes to language reconstruction and classification. The chapter gives an overview of theories, models, methods, and data, describing how diversity and variation is modelled and measured for reconstruction and classification within traditional, comparative and statistical, evolutionary, or phylogenetic methods. First, the chapter identifies the basic principles of language change and the way in which these differ within various subdomains of language. A second part delves into the outcomes of change, describing the diverse results of sound change, lexical change, and typological/morphosyntactic change. Here, important aspects include the inherent propensity of change, the role of arbitrariness, the role of systems, horizontal transfer, and the outcome of change at macro-levels. Finally, the chapter deals with the issue of the ontological status of the reconstruction, and how various theoretical approaches may affect the interpretation of results. The chapter reviews results and controversies arising from current research.

English some and Swedish någon have a number of ‘subidentificational’ meanings, as in English some general (or other) has been shot; it was some shooting (or something). This paper reviews those meanings and attempts to determine how many context-invariant meanings are needed in order to account for their full range of meanings in context. By explicitly setting out processes of inference generation within a Gricean framework, it is found that for a large number, only one underlying (i.e. coded) meaning is required, which in context generates inferences such as lack of speaker knowledge, recall or interest in the NP referent, regarding either its type or which entity it is. Nevertheless, not all meanings can be handled in this way and additional coded meanings are required. Two diachronic pathways are discussed via which one coded meaning might extend to another. Some conclusions relevant for future work on indefinites are drawn.

The non–Pama-Nyugan, Tangkic languages were spoken until recently in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia. The most extensively documented are Lardil, Kayardild, and Yukulta. Their phonology is notable for its opaque, word-final deletion rules and extensive word-internal sandhi processes. The morphology contains complex relationships between sets of forms and sets of functions, due in part to major historical refunctionalizations, which have converted case markers into markers of tense and complementization and verbal suffixes into case markers. Syntactic constituency is often marked by inflectional concord, resulting frequently in affix stacking. Yukulta in particular possesses a rich set of inflection-marking possibilities for core arguments, including detransitivized configurations and an inverse system. These relate in interesting ways historically to argument marking in Lardil and Kayardild. Subordinate clauses are marked for tense across most constituents other than the subject, and such tense marking is also found in main clauses in Lardil and Kayardild, which have lost the agreement and tense-marking second-position clitic of Yukulta. Under specific conditions of co-reference between matrix and subordinate arguments, and under certain discourse conditions, clauses may be marked, on all or almost all words, by complementization markers, in addition to inflection for case and tense.

Typological datasets for quantitative historicallinguistic inquiry are growing in breadth, but a challenge is also to increase their depth, since advanced methods often ideally require many hundreds of traits per language. Using biphone transition probabilities from phonemicized vocabulary data, we extract several hundred high-definition phonotactic traits per language, for 17 languages in the Ngumpin-Yapa and Yolngu subgroups of the Pama-Nyungan family, Australia. We detect phylogenetic signal at a significant level (p < 0.001 for both subgroups), measured against a reference phylogeny inferred from basic vocabulary cognacy data. This contrasts with simpler, binary coding of biphones’ occurrence, which provides insufficient detail for the detection of phylogenetic signal. Thus, we demonstrate the viability of a new method in quantitative historical linguistics, and emphasize the inferential power to be harnessed from high-definition, trait-rich datasets for comparative research.

