Phillip Rogers’s research while affiliated with University of Pittsburgh and other places

It has been shown that linguistic features of main and dependent clauses in complex sentence constructions may show different degrees of association strength giving rise to a number of cross-clausal associations. While this domain has been explored for the most part in corpus-based studies in individual languages, it has received little attention from a typological perspective. The present study makes inroads into this territory by exploring cross-clausal associations of one complex sentence construction in typological perspective: Counterfactual conditionals (e.g., if you had gone, you would have seen her ). In particular, special attention is paid to the interaction of clause-linkage patterns, TAM markers, iconicity of sequence, and ‘but’ clauses in counterfactual conditionals in a sample of 131 languages. By using a hierarchical configural frequency analysis, we identify a number of preferred and dispreferred cross-clausal associations in counterfactual conditionals that we explain from a functional perspective.

This study explores the phonological structure of affixes based on different parameters. We begin by investigating the common but insufficiently supported claim that affixes tend to be monosyllabic, and we then take up the ideas that prefixes and suffixes differ in terms of size and in their proclivity for allomorphy. Our database consists of affix lists of 25 unrelated languages, which come from all six geographical macro-areas and yield a total of 1,454 affixes (403 prefixes, 1,051 suffixes). The results show that both prefixes and suffixes are most often monosyllabic, but prefixes are still significantly shorter than suffixes in terms of segments and syllables. There is no significant difference in terms of allomorphy. We argue that the monosyllabic tendency emerges as an artifact, given that a monosyllabic affix is long enough to be perceived, short enough to be economical, and compatible even with simple syllable structures. Meanwhile, prefixes are shorter than suffixes because they pose a challenge for comprehension and because syllable onsets in many languages allow more complexity than codas. The overall insight is that syllables are a prominent domain in morphology as well as phonology, even though various factors may undermine the overlap of affixes and syllables.