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Abstract This paper explores the concept of multiple grammars (MGs) and their implications for linguistic theory, language acquisition, and bilingual language knowledge. Drawing on evidence from phenomena such as scope interactions, verb raising, and agreement patterns, I argue that seemingly identical surface structures can be undergirded by different grammatical analyses that may compete within speaker populations. I then propose a typology of MG distributions, includingshared MGs, competing MGs,andpartial MGs, each with distinct consequences for acquisition and use. Contrary to expectations of simplification, bilingualism can sometimes lead to an expansion of grammatical analyses and does not always lead to the elimination of MGs. The paper discusses methods for predicting environments conducive to MGs, considering factors such as structural ambiguity and silent elements. The examination of MGs compels us to explore how learners navigate underdetermined input, especially in bilingual contexts, and to examine the interplay between gradient acceptability judgments and categorical grammatical distinctions. The study of MGs offers valuable insights into language variation, change, and the nature of linguistic competence. 

Abstract This chapter examines the "Silent Problem" in heritage languages (HLs) - the systematic difficulty heritage speakers experience with silent grammatical elements compared to their overt counterparts. Through analysis of null pronouns and gaps in relative clauses, the study reveals consistent patterns where heritage speakers show reduced sensitivity to silent elements in both comprehension and production. The research demonstrates that heritage speakers maintain the basic licensing conditions for null elements but exhibit altered interpretive strategies. They show a stronger preference for subject antecedents in anaphoric dependencies than baseline speakers, following what the author terms the "Position of Antecedent Strategy" (PAS) - consistently choosing the highest structural argument as the antecedent regardless of pronoun type (null or overt). A pilot study on Russian relative clauses using weak crossover (WCO) effects reveals that baseline speakers exhibit bimodal grammar patterns - some using A-bar movement, others using coindexation - while heritage speakers uniformly employ coindexation structures, suggesting a shift from syntactic to anaphoric dependencies. This represents a preference for "Merge over Move" operations in heritage grammars. The chapter identifies several factors contributing to these patterns: (1) reduced perceptual salience of silent elements, (2) heritage speakers' aversion to scalar principles in favor of equipollent oppositions, and (3) difficulty establishing long-distance dependencies. Production data shows heritage speakers often use resumptive pronouns instead of gaps in relative clauses, reflecting the general avoidance of silent elements. The study draws parallels between heritage languages and endangered languages, suggesting these patterns reflect universal consequences of reduced linguistic exposure. The findings contribute to understanding how grammatical representations restructure under conditions of limited input, with implications for theories of bilingual language development and syntactic processing. 

Legate (2003) argues, contra Chomsky 2001, that passive vP is a phase in English. In this paper, I present novel Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS) data from (i) theme vowel quality, (ii) apparent non-local allomorphy and allosemy, and (iii) agreement to support the claim that passive vP is not phasal in this language. Comparing these findings with Legate’s, I show that those of her diagnostics that can be applied to BCS put BCS passive participles on a par with active verbs, patterning with the English data. This result, I argue, supports the view that Legate’s diagnostics may not be phasehood detectors at all and has consequences for our general understanding of phasehood. 

Mayan languages have been claimed to lack the category Tense. Temporal interpretation is instead said to be guided by grammatical Aspect (see e.g. Larsen 1988 for K’iche’, Vázquez Álvarez 2002 for Chol, Bohnemeyer 2002 for Yucatec Maya, Coon 2016 for an overview, a.o.). In this paper, I examine the distribution and interpretation of the Tense/Aspect markers x- and k- in K’iche’, traditionally said to mark perfective (completive) and imperfective (incompletive) Aspect, respectively. I consider the co-occurrence possibilities of these markers with temporal adverbials (including temporal clauses), aspectual adverbials (‘in/for an hour’), the adverb na ‘still’, and individual level predicates. The evidence converges on the conclusion that the K’iche’ prefixes x- and k- mark (past and non-past) Tense rather than Aspect. The analysis is also shown to make the correct predictions for temporal matching in embedded clauses. Finally, I consider some uses of k- in past contexts and conclude that they are best seen as instances of the narrative present. 

With the increasing interest in low-resource languages, unsupervised morphological segmentation has become an active area of research, where approaches based on Adaptor Grammars achieve state-of-the-art results. We demonstrate the power of harnessing linguistic knowledge as priors within Adaptor Grammars in a minimally-supervised learning fashion. We introduce two types of priors: 1) grammar definition, where we design language-specific grammars; and 2) linguistprovided affixes, collected by an expert in the language and seeded into the grammars. We use Japanese and Georgian as respective case studies for the two types of priors and introduce new datasets for these languages, with gold morphological segmentation for evaluation. We show that the use of priors results in error reductions of 8.9 % and 34.2 %, respectively, over the equivalent state-of-the-art unsupervised system