We present a series of large-scale formal acceptability judgment studies that explored Norwegian island phenomena in order to follow up on previous observations that speakers of Mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian accept violations of certain island constraints that are unacceptable in most languages cross-linguistically. We tested the acceptability of wh-extraction from five island types: whether-, complex NP, subject, adjunct, and relative clause (RC) islands. We found clear evidence of subject and adjunct island effects on wh-extraction. We failed to find evidence that Norwegians accept wh-extraction out of complex NPs and RCs. Our participants judged wh-extraction from complex NPs and RCs to be just as unacceptable as subject and adjunct island violations. The pattern of effects in Norwegian paralleled island effects that recent experimental work has documented in other languages like English and Italian (Sprouse et al. 2012; Sprouse et al. 2016). Norwegian judgments consistently differed from prior findings for one island type: -islands. Our results reveal that Norwegians exhibit significant inter-individual variation in their sensitivity to whether-island effects, with many participants exhibiting no sensitivity to whether-island violations whatsoever. We discuss the implications of our findings for universalist approaches to island constraints. We also suggest ways of reconciling our results with previous observations, and offer a systematic experimental framework in which future research can investigate factors that govern apparent island insensitivity.

Sign languages display remarkable crosslinguistic consistencies in the use of handshapes. In particular, handshapes used in classifier predicates display a consistent pattern in : classifier handshapes representing display more finger complexity than those representing how objects are . Here we explore the conditions under which this morphophonological phenomenon arises. In Study 1, we ask whether hearing individuals in Italy and the United States, asked to communicate using only their hands, show the same pattern of finger complexity found in the classifier handshapes of two sign languages: Italian Sign Language (LIS) and American Sign Language (ASL). We find that they do not: gesturers display more finger complexity in handshapes than in handshapes. The morphophonological pattern found in conventional sign languages is therefore not a codified version of the pattern invented by hearing individuals on the spot. In Study 2, we ask whether continued use of gesture as a primary communication system results in a pattern that is more similar to the morphophonological pattern found in conventional sign languages or to the pattern found in gesturers. have not acquired a signed or spoken language and instead use a self-generated gesture system to communicate with their hearing family members and friends. We find that homesigners pattern more like signers than like gesturers: their finger complexity in handshapes is higher than that of gesturers (indeed as high as signers); and their finger complexity in handshapes is lower than that of gesturers (but not quite as low as signers). Generally, our findings indicate two markers of the phonologization of handshape in sign languages: increasing finger complexity in handshapes, and decreasing finger complexity in handshapes. These first indicators of phonology appear to be present in individuals developing a gesture system without benefit of a linguistic community. Finally, we propose that iconicity, morphology and phonology each play an important role in the system of sign language classifiers to create the earliest markers of phonology at the morphophonological interface.

The division of linguistic structure into a meaningless (phonological) level and a meaningful level of morphemes and words is considered a basic design feature of human language. Although established sign languages, like spoken languages, have been shown to be characterized by this bifurcation, no information has been available about the way in which such structure arises. We report here on a newly emerging sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, which functions as a full language but in which a phonological level of structure has not yet emerged. Early indications of formal regularities provide clues to the way in which phonological structure may develop over time.

This paper focuses on passive symmetry effects in Germanic. We describe two large-sample judgment experiments with native speakers of Norwegian and Swedish, two partially symmetric passive languages. The results fail to support predictions of Anagnostopoulou's (2003) seminal locality approach to passive symmetry in these languages. We propose that constraints on object ordering in these varieties are better modeled on a revised version of classic case-based theories. On this approach, patterns of object ordering are governed by variation in the way that case is assigned to objects. In addition, the Norwegian results suggest a shape conservation effect in object shift contexts not previously reported in the literature. Theme-recipient orders in Norwegian object shift contexts are available for just those speakers who also accept theme-recipient orders in active non-object shift contexts. This object ordering constraint applies in the same environment that another, much better described ordering constraint applies, namely Holmberg's Generalization effects. We show that these results are explained by Fox and Pesetsky's (2005) cyclic linearization algorithm together with the assumption that theme-recipient orders vP-internally reflect short theme-movement above the recipient.

Tetst'ıné is a dialect of Dëne Sųłıné (ISO: CHP) spoken in Canada's Northwest Territories. The verb system of Tetst'ıné has only recently been described (Jaker and Cardinal 2020); this paper is the first to propose an analysis of the distribution of long and short vowels in Tetst'ıné prefixes. In Tetst'ıné, all long vowels in prefixes are derived from intervocalic consonant deletion, although not all cases of intervocalic consonant deletion result in a long vowel. Whether or not deletion of an intervocalic consonant results in a long or short vowel depends on a combination of two factors: the consonant that was deleted, and the morphological level to which the preceding prefix belongs. In this paper, I propose that the basic generalization about prefix vowel length can be stated in terms of Systematic Underspecification (Kiparsky 1993). I claim that prefix vowels, unlike stem vowels, have zero moras underlyingly, and only acquire a mora after passing through at least one level of the phonology. This analysis predicts that prefix vowel length ought to be subject to a Derived Environment Effect (DEE), for which there is indeed evidence. The pattern of mora insertion in Tetst'ıné prefix vowels is thus an example of the interleaving of phonology and morphology, and illustrates how phonological behaviour can be to some extent predicted based on morphological structure.

Based on six detailed case studies of languages in which focus is marked morphosyntactically, we propose a novel formal theory of focus marking, which can capture these as well as the familiar English-type prosodic focus marking. Special attention is paid to the patterns of focus syncretism, that is, when different size and/or location of focus are indistinguishably realized by the same form. The key ingredients to our approach are that complex constituents (not just words) may be directly focally marked, and that the choice of focal marking is governed by blocking.