As one of the primary means of constructing gendered identities, language is a matter of central concern to transgender people (Zimman 2018). In this paper, we present an analysis of non-binary singular they; that is, they as used to refer to individuals whose gender identity is not, or is not exclusively, masculine or feminine. Despite singular they's widespread usage and long history in English, not all speakers judge this most recent innovation to be grammatical, even if they do not object to singular they in quantified, generic, or otherwise gender non-specific contexts, and even if they produce the latter sort of examples natively. We argue that resistance to this new use of they can, at least in part, be attributed to speakers' level of participation in a grammatical change in progress. Further, we propose that this change can be categorized into three distinct stages, with they's most recent broadening-that is, as a non-binary singular pronoun of referencedovetailing with wider socio-cultural changes (as well as featural changes beyond the pronominal system) that underscore the difficulty in separating grammatical and social judgements. As we aim to show, linguists from all subdisciplines-both theoretical and applied-are especially well suited to leverage theoretical insights to advocate for trans-affirming language practice.

This article proposes a feature-geometric analysis of the interpretable features of Infl, using MINIMALIST syntax and DISTRIBUTED MORPHOLOGY . A small universal set of monovalent interpretable features and a set of entailment relations among them provide the basis for a principled account of the tense systems of English and Spanish. While each feature, each lexical item, and each vocabulary item has a unified representation, surface polysemy is shown to arise from the mappings between them. Crosslinguistic variation is shown to arise from the different features chosen by each language and from the ways in which each language assembles its features into lexical items and vocabulary items. In addition, the presence or absence of a dependent feature F in a given language is shown to have important consequences for the semantic interpretation of the feature dominating F. These three possible differences interact to produce the significant superficial differences between the tense systems of the two languages.

This chapter sheds light on the crosslinguistically robust, but not total, complementarity between plurality and classifiers by proposing a formal representation of plurality and classification as two separate aspects of individuation, the semantic property that characterizes count nouns cross-linguistically. Drawing on data from English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Armenian, Korean, and Persian, the chapter argues that the differences among these languages can be reduced to a small number of differences in a) which features the language makes use of, b) which of those features can project as syntactic heads, and c) the status of non-projecting features as modifiers or head features. Under the proposed analysis, it is not necessary that a language be characterizable, as a whole, as a classifier language or as a plural-marking language. Rather, classifiers and plural marking may coexist in a language as long as only one appears in any given nominal.

This paper addresses two fundamental questions about the nature of formal features in phonology and morphosyntax: what is their expressive power, and where do they come from? To answer these questions, we begin with the most restrictive possible hypothesis (all features are privative, and are wholly dictated by Universal Grammar, with no room for cross-linguistic variation), and examine the extent to which empirical evidence from a variety of languages compels a retreat from this position. We argue that there is little to be gained by positing a universal set of specific features, and propose instead that the crucial contribution of UG is the language learner's ability to construct features by identifying correlations between contrasts at different levels of linguistic structure. This view resonates with current research on how the interaction between UG and external 'third factors' shapes the structure of language, while at the same time harking back to the Saussurean notion that contrast is the central function of linguistic representations.

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