Frontmatter -- Preface -- Contributors -- Funding and support -- Abbreviations -- Orthographic conventions for Caucasian languages -- Overview of conventions -- Overview of tables -- Overview of figures -- Overview of maps -- Overview of appendices -- Contents -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Theoretical backdrop: words, things, and humans in their environment -- 3. Language: classification, reconstruction, and principles of change -- 4. Description of the database Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics -- 5. Atlas: Grammar -- 6. Atlas: Lexicon -- 7. Concluding chapter: an integrated view of the linguistic and cultural histories of Eurasia -- Literature -- Appendix 1: Languages of the current atlas -- Appendix 2a: Grammar: Features, complete list (from DiACL) -- Appendix 2b: Grammar: State combinations -- Appendix 2c: Grammar: State combinations in languages -- Appendix 2d: Grammar: Solutions 1–10 by Structure -- Appendix 3a: Lexicon: list of concepts, coverage by family -- Appendix 3b: Lexical data -- Appendix 3c: Lexical data: statistics -- Appendix 3d: Lexicon: Source language data, flow map -- Appendix 4a: Language consultants -- Appendix 4b: Literary sources -- Appendix 4c: Geographical sources -- Map Credits -- Index Historical linguistics is a growing field, and so is the notion of the role of cultural aspects as involved in language diversity. However, a collective work on the current stand within this field is lacking, in particular for little researched areas such as the Amazon.Computational methods, as well as new technologies for geographic mapping and data base management have opened new possibilities for looking at history of language and culture, based on earlier theories. These methods are used as complementary to established methods, such as comparative method, areal method, and relative and absolute chronology.The current atlas will focus on the following topics: 1. language spread and diversity in relation to ecology, subsistence, and cultural contact, 2. functionality in culture, as expressed in cultural vocabulary, 3. indications of contact by means of borrowings of cultural vocabulary and linguistic typology.The book will be based on a rich new data (from about 400 languages), which will be available open source via a geographic database. The volume will be of relevance for students and researchers of linguistics, cultural anthropology, human ecology, archaeology, and adjacent disciplines. DiACL - Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics https://snd.gu.se/en/catalogue/study/ext0269

These are the basic data sets (.xml), which are used for creating maps, graphs and results of the volume Mouton Atlas of Languages and Cultures (Mouton De Gruyter 2019). Data has been extracted from the database Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics during 2018 and prepared for publication. Data is printed in the paper and online version of the book. The data is made available by permission from the publishers. NB. In using the data, quoting of the book is required: Carling, Gerd (ed.) 2019. Mouton Atlas of Languages and Cultures. Berlin - New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Typologists strive to compare like with like, but four dilemmas make this challenging in phonology: (1) the non-uniqueness of phonological analysis; and the existence of (2) multiple levels of analysis; (3) multiple theories of phonology; and (4) analytical interdependencies between phonological phenomena. Here I argue that the four dilemmas can be coherently related, and then addressed together. I introduce the concept of criterial conflicts, derived from notions in canonical typology. Criterial conflicts arise in the presence of an unexpected pairing of properties that pulls an analysis in two directions. This contradictory pull and its resolution in different directions leads by various paths to the four dilemmas. Concrete strategies are then discussed for countering the common, underlying problem. I observe that criterial conflicts are well handled by factorial analysis (i.e., multiple normalization) and multivariate analysis, but not by simple normalization. Illustrative examples are taken from the canonical typology of segments.

Abstract Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data – in this instance, statistical phonotactics. We extract phonotactic data from 112 Pama-Nyungan vocabularies and apply tests for phylogenetic signal, quantifying the degree to which the data reflect phylogenetic history. We test three datasets: (1) binary variables recording the presence or absence of biphones (two-segment sequences) in a lexicon (2) frequencies of transitions between segments, and (3) frequencies of transitions between natural sound classes. Australian languages have been characterized as having a high degree of phonotactic homogeneity. Nevertheless, we detect phylogenetic signal in all datasets. Phylogenetic signal is greater in finer-grained frequency data than in binary data, and greatest in natural-class-based data. These results demonstrate the viability of employing a new source of readily extractable data in historical and comparative linguistics.

