Italy was among the first countries in Europe to be heavily impacted by the outbreak of COVID-19. Northern Italy and Lombardy, in particular, were the most affected areas. In September 2021, the team of "AIS, the digital turn" (AISdt), a project whose objectives include collecting data in 50 locations in Italy, across Lombardy and Piedmont, resumed in-person data collection. Given the field of the investigation and the profile required for the informants (speakers over 60), the decision came only after a long examination of the right conditions and the necessary measures. The paper is intended as a reference text of field investigations amid the pandemic: based on the experience of the AISdt project, it recounts the preparation required by the new modality of fieldwork, the protocols put in place to ensure the safety of all participants before and during the interviews, and the response received from the informants.

We investigate the degree to which mispronounced signs can be accommodated by signers of French Sign Language (LSF). Using an offline judgment task, we examine both the individual contributions of three parameters - handshape, movement, and location - to sign recognition, and the impact of the individual features that were manipulated to obtain the mispronounced signs. Results indicate that signers judge mispronounced handshapes to be less damaging for well-formedness than mispronounced locations or movements. In addition to this macro-effect of parameter, individual features are found to carry different weights during sign recognition, mirroring what has been reported for phonological features in spoken languages. Together, these results thus further support an underlying a-modal phonological architecture for human language, including feature-based phonological representations.

We present a new paradigm investigating social meaning through strategic action. More precisely, we present an experimental technique (a textual role-playing game developed with the Ren'Py engine), which we view as an enrichment of the matched-guise technique (MGT). In this paradigm the explicit response scales of the MGT are substituted for strategic choices in a video game. We argue that studying social meaning experimentally through looking at its effects on participants' actions is more interactive than the classic paradigm. We compare the results from both the video game and a more classic version of the paradigm based on scales, conducted with the same linguistic materials, and we show that researchers who use only the MGT may be missing some crucial aspects of the social meanings of the linguistic phenomena they are studying. We also argue that a paradigm based on strategic action is better equipped to study the social, political, and economic outcomes for the users of those linguistic variants, and therefore to contribute to understanding phenomena like linguistic discrimination.

The present paper investigates variation between nominal and prepositional adjuncts of time as in, for example, [] . The main goals are (i) to assess potential changes in the distribution of these variants in the history of English, specifically from Middle English to Late Modern English (1150-1914), and (ii) to test which factors most strongly impact the choice between the two variants, with a focus on the impact of different complexity measures. To address these questions, the paper makes use of data from the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpora of Historical English (PPCME2; PPCEME; PPCMBE), explored by means of logistic regression modelling. The results suggest that there is no dramatic, sweeping change in this abstract alternation over time, but that this variation may mainly plays out on lower, noun-specific levels.

In Kamang (Alor-Pantar, Indonesia), some verbs alternate between indexing the S or P argument with a prefix (from several different series) and occurring unprefixed; that is, Kamang has differential argument indexing. Through a qualitative study of a spoken-language corpus, this paper investigates the alternation between one of the prefix series and zero-marking. Previously described as indicating increased patientivity on intransitive motion and posture verbs, the alternation is here analysed in terms of a shift in event view: unprefixed verbs express events holistically, while prefixed verbs shift the viewpoint towards the "elaboration phase", the temporal and causal middle and end of an event. Elaboration constructions are associated with resultative and completive semantics and, relatedly, greater affectedness of the undergoer argument. Cross-linguistically, such constructions (e.g., resultatives and middles) are frequently subject to lexical restrictions, and the same applies to the Kamang alternation.

The last decades have seen major advances in the study of gestures both in humans and non-human primates. In this paper, we seriously examine the idea that there may be gestural form types that are shared across great ape species, including humans, which may underlie gestural universals, both in form and meaning. We focus on one case study, the gesture common to chimpanzees and humans, and provide a semantic analysis of this gesture.

