As a complement to C. B. van Haeringen's classic comparative study (1956) that positioned the grammar of Dutch in between the grammars of English and German, this study compares the productivity of three kinds of “raising” patterns in these languages: Object-to-Subject, Subject-to-Object, and Subject-to-Subject raising. It establishes the extent to which Dutch, as well as English and German, have evolved from the old West Germanic starting point these languages are assumed to have shared in this area of grammar. The results are a test case for Hawkins' (1986) case syncretism account of the difference in “explicit-ness” between the grammars of English and German.*

This article explores the theory of pluricentricity from an empirical perspective. With a particular focus on the written lexicon, and using questionnaires and statistical analysis, I examine how native speakers from Austria (n=115) and Germany (n=104) rated the standardness of 36 words designated as representing either Austrian Standard German (ASG) or German Standard German (GSG). Analyses of quantitative data offer preliminary empirical support for the pluricentricity of the German language. Ultimately, my study (a) justifies the need for more extensive empirical research on perceptions of standardness among native speakers in Austria, (b) demonstrates the value of eliciting attitudes of nonlinguists to assess the validity of theories posited by linguists, and (c) provides an initial model for investigating coexisting standard varieties which, it is hoped, future researchers will adopt and improve on.

In Modern English, function words such as this, that, and the are pronounced with a voiced onset, while content words have the original voiceless onset. A statistical analysis of the distribution of <ð> and <þ> in Vices and Virtues, a text preserved in London, British Library, Stowe MS 34 (circa 1200), reveals a distribution, whose most plausible interpretation is that these two letters were used to encode stress-conditioned differences in voicing. This sets the voicing of function words, normally dated to the fourteenth century, back to circa 1200 or earlier.*