Phylogenetic comparative methods are new in our field and are shrouded, for most linguists, in at least a little mystery. Yet the path that led to their discovery in comparative biology is so similar to the methodological history of balanced sampling, that it is only an accident of history that they were not discovered by a linguistic typologist. Here we clarify the essential logic behind phylogenetic comparative methods and their fundamental relatedness to a deep intellectual tradition focussed on sampling. Then we introduce concepts, methods and tools which will enable typologists to use these methods in everyday typological research. The key commonality of phylogenetic comparative methods and balanced sampling is that they attempt to deal with statistical non-independence due to genealogy. Whereas sampling can never achieve independence and requires most comparative data to be discarded, phylogenetic comparative methods achieve independence while retaining and using all comparative data. We discuss the essential notions of phylogenetic signal; uncertainty about trees; typological averages and proportions that are sensitive to genealogy; comparison across language families; and the effects of areality. Extensive supplementary materials illustrate computational tools for practical analysis and we illustrate the methods discussed with a typological case study of the laminal contrast in Pama-Nyungan.

Linguistics, and typology in particular, can have a bright future. We justify this optimism by discussing comparability from two angles. First, we take the opportunity presented by this special issue of Linguistic Typology to pause for a moment and make explicit some of the logical underpinnings of typological sciences, linguistics included, which we believe are worth reminding ourselves of. Second, we give a brief illustration of comparison, and particularly measurement, within modern typology.

Linguists seek insight from all human languages, however accessing information from most of the full store of extant global linguistic descriptions is not easy. One of the most common kinds of information that linguists have documented is vernacular sentences, as recorded in descriptive grammars. Typically these sentences are formatted as interlinear glossed text (IGT). Most descriptive grammars, however, exist only as hardcopy or scanned pdf documents. Consequently, parsing IGTs in scanned grammars is a priority, in order to significantly increase the volume of documented linguistic information that is readily accessible. Here we demonstrate fundamental viability for a technology that can assist in making a large number of linguistic data sources machine readable: the automated identification and parsing of interlinear glossed text from scanned page images. For example, we attain high median precision and recall (>0.95) in the identification of example sentences in IGT format. Our results will be of interest to those who are keen to see more of the existing documentation of human language, especially for less-resourced and endangered languages, become more readily accessible.

We introduce the Romance Verbal Inflection Dataset 2.0, a multilingual lexicon of Romance inflection covering 74 varieties. The lexicon provides verbal paradigm forms in broad IPA phonemic notation. Both lexemes and paradigm cells are organized to reflect cognacy. Such multi-lingual inflected lexicons annotated for two dimensions of cognacy are necessary to study the evolution of inflectional paradigms, and test linguistic hypotheses systematically. However, these resources seldom exist, and when they do, they are not usually encoded in computationally usable ways. The Oxford Online Database of Romance Verb Morphology provides this kind of information, however, it is not maintained anymore and is only available as a web service without interfaces for machine-readability. We collect its data and clean and correct it for consistency using both heuristics and expert annotator judgements. Most resources used to study language evolution computationally rely strictly on multilingual contemporary information, and lack information about prior stages of the languages. To provide such information, we augmented the database with Latin paradigms from the LatInFlexi lexicon. Finally, to make it widely avalable, the resource is released under a GPLv3 license in CLDF format.

Kala Lagaw Ya is the language of the western and central islands of the Torres Strait. It exhibits an extremely complex pattern of 'split argument coding' ('split ergativity'), which has previously been considered typologically exceptional and problematic for widely discussed universals of argument coding dating back to work by Silverstein, Comrie and Dixon in the 1970s, and framed in terms of an 'animacy' or 'nominal' hierarchy. Furthermore, the two main dialects of the language, which centre around Saibai Island and Mabuiag Island, differ in the detail of their argument coding in interesting ways. In this paper we argue that once we take into account other typologically well-attested principles concerning the effect of markedness on neutralization in the morphological coding of grammatical categories, and in particular recent proposals about the typology of number marking systems, the Kala Lagaw Ya system falls into place as resulting from the unexceptional interaction of a number of universal tendencies. On this view, the case systems of the two dialects of Kala Lagaw Ya, while complex, appear not to be typologically exceptional. This account can be taken as a case study contributing to our understanding of universals of argument coding and how they relate to forces affecting the neutralization of morphological marking. The reframing of the Kala Lagaw Ya facts then has broader implications: it reinforces the value of viewing complex patterns as the result of the interaction of simpler, more regular forces, and in so doing it also lends further empirical weight to the universals of argument coding which Kala Lagaw Ya was previously thought to violate.