Two measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge, the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and the Word Familiarity Test (WordFAM), were recently validated for web-based administration. An analysis of the psychometric properties of these assessments revealed high internal consistency, suggesting that stable assessment could be achieved with fewer test items. Because researchers may use these assessments in conjunction with other experimental tasks, the utility may be enhanced if they are shorter in duration. To this end, two "brief" versions of the VST and the WordFAM were developed and submitted to validation testing. Each version consisted of approximately half of the items from the full assessment, with novel items across each brief version. Participants ( = 85) completed one brief version of both the VST and the WordFAM at session one, followed by the other brief version of each assessment at session two. The results showed high test-retest reliability for both the VST ( = 0.68) and the WordFAM ( = 0.82). The assessments also showed moderate convergent validity (ranging from  = 0.38 to 0.59), indicative of assessment validity. This work provides open-source English vocabulary knowledge assessments with normative data that researchers can use to foster high quality data collection in web-based environments.

The goal of the current work was to develop and validate web-based measures for assessing English vocabulary knowledge. Two existing paper-and-pencil assessments, the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) and the Word Familiarity Test (WordFAM), were modified for web-based administration. In Experiment 1, participants ( = 100) completed the web-based VST. In Experiment 2, participants ( = 100) completed the web-based WordFAM. Results from these experiments confirmed that both tasks (1) could be completed online, (2) showed expected sensitivity to English frequency patterns, (3) exhibited high internal consistency, and (4) showed an expected range of item discrimination scores, with low frequency items exhibiting higher item discrimination scores compared to high frequency items. This work provides open-source English vocabulary knowledge assessments with normative data that researchers can use to foster high quality data collection in web-based environments.

In linguistics, there is little consensus on how to define, measure, and compare complexity across languages. We propose to take the diversity of viewpoints as a given, and to capture the complexity of a language by a vector of measurements, rather than a single value. We then assess the statistical support for two controversial hypotheses: the trade-off hypothesis and the equi-complexity hypothesis. We furnish meta-analyses of 28 complexity metrics applied to texts written in overall 80 typologically diverse languages. The trade-off hypothesis is partially supported, in the sense that around one third of the significant correlations between measures are negative. The equi-complexity hypothesis, on the other hand, is largely confirmed. While we find evidence for complexity differences in the domains of morphology and syntax, the overall complexity vectors of languages turn out virtually indistinguishable.

The interaction of morphosyntactic features has been of great interest in research on linguistic complexity. In this paper we approach such interactions in possessive noun phrases. First, we study the interaction of head marking and dependent marking in this domain with typological feature data and with multilingual corpus data. The data suggest that there is a clear inverse relationship between head and dependent marking in possessive noun phrases in terms of complexity. The result points to evidence on complexity trade-offs and to productive integration of typological and corpus-based approaches. Second, we explore whether zero versus overt morphological marking as a measure of morphological complexity affects dependency length as a measure of syntactic complexity. Data from multilingual corpora suggest that there is no cross-linguistic trend between these measures in possessive noun phrases.

This article presents the results of a quantitative study in which the complexity levels of dialectal varieties belonging to the South Slavic dialect continuum are measured and analyzed. The sample comprises 919 data points, pertaining to the Bulgarian-Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian dialect continua. Complexity is viewed in this study as a property demonstrating variation across areas and subject to diachronic change which can be associated either with language-internal processes or with language contact. This study discusses which linguistic processes produced varying levels of complexity in the modern South Slavic varieties. In particular, a correlation of complexity with altitude and distance to the Albanian border, two factors which can be associated with degree of isolation versus contact of speech communities, is investigated for a subset of varieties spoken across the areas with bi- and multilingual population. Suggestions on which constellations of societal features could act as determinants of linguistic change are made for several areas within the South Slavic continuum. Particular attention is paid to the contact-related developments in the South Slavic varieties spoken in the areas of intensive past and present contact, such as the west of North Macedonia, the south of Montenegro, Kosovo, and Southeast Serbia.

