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1. The Linguistics of Programming

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3689492.3689806  

   Gordon, Colin S (October 2024, ACM)

   Research in programming languages and software engineering are broadly concerned with the study of aspects of computer programs: their syntactic structure, the relationship between form and meaning (semantics), empirical properties of how they are constructed and deployed, and more. We could equally well apply this description to the range of ways in which linguistics studies the form, meaning, and use of natural language. We argue that despite some notable examples of PL and SE research drawing on ideas from natural language processing, there are still a wealth of concepts, techniques, and conceptual framings originating in linguistics which would be of use to PL and SE research. Moreover we show that beyond mere parallels, there are cases where linguistics research has complementary methodologies, may help explain or predict study outcomes, or offer new perspectives on established research areas in PL and SE. Broadly, we argue that researchers across PL and SE are investigating close cousins of problems actively studied for years by linguists, and familiarity with linguistics research seems likely to bear fruit for many PL and SE researchers. 

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2. Historical Linguistics of Sign Languages: Progress and Problems

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.818753  

   Power, Justin M. (March 2022, Frontiers in Psychology)

   In contrast to scholars and signers in the nineteenth century, William Stokoe conceived of American Sign Language (ASL) as a unique linguistic tradition with roots in nineteenth-century langue des signes française , a conception that is apparent in his earliest scholarship on ASL. Stokoe thus contributed to the theoretical foundations upon which the field of sign language historical linguistics would later develop. This review focuses on the development of sign language historical linguistics since Stokoe, including the field's significant progress and the theoretical and methodological problems that it still faces. The review examines the field's development through the lens of two related problems pertaining to how we understand sign language relationships and to our understanding of cognacy, as the term pertains to signs. It is suggested that the theoretical notions underlying these terms do not straightforwardly map onto the historical development of many sign languages. Recent approaches in sign language historical linguistics are highlighted and future directions for research are suggested to address the problems discussed in this review. 

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3. Moving away from lexicalism in psycho- and neuro-linguistics

   https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2023.1125127  

   Krauska, Alexandra; Lau, Ellen (February 2023, Frontiers in Language Sciences)

   In standard models of language production or comprehension, the elements which are retrieved from memory and combined into a syntactic structure are “lemmas” or “lexical items.” Such models implicitly take a “lexicalist” approach, which assumes that lexical items store meaning, syntax, and form together, that syntactic and lexical processes are distinct, and that syntactic structure does not extend below the word level. Across the last several decades, linguistic research examining a typologically diverse set of languages has provided strong evidence against this approach. These findings suggest that syntactic processes apply both above and below the “word” level, and that both meaning and form are partially determined by the syntactic context. This has significant implications for psychological and neurological models of language processing as well as for the way that we understand different types of aphasia and other language disorders. As a consequence of the lexicalist assumptions of these models, many kinds of sentences that speakers produce and comprehend—in a variety of languages, including English—are challenging for them to account for. Here we focus on language production as a case study. In order to move away from lexicalism in psycho- and neuro-linguistics, it is not enough to simply update the syntactic representations of words or phrases; the processing algorithms involved in language production are constrained by the lexicalist representations that they operate on, and thus also need to be reimagined. We provide an overview of the arguments against lexicalism, discuss how lexicalist assumptions are represented in models of language production, and examine the types of phenomena that they struggle to account for as a consequence. We also outline what a non-lexicalist alternative might look like, as a model that does not rely on a lemma representation, but instead represents that knowledge as separate mappings between (a) meaning and syntax and (b) syntax and form, with a single integrated stage for the retrieval and assembly of syntactic structure. By moving away from lexicalist assumptions, this kind of model provides better cross-linguistic coverage and aligns better with contemporary syntactic theory. 

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4. Structure Sensitive Tier Projection: Applications and Formal Properties

   De Santo, Aniello; Graf, Thomas (August 2019, FG 2019)

   The subregular approach has revealed that the phonological surface patterns found in natural language are much simpler than previously assumed. Most patterns belong to the subregular class of tier-based strictly local languages (TSL), which characterizes them as the combination of a strictly local dependency with a tier-projection mechanism that masks out irrelevant segments. Some non-TSL patterns have been pointed out in the literature, though. We show that these outliers can be captured by rendering the tier projection mechanism sensitive to the surrounding structure. We focus on a specific instance of these structure-sensitive TSL languages: input-local TSL (ITSL), in which the tier projection may distinguish between identical segments that occur in different local contexts in the input string. This generalization of TSL establishes a tight link between tier-based language classes and ISL transductions, and is motivated by several natural language phenomena. 

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5. Homesign Research, Gesture Studies, and Sign Language Linguistics: The Bigger Picture of Homesign and Homesigners

   https://doi.org/10.1111/tops.12766  

   Coppola, Marie (July 2025, Topics in Cognitive Science)

   Abstract Studies of homesigns have shed light on the human capacity for language and on the challenging problem of language acquisition. The study of homesign has evolved from a perspective grounded in gesture studies and child development to include sign language linguistics and the role of homesigns in language emergence at the community level. One overarching finding is that homesigns more closely resemble sign languages used by linguistic communities than they resemble the gestures produced by hearing people along with spoken language. Homesigns may not exhibit all of the linguistic properties of community languages, but the properties they do exhibit are language properties, and for the people who use them, homesigns are their language. Further, the linguistic structures in homesigns are innovated by the deaf people who use them and are imperfectly learned by their hearing communication partners. I close with a call to action: We cannot celebrate discoveries about the mind made possible by studies of homesigns and emerging languages while ignoring the pervasiveness of language deprivation among deaf people, and the relative lack of deaf participation in science, even in studies of sign languages. While the scientific community learns much from studying homesigns and sign languages, we also have a responsibility to work toward ensuring that every deaf person has access to language, communication, and education. 

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