We examine the role of contrast in the local licensing of scrambling in on-line language comprehension in German using event-related brain potentials (ERP). Although contrastive readings give rise to a higher acceptability of scrambled word orders, they do not lead to an attenuation of the processing difficulties observed at the position of the scrambled object itself. Thus, similar to previous findings on givenness, contrast leads to global but not local licensing of scrambled structures, a finding that speaks against an immediate interaction of all relevant information types. The pattern is reversed when the scrambled object induces a corrective focus reading. Here scrambling does not give rise to increased local processing cost, but global acceptability decreases. These findings suggest that corrective focus can override local syntactic requirements on the basis of its extraordinarily high communicative saliency.

Recent studies, by us and others, have argued that the Second Consonant Shift began medially after stressed short vowels, triggered by a segmental interpretation of aspiration in interaction with Germanic syllable weight requirements. The most striking empirical support came from the dialect of Wermelskirchen, where shift of fortis stops is attested only following short vowels. But is Wermelskirchen an isolated dialect or part of a general pattern? We review selected dialect data supporting this new account of the shift and show the Wermelskirchen evidence to be cut from a broader regional fabric that is marked also by biases in place of articulation among stops and, to some extent, their following vowels. We take these data to reflect the archaic nature of the modern distributions, concluding that the apparent idiosyncrasies obscure an original, fundamental regularity whose structural motivations come into clearer focus under the principles of Evolutionary Phonology.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 11th Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC-11), University of California–Davis, in April 2005. In addition to members of that audience and two readers for this journal, we have had the privilege of valuable discussions on this topic and comments on earlier drafts from the following colleagues, none of whom necessarily agrees with all of our points: Juliette Blevins, Markus Denkler, David Fertig, Patrick Honeybone, Robert B. Howell, Thomas Klein, Mark Louden, Jürgen Macha, Monica Macaulay, Klaus J. Mattheier, Donka Minkova, Richard Page, and Laura Smith. We also thank Garry Davis for sharing a copy of the handout from his 2003 presentation with us.