Since prosodic units were introduced as a point of reference in sound change, Sievers' alternation of [i] and [j] in Gothic has been examined in terms of the syllable or the foot. However, such prosodic studies fail to capture the empirical fact that Sievers' alternation of [i] and [j] is consistently manifested only in the masculine ja-stem nouns and ja-stem verbs in Gothic. Furthermore, to account for the alternation, these studies rely on exceptional syllabification (Murray and Vennemann 1983), problematic foot parsing (Dresher and Lahiri 1991), or unmotivated abstract rules (Calabrese 1994), among other devices.

This paper is a study of the morphology and phonology of truncations in German (also known as i-Bildungen) within the framework of Optimality Theory. Truncations are shown to constitute a widespread and productive morphological pattern in Modern Standard German. The morphosyntactic properties of these forms are shown to follow from the assumption of a regular binary word-syntactic structure in which the base functions as the head, and a phonologically empty morpheme adds other, non-head, properties. The specific phonological properties can then be derived from the operation of a set of ranked constraints in the sense of Optimality Theory. The analysis implies a strong correspondence between reduplication and truncation as two related aspects of prosodic morphology.A first version of this paper was presented in March 1996; the handout from this presentation (Wiese 1996) has been discussed occasionally since. Members of the research project Prosodische Morphologie (part of SFB 282 “Theorie des Lexikons”) at the universities of Düsseldorf and Cologne, in particular Chris Golston, Martin Neef, Renate Raffelsiefen, Heinz Vater, Markus Walther, and Anja Werner, have contributed to the early stages of the paper in different ways. In addition, I thank Susanne Niedeggen-Bartke, Caroline Féry, and Birgit Alber for helpful input, and two anonymous JGL reviewers for important criticism and clarifications.

The book consists of eleven chapters, all showcasing in one way or another linguistic approaches to literature and other arts. Several chapters (on Kafka, Jandl, Trakl, Mayröcker, and Jonke) are revised versions of the author's older articles, some going back to the early seventies. It is—this might be said at the outset—unfortunate to see that most of the references are also to older scholarship and that some of the issues and concerns seem to be formulated in reaction to a somewhat obsolete literary discourse. In these chapters, the entire poststructuralist movement, surely the most influential paradigm of literary scholarship in the past thirty years, as well as several other important currents in literary scholarship, are overlooked.

This book explores aspects of early medieval Germanic social organization and cultural practice on the basis of word semantic studies. The lexical data are taken from three layers of the vocabulary in Old Germanic, corresponding to the three cultural tradition—native Germanic, Roman, and Christian—that were fused to form a new identity in the early medieval Germanic world. By careful interpretations of a wide range of literary and historical sources and by rigorous linguistic analyses, Green examines the rise and fall of closely associated words in relation to the complex of political, military, legal, and religious forces working through society. Taken as a whole, the work provides a broad, richly informative, and well-balanced survey on the contacts that the early Germanic tribes made with Rome and Christianity during the period from classical antiquity to the early Middle Ages, ranging from approximately 300 B.C.E. to 900 C.E. No less wide is the geographical coverage of the book, from Ireland and Visigothic Spain to the Crimea and the eastern Baltic.

This book assesses the phonological features of Pennsylvania German English (PGE) and the social factors that give rise to the creation of this variety. The topic has been secondary in the study of Pennsylvania German speakers until now, and for this reason the volume deserves special notice. The study deals with two groups of speakers of Pennsylvania German (PG): the sectarians (i.e., Amish and Mennonites) and the nonsectarians. Paradoxically, although the sectarians are more isolated from mainstream society, their English has fewer features of interference from PG; the nonsectarians, who are integrated into the English mainstream, exhibit more features of interference from PG in their spoken English. The other half of the Pennsylvania German paradox is that the nonsectarians also have fewer convergence features in their PG. As Kopp discusses in his final chapter, the explanations for these two halves of the paradox can be found in the unique aspects of the features of language use and language attitudes found within each group.

Ohne Zweifel ist das vorliegende Buch die umfassendste Einführung in die Dialektologie des Deutschen bzw. in die Dialektologie allgemein, die derzeit auf dem deutschsprachigen Markt ist. Sie beschränkt sich nicht nur auf den Teilbereich der Dialektgeographie, sondern bezieht auch die Dialektsoziologie, Teile der historischen Dialektologie und sogar eine Übersicht über die verschiedenen deutschen Dialektland-schaften mit ein. Es stellt sich jedoch die Frage, ob die sicherlich begrenzte Seitenzahl, die durch die Publikation in der Niemeyer-Reihe “Germanistische Arbeitshefte” vorgegeben ist, überhaupt ausreicht, einen so komplexen Gegenstandsbereich auf einer Einführungsstufe zu vermitteln.