University of California, Santa Barbara
Linguistics
It has been proposed that patterns of core argument marking have high genetic stability and strong resistance to areal influence, making them good indicators of deep genetic relationships . Patterns in four languages of Northern... more
In a number of languages, interrogative and relative pronouns show the same forms. The pattern is not distributed evenly around the globe, however: it is concentrated in Europe. It does appear elsewhere, for example in South America in... more
Written varieties of many languages show greater syntactic complexity than their spoken counterparts. The difference is not surprising: writers have more time to create elaborate structures than speakers, who must produce speech in a... more
It was once thought that in situations of language contact, substance is always borrowed before structure. More recent work, however, has been demonstrating that even under conditions of language maintenance, structure can be copied... more
A major goal of linguistics is to discover regular patterns in language. Irregularities are accordingly often dismissed as uninteresting, primarily annoyances for the analyst and language learner. But irregularity is rarely arbitrary,... more
Skilled first-language speakers are often unaware of the astounding intricacies of their languages, especially if the languages do not have long literary traditions. The value accorded such languages by both those within the community and... more
Our search for forces motivating the grammaticization of particular categories has uncovered two main kinds of factors: Cognitive and communicative. Speakers tend to develop linguistic structures that mirror their cognitive structures in... more