This study investigates why an epistemic interpretation of modal verbs is possible only in the present or preterit, not in the perfect. Epistemic modals are argued to be predicates of propositions; they are not associated with a time variable and therefore cannot be tensed. The tense in which an epistemic modal appears is either a pleonastic tense or a tense determined by the discourse context. This analysis, unlike the analyses provided by Diewald (1993), Zifonun et al. (1997), and Wurmbrand (1998), automatically predicts the scope of temporal adverbials in sentences with modals. It also has implications for two additional issues related to the study of modal verbs: the classification of evidential modals and the grammaticalization of modals.I would like to thank a number of people for their help in various ways with this article (for serving as native informants, for providing language data and valuable references, and for helpful discussion): Susanna Bauer, Byron W. Bender, Amy Dahlstrom, Wolfgang Ertl, Gert Webelhuth, Ann S. Wilke, and Werner W. Wilke. Thanks also to anonymous JGL reviewers for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft.

According to Hesselman's Law, lengthenings in closed syllables (CSL) precede lengthenings in open syllables (OSL). This paper surveys dialectal and philological evidence from North Germanic and Upper German in support of Hesselman's Law. The paper argues that CSL serves as a catalyst for OSL. After CSL, short vowels are always followed by long consonants and short consonants are always preceded by long vowels in stressed heavy syllables, a pattern consistent with crosslinguistic tendencies for V/C duration ratios. OSL occurs when language learners extend the pattern by lengthening short vowels followed by heterosyllabic short consonants. The Moraic Preservation Principle (MPP) accounts for the precedence of CSL over OSL despite the preference for bimoraic stressed syllables in Germanic known as Prokosch's Law. A generalization of the Moraic Conservation Principle proposed by Hayes (1989), the MPP states that lengthening processes preserve mora count. CSL does not violate MPP since it results in a bimoraic syllable remaining bimoraic. However, OSL constitutes a violation of MPP by adding to the mora count of the word.I would like to thank two anonymous JGL reviewers and Mark Louden for helpful comments and suggestions.

The success of the volumes in the series Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft has encouraged the publisher to plan revisions of them every fifteen years or so in order to incorporate newly assembled corpora of data, newly emerging methodologies, and new research; to recognize changing empirical domains as the boundaries between them shift or disappear; and to reflect new political realities and linguistic trends within a rapidly changing Europe. The two volumes of the first edition of Sprachgeschichte appeared in 1984 and 1985, respectively. The second edition, of which only the first of three volumes is under consideration here, is—as the subtitle promises—an expansion and elaboration of the first, taking into consideration recent research, new theoretical approaches to old problems, newly developed method-ologies, and the increased interest in linguistic developments in the German-speaking world since 1945.

This book is a modern exploration of the feature [tense] introduced in distinctive feature theory by Roman Jakobson and colleagues (Jakobson, Fant, and Halle 1952). By proposing the feature again after years of skepticism toward its phonetic motivation, Jessen aims to provide a contribution to the integration of phonetics and phonology within linguistic theory. This thorough study of the tense/lax opposition in German obstruents is an expanded version of Jessen's 1996 Cornell University Ph.D. dissertation and is of particular significance because it reveals details and clarification of Jakobsonian concepts through personal communication with Linda Waugh, a former student of and later close collaborator with Jakobson himself. As such, the book will be of interest to phonologists, linguistic phoneticians, and those interested in the very concept of distinctive features and their role in describing the sound structure of human languages. Some background in acoustic phonetics and familiarity with experimental phonetic research is desirable to fully appreciate the power of the arguments presented in the study.

Zur historischen Lexikostatistik der starken Verben im Deutschen (henceforth ZHLSVD) is an attempt to catalogue all of the strong verbs for each period of the German language (OHG, MHG, ENHG, and NHG) and to describe and analyze the loss and regularization of strong verbs across these periods. The book is an abridged version of Kühne's 1996 Bochum doctoral dissertation (7). The printed part of ZHLSVD consists of an introduction and three chapters. A CD-ROM is included with the book.

The edited volume under review contains an introduction followed by fifteen articles, most of which grew out of a workshop on wh-scope marking held in December 1995 at the University of Tübingen. Earlier versions of twelve of the contributions to the present collection have previously appeared in the workshop proceedings edited by Lutz and Müller (1996). Several of these have undergone rather substantial changes, though, and three articles (Cheng, Cole and Hermon, and Horvath), as well as the editors' introduction, were not included in the earlier collection of working papers at all.

Adverbs, their placement, and their licensing conditions have been the focus of a number of recent (language-specific and crosslinguistic) studies (e.g., Alexiadou 1997, Ernst 1998, Laenzlinger 1998, and Cinque 1999, among others). Pittner's book complements these studies by offering a detailed investigation of adverbials in German. The book is divided into six main chapters. In what follows I give a brief critical overview of the contents of the study, and I finish my discussion by addressing some general theoretical issues treated by Pittner.

Magnús Snædal has chosen a modest and understated title for this significant work. The thought of a published concordance often brings to mind earlier times, a volume of reproduced computer printout with endless pages of KWIC (Key Word in Context) format, usually arranged without regard to proper lemmatization or disambiguation. But Snædal has not chosen the easy path. Instead he has used state-of-the-art technology and labored long and hard to make a valuable contribution to Germanic studies in general and Gothic scholarship in particular.

This book sets itself the ambitious aim of assessing the relative merits of two fundamentally different approaches to the analysis of discourse: “grammatical research” and “conversational analysis.” The latter, derived from the work of ethnomethodologists in the 1960s and 1970s (Garfinkel 1967), is concerned with the analysis of the principles involved in such phenomena as turn-taking in conversation (Sacks, Schlegloff, and Jefferson 1974); the former is not a specific theory nor a single approach, but appears to cover standard linguistic methods in the description of discourse, focusing on features of language itself and their role. The evaluation of the relative value of these approaches is potentially a rather wide-ranging enterprise; however, the book is in fact clearly focused, and is firmly grounded in the practical analysis of data, which gives its findings an authority that could not be achieved by more abstract and theoretical reasoning alone. These findings could certainly be seen as a vindication of the “grammatical” approach at the expense of the “conversational”; however, it is not a polemical demonstration of its superiority, but rather a balanced and sympathetic assessment. Using data from recorded conversations, the author examines three marginal linguistic features that might be said to have a conversational role, and concludes that this role can be seen as linguistic, as opposed to purely conversational. Since linguistic structure itself can thus be demonstrated to have interactive relevance, the author concludes that, in effect, at least some of the claims made for conversational analysis are to be rejected. Whether an issue of this general and ultimately theoretical kind can really be decided in this practical way may be open to question, as it seems to depend more on the overall approach to the phenomenon than on the analysis of data, but there can be no doubt that the detailed analysis of specific features of conversation from this perspective makes the book a valuable contribution to the study of the linguistics of conversation, regardless of how we evaluate its theoretical conclusions.