Notes accompanying a dataset of 392 Australian phonemic inventories contributed to PHOIBLE 2.0. The dataset is an explicitly typological one, which seeks to deal even-handedly with numerous issues that arise in the cross-linguistic comparison of Australian phoneme inventories. These notes explain how and why the inventories will appear to differ from the ultimate source documents.

Analogy has returned to prominence in the field of inflectional morphology as a basis for new explanations of inflectional productivity. Here we review the rising profile of analogy, identifying key theoretical and methodological developments, areas of success, and priorities for future work. In morphological theory, work within so-called abstractive approaches places analogy at the center of productive processes, though significant conceptual and technical details remain to be settled. The computational modeling of inflectional analogy has a rich and diverse history, and attention is now increasingly directed to understanding inflectional systems through their internal complexity and cross-linguistic diversity. A tension exists between the prima facie promise of analogy to lead to new explanations and its relative lack of theoretical articulation. We bring this to light as we examine questions regarding inflectional defectiveness and whether analogy is reducible to grammar optimization resulting from simplicity biases in learning and language use. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 10 is January 2024. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

The word final phonology of Lardil was brought to the attention of linguists by Ken Hale in the 1960s and since then certain properties of the data have led it to occupy a privileged position, in a canon of data sets against which new theoretical proposals are frequently tested. Several seminal arguments for new and high-profile phonological theories are now based at least in part upon analyses of Hale's data set. After reviewing what is of such interest in Lardil, a body of data is assembled which alters our understanding of the empirical facts and theoretical implications of Lardil phonology. Hale's process of Laminalization is reanalyzed as Apicalization; constrained lexical exceptions are found with respect to Apocope, Apicalization and Truncation; and a process of Raising is identified. A discussion of the systematicity of these new data, and of their demonstrable antiquity leads to the conclusion that future formal analyses of the language must account not only for already well-known properties of the data, but for the existence of multiple, active patterns that apply selectively throughout the lexicon.

Yukulta, also known as Ganggalida, is an extinct member of the Southern branch of the non-Pama-Nyungan, Tangkic language family of north-western Queensland, Australia. Key sources are a master’s dissertation and related sketch grammar by Sandra Keen (1972; 1983) plus around twenty hours of Keen’s field recordings, deposited at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra, Australia. These recordings are now undergoing transcription by the current author, and provide significant additional information about the language; however, since the recordings consist overwhelmingly of elicited sentence translations from English into Yukulta by a single speaker, it is

Feature stability, time and tempo of change, and the role of genealogy versus areality in creating linguistic diversity are important issues in current computational research on linguistic typology. This paper presents a database initiative, DiACL Typology, which aims to provide a resource for addressing these questions with specific of the extended Indo-European language area of Eurasia, the region with the best documented linguistic history. The database is pre-prepared for statistical and phylogenetic analyses and contains both linguistic typological data from languages spanning over four millennia, and linguistic metadata concerning geographic location, time period, and reliability of sources. The typological data has been organized according to a hierarchical model of increasing granularity in order to create data-sets that are complete and representative.

The contact history of the languages of the Eastern and Western Torres Strait has been claimed (e.g. by Dixon 2002, Wurm 1972, and others) to have been sufficiently intense as to obscure the genetic relationship of the Western Torres Strait language. Some have argued that it is an Australian (Pama-Nyungan) language, though with considerable influence from the Papuan language Meryam Mir (the Eastern Torres Strait language). Others have claimed that the Western Torres language is, in fact, a genetically Papuan language, though with substantial Australian substrate or adstrate influence. Much has been made of phonological structures which have been viewed as unusual for Australian languages. In this paper we examine the evidence for contact claims in the region. We review aspects of the phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of the Eastern and Western Torres Strait languages with an eye to identifying areal influence. This larger data pool shows that the case for intense contact has been vastly overstated. Beyond some phonological features and some loan words, there is no linguistic evidence for intense contact; moreover, the phonological features adduced to be evidence of contact are also found to be not specifically Papuan, but part of a wider set of features in Australian languages.

