This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in the Journal of Language Evolution following peer review. The version of record Varu deCastro-Arrazola, Simon Kirby, The emergence of verse templates through iterated learning,

This paper investigates the strategies involved in gender assignment in Basque-Spanish mixed Determiner Phrases (DPs) with a gendered Spanish determiner (elM /laF) and a Basque ungendered noun. Previous studies on Spanish-Basque mixed DPs have revealed conflicting results regarding the determining factor affecting gender assignment, namely, phonological ending vs. analogical gender. We designed a forced-switch elicitation task in order to elicit mixed DPs with a Spanish determiner and a Basque noun (controlled for both phonological vs. analogical cues). Thirty highly proficient Spanish-Basque bilinguals with different profiles and sociolinguistic backgrounds participated in the study. Three cues were significant in the selection of the Spanish M/F determiner: the analogical gender and two phonological cues, the word ending and the root ending of the Basque noun. Further statistical analyses revealed participants’ L1 as a strong factor in the variability attested: bilinguals with Spanish as (one of) their L1(s) rely predominantly on the analogical criterion, whereas speakers with only Basque as L1 follow mainly the phonological criterion. Overall, this study provides an explanation for the previous conflicting results and highlights the fact that bilinguals may use different strategies depending on their bilingual profile and the morpho-phonological properties of the languages in contact.

In the field of metrics, it has long been observed that verse lines tend to be more regular or restricted towards the end (Arnold 1905). This has led to the Strict End Hypothesis [SEH], which proposes a general versification principle of universal scope (Hayes 1983). This paper argues that two main challenges hinder the substantiation of the SEH in a broad typological sample of unrelated verse corpora. First, the concept of strictness is too coarse and needs to be narrowed down to testable features or subcomponents. Second, explicit measures need to be developed which enable the systematic comparison of corpora, particularly when trying to capture potentially gradient features such as the relative faithfulness to a metrical template. This study showcases how to overcome these issues by analysing the entropy at different positions in the line for corpora in five languages (English, Dutch, Sanskrit, Estonian, Berber). Finally, I argue that, if the SEH is shown to be typologically robust, shared human cognitive features may provide a partial explanation for this puzzling asymmetry in verse lines.

The aim of this paper is to check the factorial typology for a set of phonological constraints on vowel interactions in Basque against corpus data (Hualde and Gaminde 1998, Euskararen Herri Hizkeren Atlasa, 'The Basque Dialectological Atlas') with the help of OT-Help 2.0 (Staubs et al. 2010), a specialized software that calculates factorial typologies. The formal analysis developed to account for different patterns of vowel interactions in Basque, including those patterns displaying phonological opacity, implements Element Theory (Backley 2011) in Turbidity Theory (Goldrick 2001, Van Oostendorp 2008. The proposed analysis has the virtue of predicting all attested patterns of a specific type of vowel interactions in Basque and excluding the unattested patterns.