We discuss German examples where counterfactuals restricting an epistemic modal are embedded under 'believe'. Such sentences raise a puzzle for the analysis of counterfactuals, modals, and belief attributions within possible-worlds semantics. Their truth conditions suggest that the modal's domain is determined exclusively by the subject's belief state, but evaluating the counterfactual separately at each of the subject's doxastic alternatives does not yield the correct quantificational domain: the domain ends up being determined by the facts of each particular world, which include propositions the subject does not believe. We therefore revise the semantics of counterfactuals: counterfactuals still rely on an ordering among worlds that can be derived from a premise set (Kratzer, Angelika. 1978. (Monographien Linguistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft 38). Königstein: Scriptor, 2012 [1981]a. The notional category of modality. In (Oxford studies in theoretical linguistics 36), 27-69. Oxford: Oxford University Press), but rather than uniquely characterizing a world, this premise set can be compatible with multiple worlds. In belief contexts, the attitude subject's belief state as a whole determines the relevant ordering. This, in turn, motivates a revision of the semantics of : following Yalcin's work on epistemic modals (Yalcin, Seth. 2007. Epistemic modals. 116. 983-1026), we submit that evaluation indices are complex, consisting of a world and an ordering among worlds. Counterfactuals are sensitive to the ordering component of an index. Attitude verbs shift both components, relativizing the ordering to the attitude subject.

The use of differential case marking of A and P has been explained in terms of efficiency (economy) and markedness. The present study tests predictions based on these accounts, using conditional probabilities of a particular feature given the syntactic role (cue availability), and conditional probabilities of a particular syntactic role given the feature in question (cue reliability). Cue availability serves as a measure of markedness, whereas cue reliability is central for the efficiency account. Similar to reverse engineering, we determine which of the probabilistic measures could have been responsible for the recurrent cross-linguistic patterns described in the literature. The probabilities are estimated from spontaneous informal dialogues in English and Russian (Indo-European), Lao (Tai-Kadai), N||ng (Tuu) and Ruuli (Bantu). The analyses, which involve a series of mixed-effects Poisson models, clearly demonstrate that cue reliability matches the observed cross-linguistic patterns better than cue availability. Thus, the results support the efficiency account of differential marking.

Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in communicative efficiency. It has been argued that language users act efficiently, saving effort for processing and articulation, and that language structure and use reflect this tendency. The emergence of new corpus data has brought to life numerous studies on efficient language use in the lexicon, in morphosyntax, and in discourse and phonology in different languages. In this introductory paper, we discuss communicative efficiency in human languages, focusing on evidence of efficient language use found in multilingual corpora. The evidence suggests that efficiency is a universal feature of human language. We provide an overview of different manifestations of efficiency on different levels of language structure, and we discuss the major questions and findings so far, some of which are addressed for the first time in the contributions in this special collection.

Words in utterance-final positions are often pronounced more slowly than utterance-medial words, as previous studies on individual languages have shown. This paper provides a systematic cross-linguistic comparison of relative durations of final and penultimate words in utterances in terms of the degree to which such words are lengthened. The study uses time-aligned corpora from 10 genealogically, areally, and culturally diverse languages, including eight small, under-resourced, and mostly endangered languages, as well as English and Dutch. Clear effects of lengthening words at the end of utterances are found in all 10 languages, but the degrees of lengthening vary. Languages also differ in the relative durations of words that precede utterance-final words. In languages with on average short words in terms of number of segments, these penultimate words are also lengthened. This suggests that lengthening extends backwards beyond the final word in these languages, but not in languages with on average longer words. Such typological patterns highlight the importance of examining prosodic phenomena in diverse language samples beyond the small set of majority languages most commonly investigated so far.

Over the past several decades, an increasing number of empirical studies have documented the interaction of information across the traditional linguistic modules of phonetics, phonology, and lexicon. For example, the frequency with which a word occurs influences its phonetic properties of its sounds; high frequency words tend to be reduced relative to low frequency words. Lexicalist Exemplar Models have been successful in accounting for this body of results through a single mechanism, - memory representations that integrate lexical, phonological, and phonetic information into a single structure. We review recent studies that suggest there are critical limitations to assuming that phonetic variation solely reflects the storage of word labels and sound structure in exemplars. Specifically, these studies show that factors related to the on-line retrieval and planning of lexical items also influence phonetic variation. The implications of these findings for exemplar models are discussed; the relationship of exemplar storage to the broader cognitive system is examined, as well as alternative theoretical frameworks incorporating gradience at all levels of linguistic representation.