The phonologies of Australia can now be investigated with new tools for large-scale phonological typology. Here we draw on an empirical dataset covering the reported phonemic inventories of nearly four hundred Australian language varieties. Variation is observed in terms of major genealogical groupings of languages, comparing the variation among them and within them. Five topics are selected based on their importance to our understanding of continental phonological diversity in Australia, and their potential to shed new light within the space available. They are: the main parameters of variation in Australian segment inventories; less frequent, additional consonant types; infrequent absences from consonant inventories; diversity among systems with two series of stops; vowel systems.

Prehistoric human activities have contributed to the dispersal of many culturally important plants. The study of these traditional interactions can alter the way we perceive the natural distribution and dynamics of species and communities. Comprehensive research on native crops combining evolutionary and anthropological data is revealing how ancient human populations influenced their distribution. Although traditional diets also included a suite of non-cultivated plants that in some cases necessitated the development of culturally important technical advances such as the treatment of toxic seed, empirical evidence for their deliberate dispersal by prehistoric peoples remains limited. Here we integrate historic and biocultural research involving Aboriginal people, with chloroplast and nuclear genomic data to demonstrate Aboriginal-mediated dispersal of a non-cultivated rainforest tree. We assembled new anthropological evidence of use and deliberate dispersal of Castanospermum australe (Fabaceae), a non-cultivated culturally important riparian tree that produces toxic but highly nutritious water-dispersed seed. We validated cultural evidence of recent human-mediated dispersal by revealing genomic homogeneity across extensively dissected habitat, multiple catchments and uneven topography in the southern range of this species. We excluded the potential contribution of other dispersal mechanisms based on the absence of suitable vectors and current distributional patterns at higher elevations and away from water courses, and by analyzing a comparative sample from northern Australia. Innovative studies integrating evolutionary and anthropological data will continue to reveal the unexpected impact that prehistoric people have had on current vegetation patterns. A better understanding of how traditional practices shaped species' distribution and assembly will directly inform cultural heritage management strategies, challenge "natural" species distribution assumptions, and provide innovative baseline data for pro-active biodiversity management.

Debate over whether phonaesthemes are part of morphology has been long and inconclusive. We contend that this is because the properties that characterise individual phonaesthemes and those that characterise individual morphological units are neither sufficiently disjunct nor sufficiently overlapping to furnish a clear answer, unless resort is made to relatively aprioristic exclusions from the set of 'relevant' data, in which case the answers follow directly and uninterestingly from initial assumptions. In response, we pose the question: 'According to what criteria, if any, do phonaesthemes distinguish themselves from non-phonaesthemic, stem-building elements?', and apply the methods of Canonical Typology to seek answers. Surveying the literature, we formulate seven canonical criteria, identifying individual phonaesthemes which are more, or less, canonical according to each. We next apply the same criteria to assess non-phonaesthemic stem-building elements. The result is that just one criterion emerges which clearly differentiates the two sets of phenomena, namely the canonical accompaniment of phonaesthemes by non-recurrent residues, and this finding is not predetermined by our assumptions. From the viewpoint of morphological theory more broadly, we assume that any viable theory must find a place for lexical stems which are composed of a recurring, sound-meaning pairing plus a non-recurrent residue. Most phonaesthemes will occur in such stems. Consequently, theoretically interesting questions can then be asked about this entire class of lexical stems, including but not limited to its phonaesthemic members. Whether they are 'part of morphology' or not, phonaesthemes can contribute coherently to the development of morphological theory.

The phonologies of Australia can now be investigated with new tools for large-scale phonological typology. Here we draw on an empirical dataset covering three hundred thousand lexical entries from over two hundred and fifty language varieties, which enables us to understand continent-level phonological variation in significantly more detail than previously. Variation is observed in terms of major genealogical groupings of languages, comparing the variation among them and within them. Three topics are selected based on their importance to our understanding of continental phonological diversity in Australia, and their potential to shed new light within the space available. They are: the principle characteristics and parameters of variation in consonant phonotactics; vowel phonotactics, specifically statistical harmony between vowels in adjacent syllables; and issues of analysis at the intersection of segment inventories and phonotactics, namely contour segments such as prestopped nasals.

Features are central to all major theories of syntax and morphology. Yet it can be a non-trivial task to determine the inventory of features and their values for a given language, and in particular to determine whether to postulate one feature or two in the same semantico-syntactic domain. We illustrate this from tenseaspect-mood (TAM) in Kayardild, and adduce principles for deciding in general between one-feature and two-feature analyses, thereby contributing to the theory of feature systems and their typology. Kayardild shows striking inflectional complexities, investigated in two major studies (Evans 1995, Round 2013), and it proves particularly revealing for our topic. Both Evans and Round claimed that clauses in Kayardild have not one but two concurrent TAM features. While it is perfectly possible for a language to have two features of the same type, it is unusual. Accordingly, we establish general arguments which would justify postulating two features rather than one; we then apply these specifically to Kayardild TAM. Our finding is at variance with both Evans and Round; on all counts, the evidence which would motivate an analysis in terms of one TAM feature or two is either approximately balanced, or clearly favours an analysis with just one. Thus even when faced with highly complex language facts, we can apply a principled approach to the question of whether we are dealing with one feature or two, and this is encouraging for the many of us seeking a rigorous science of typology. We also find that Kayardild, which in many ways is excitingly exotic, is in this one corner of its grammar quite ordinary.

The Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) is a fundamental governing principle of syllable structure; however, its details remain contested. This study aims to clarify the empirical status of the SSP in a cross-linguistic study of 496 languages. We adopt a phonetically-grounded definition of sonority - acoustic intensity - and examine how many languages contain SSP-violating clusters word-initially and word-finally. We consider the treatment of complex segments both as sonority units and as clusters. We find a significant proportion of languages violate the SSP: almost one half of the language sample. We examine which clusters cause the violations, and find a wide range: not only the notorious case of clusters with sibilants, but also with nasals, approximants and other obstruents. Violations in onsets and codas are not symmetrical, especially when complex segments are treated as units. We discuss where existing theoretical accounts of the SSP require further development to account for our crosslinguistic results.

Dynamic models of paradigm change can elucidate how the simplest of processes may lead to unexpected outcomes, and thereby can reveal new potential explanations for observed linguistic phenomena. Ackerman & Malouf (2015) present a model in which inflectional systems reduce in disorder through the action of an attraction-only dynamic, in which lexemes only ever grow more similar to one another over time. Here we emphasise that: (1) Attraction-only models cannot evolve the structured diversity which characterises true inflectional systems, because they inevitably remove all variation; and (2) Models with both attraction and repulsion enable the emergence of systems that are strikingly reminiscent of morphomic structure such as inflection classes. Thus, just one small ingredient -- change based on dissimilarity -- separates models that tend inexorably to uniformity, and which therefore are implausible for inflectional morphology, from those which evolve stable, morphome-like structure. These models have the potential to alter how we attempt to account for morphological complexity.

Cultural attractors enable evolving cultural traits to gain the stability that underpins cumulative cultural evolution, yet the conditions that support their existence are poorly understood. We examine conditions affecting the stability of a salient kind of complex cultural attractor in human language, known as inflectional classes. We present a model of the evolution of inflectional classes, as they are reconstructed across generations via a combination of direct transmission and analogical inference. Parameters examined pertain to diversity of the lexicon and the cog-nitive policies governing inferential reasoning. We discover that persistence of stable inflection classes interacts in complex ways with features which affect how inflection classes are inferred. Thus we contribute to a greater understanding of factors affecting cultural attractors' existence, and to insights into a widespread and complex trait of human language.

Linguistics, and typology in particular, can have a bright future. We justify this optimism by discussing comparability from two angles. First, we take the opportunity presented by this special issue of to pause for a moment and make explicit some of the logical underpinnings of typological sciences, linguistics included, which we believe are worth reminding ourselves of. Second, we give a brief illustration of comparison, and particularly measurement, within modern typology.

The notion of ‘erosion’, a universal diachronic process affecting the phonetic content of certain language forms, has held a place in historical linguistics for almost two centuries now. Recently it has been argued that the erosion of high frequency words can be derived as a consequence of normal language use within a theory of phonology based on exemplars. Focusing on discrete changes to function words, this paper argues that types of erosion exist which cannot be derived in this manner. Instead, erosion as well as other less celebrated, but well attested, irregular changes to function words can be accounted for by a species of paradigm levelling. Prosodic paradigm levelling (PPL) is much like its familiar morphological cousin only it plays out over paradigms whose cells contain word forms selected for by prosodic, not morphological, features. While PPL can account for data which exemplar models cannot, it is maintained nevertheless that exemplar models can offer a reasonable account of much of the data, provided that the model incorporates a discrete level of phonological representation, in addition to exemplars. Arguments presented have implications for phonological representation in general, as well as for the explanation of discrete, irregular change to function words.

Morphomes (Aronoff 1994) exemplify extreme complexity within inflectional morphology. This chapter argues that morphomic categories come in three types. Rhizomorphomes pertain to morphological roots, dividing the lexicon into classes (e.g. declensions, conjugation classes) whose members share similar paradigms. Meromorphomes pertain to sets of word‐formation operations, which derive the pieces of individual word forms; thus meromorphomes inhere in the organization of a morphological exponence system. Metamorphomes pertain to distributions of meromorphomes across a paradigm. Rhizomorphomes and metamorphomes are well described, but meromorphomes much less so. Arguments are presented for the existence of meromorphomes, drawing on evidence from Kayardild (Round 2013). It is observed that in given languages, all three kinds of morphomic category may divide into subcategories, adding more complexity to the picture. Nevertheless, the architecture of this linguistic complexity, in an autonomous layer of representation with subcategories, is familiar and qualitatively similar to other domains of grammar.

One of the more intriguing phenomena in Australian phonologies is nasal cluster dissimilation (NCD), in which two nasal+stop clusters interact in such a way that one cluster dissimilates, so that it is no longer a nasal+stop. The focus here is on NCD in which the second of two NC clusters loses its nasal. This kind is an order of magnitude more common than any other NCD pattern in Australian languages, with at least twenty-five Australian languages exhibiting it. This chapter provides the missing typological overview of NCD which has been called for since McConvell’s seminal study (1988b), primarily of languages in the Ngumpin family. Sections cover: McConvell’s classic account of progressive NCD nasal deletion in Gurindji; cross-linguistic parameters of variation; NCD triggers; NCD targets; the application of NCD over long distances and in multiple locations; and interactions of NCD with other processes.

Presenting new data and analyses of the inflectional system and syntax of Kayardild, a typologically striking language of Australia, this book makes Kayardild accessible to mainstream formal linguistic theory and so will appeal to a broad new audience as well as to those who know Kayardild well.

The phonologies of the world’s languages vary in their static properties, such as segment inventories and phonotactics, but also in their dynamic, morphophonological alternations. The dynamic phonology of Australian languages has been significantly understudied. Here we draw on a dataset of morphophonological alternations in 118 languages. Two topics are chosen for their particular interest with respect to Australian languages: lenition and assimilation. The coverage here represents the most in-depth survey of both phenomena in Australian languages at the time of writing. For reasons of space, we cover the most common and widespread kinds of lenition processes in Australian languages: alternations in syllable onset position between stops and more sonorous oral segments or zero, in which the alternations are phonologically conditioned by the sonority of the segment on the left; and local assimilation between adjacent consonants, and between vowels in adjacent syllables.

The chapter is an overview of attested cases of suppletion in the languages of Australia. It first analyses verbal suppletion, which is most frequent on the dividing lines of tense and aspect, but also present for mood, in particular imperatives, and number. Most frequent suppletive meanings include posture and motion verbs. Suppletion in pronominal and demonstrative paradigms is extremely frequent, as it is cross-linguistically, and so is suppletion in the possessive paradigms of kin terms. The rarer case of suppletion for incorporated or compounded forms is widely attested, as are some rare cases of suppletion for case in nominals.

Autosegmental–metrical analyses of intonation typically assume a binary opposition between L/H tones, realised as pitch targets within some local pitch range, or register. However, because tone and register can be phonologically independent, a theoretical concern is that an ostensibly threeleveled tone system could be analysed in terms of binary tone plus careful register setting. Plateau contours in Kayardild, based superficially around three tone levels, present a case in point. Arguments are provided that just two phonological tones are involved, plus a form of register control that characterises the entire Kayardild intonational system.

Almost universally, diachronic sound patterns of languages reveal evidence of both regular and irregular sound changes, yet an exception may be the languages of Australia. Here we discuss a long-observed and striking characteristic of diachronic sound patterns in Australian languages, namely the scarcity of evidence they present for regular sound change. Since the regularity assumption is fundamental to the comparative method, Australian languages pose an interesting challenge for linguistic theory. We examine the situation from two different angles. We identify potential explanations for the lack of evidence of regular sound change, reasoning from the nature of synchronic Australian phonologies; and we emphasise how this unusual characteristic of Australian languages may demand new methods of evaluating evidence for diachronic relatedness and new thinking about the nature of intergenerational transmission. We refer the reader also to Bowern (this volume) for additional viewpoints from which the Australian conundrum can be approached.

Functional load (FL) quantifies the contributions by phonological contrasts to distinctions made across the lexicon. Previous research has linked particularly low values of FL to sound change. Here, we broaden the scope of enquiry into FL to its evolution at higher values also. We apply phylogenetic methods to examine the diachronic evolution of FL across 90 languages of the Pama-Nyungan (PN) family of Australia. We find a high degree of phylogenetic signal in FL, indicating that FL values covary closely with genealogical structure across the family. Though phylogenetic signals have been reported for phonological structures, such as phonotactics, their detection in measures of phonological function is novel. We also find a significant, negative correlation between the FL of vowel length and of the following consonant-that is, a time-depth historical trade-off dynamic, which we relate to known allophony in modern PN languages and compensatory sound changes in their past. The findings reveal a historical dynamic, similar to transphonologization, which we characterize as a flow of contrastiveness between subsystems of the phonology. Recurring across a language family that spans a whole continent and many millennia of time depth, our findings provide one of the most compelling examples yet of Sapir's 'drift' hypothesis of non-accidental parallel development in historically related languages.

Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped it. A storied distribution in linguistics has been Zipf's law, a kind of power law. In the wake of a major debate in the sciences around power-law hypotheses and the unreliability of earlier methods of evaluating them, here we re-evaluate the distributions claimed to characterize phoneme frequencies. We infer the fit of power laws and three alternative distributions to 166 Australian languages, using a maximum likelihood framework. We find evidence supporting earlier results, but also nuancing them and increasing our understanding of them. Most notably, phonemic inventories appear to have a Zipfian-like frequency structure among their most-frequent members (though perhaps also a lognormal structure) but a geometric (or exponential) structure among the least-frequent. We compare these new insights the kinds of causal processes that affect the evolution of phonemic inventories over time, and identify a potential account for why, despite there being an important role for phonetic substance in phonemic change, we could still expect inventories with highly diverse phonetic content to share similar distributions of phoneme frequencies. We conclude with priorities for future work in this promising program of research.