In this paper we argue for the following properties of clause-bound scrambling, as they are manifested in German. First, scrambling presupposes head-final projections. Only selected constituents, notably arguments, scramble, the reason being that phrases selected by a head have a unique base order. Second, scrambling involves antecedent-gap dependencies with A-chain properties. Third, scrambling is overt and non-string-vacuous. Fourth, scrambling is syntactically optional, clause-bound, category neutral, and may apply to more than one phrase per clause. Fifth, scrambled elements remain transparent for extraction; they are licit binders and take scope.

Furthermore, we evaluate our conclusion that scrambling is contingent on the “OV” property by examining Yiddish, an uncontroversial scrambling Germanic language with controversial VO versus OV status. We argue that Yiddish is a variant of an OV language—thus allowing scrambling—and that it is the only Germanic language with alternative V-positions in a VP-shell structure, like Hindi, and, arguably, like Slavic languages.We wish to thank two anonymous JGL reviewers for their constructive comments and for pointing out various shortcomings in the previous version. Special thanks go to Marga Reis for valuable suggestions on various sections. The responsibility for remaining shortcomings remains ours, of course. We are very grateful to Mark Louden for his generous support in enhancing the readability.

We argue that the distribution of definiteness marking in Scandinavian DPs is best accounted for by a lexical rule converting Ns to Ds, and not by syntactic head movement. The proposed lexical rule, together with the assumption that lexical expressions can block equivalent phrasal expressions, is shown to account for the core facts about definiteness marking distribution in Danish, and is extended to Swedish and Norwegian. In addition, some previously mysterious facts about definiteness marking in DPs containing relative clauses are explained.

Syntactic constructions may form an alternative to, or compete with the morphological expression of semantic and grammatical content. This applies to the passive forms of verbs, the progressive form, analytic causatives, adjective-noun sequences, and particle verbs in Dutch. In this article I develop a view of the Dutch lexicon in which this interaction between syntax and morphology can be understood. The central notion used is that of the constructional idiom, a construction with a (partially) non-compositional meaning, of which not all terminal elements are fixed. These constructional idioms, like morphological word formation, serve to extend the fund of expressions that are available for concatenation in the syntax.I would like to thank the anonymous referees of this journal, and Farrell Ackerman, Arie Verhagen, and the audience at the MMM3 meeting in Barcelona, September 2001, for their comments on previous drafts of this paper.

This paper reviews the available evidence in support of a diaglossic account(Auer 2005, 2011) of the 20th century history of Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch,whereby the national varieties of Dutch are argued to be developing towards astratificational configuration without discrete intermediate strata between thebase dialects and the standard. However, we show that the processes leading todiaglossia differ significantly in the two varieties. While the recent historyof Netherlandic Dutch is characterized by downward norm relaxation (top tobottom), Belgian Dutch is characterized by bottom-up (re)standardization.Building on a refined version of Auer’s diaglossic model, we reflecton the exact nature of linguistic standardization in the Low Countries andoutline scenarios for the further development of Belgian and NetherlandicDutch.

Based on data from two experimental studies, this paper investigates the production of gender in a Norwegian dialect (Tromsø) by several groups of child and adult speakers. The findings show that gender is late acquired (around age 7) and, furthermore, that there are considerable differences between the groups, indicating an ongoing historical change that involves the loss of feminine gender agreement. However, the feminine declensional endings, such as the suffixal definite article, are retained. While there are sociolinguistic factors causing this change, we argue that the nature of the change can be explained by the process of language acquisition.*

This paper discusses the problem of gender agreement in Dutch, arising from the loss of gender markers and resulting in different gender values for nouns and pronouns. On the basis of corpus data from spontaneous speech, the study shows that Dutch pronominal gender is undergoing a functional reinterpretation according to the degree of individuation of the referent. In addition to the antecedent's lexical gender, this conceptual property governs the agreement behavior of personal, possessive, and relative pronouns. Special attention is given to the competition between semantic and syntactic gender agreement and to parallel phenomena in other Germanic languages.Many thanks to Geert Booij, Grev Corbett, Edith Moravcsik, Monika Schmid, Hans Olav Enger, Caroline Sandström, Pieter van Reenen, Frans Hinskens, Florian Haas, and two anonymous referees for comments on versions of this article, to Andrew Spencer for discussion, and to my colleagues at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for additional data. The usual disclaimers apply.

This study reports on a number of highly significant differences found between English, German, and Dutch hesitation markers. English and German native speakers used significantly more vocalic-nasal hesitation markers than Dutch native speakers, who used predominantly vocalic hesitation markers. English hesitation markers occurred most frequently when preceded by silence and followed by a lexical item, or when surrounded by silence. German and Dutch hesitation markers occurred most frequently surrounded by lexical items. In Dutch, vocalic-nasal hesitation markers dominated only when surrounded by silence. Vocalic-nasal hesitation markers dominated in all positions in English and German, although in the former language this was more salient than in the latter. Nasal hesitation markers were used significantly more frequently in German than in English or Dutch. In addition to overall language trends, speaker-specific differences, especially within German and Dutch, were observed. These results raise questions in terms of the symptom versus signal hypotheses regarding the function of hesitation markers.I am indebted to Angelika Braun and Jens-Peter Köster for their supervision at the University of Trier. I am also thankful to Monika Schmid and Wim Peeters in the Netherlands and to Eva Gossner in England for their organizational help. Finally, I am very grateful to the participants, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. All inadequacies in this article remain my responsibility.

This paper discusses the auxiliated posture verb constructions in Dutch (liggen/zitten/staan+te+V ‘sit/lie/stand to V’) that have progressive, durative, or habitual interpretation. My analysis, based on a large corpus of written texts, reveals, first of all, that to a large extent these constructions follow the regular (that is, non-aspectual) use of the three cardinal posture verbs as basic locational verbs. Second, the corpus used for the present study reveals clear experientially based patterns in the type of verbs that occur in the auxiliated posture verb construction. The data suggest that, at least in the written language, the construction has retained a link with the postural (or by extension, the locational) source. This sheds light on some clear semantic differences between the auxiliated posture verb constructions and another common progressive construction in Dutch, aan het V zijn ‘be at the V-inf’. The paper also briefly considers the progressive construction lopen+te+V ‘run to V’, showing that it is less grammaticalized and still predominantly tied to motion events.I would like to thank the anonymous referees of this journal for their comments on a previous version of this paper. Responsibility for any remaining inaccuracies is, of course, mine.

Dutch consonant cluster assimilations have come to play a central role in the debate over whether laryngeal features are restrictedly privative (single-valued) or must be encoded as binary (marking both positive and negative values). It has been argued, in particular, that the negative specification [–voice] is necessary in order to capture the difference in directionality of assimilation between stop-final and fricative-final clusters in Dutch as well as to accommodate the contrary behavior of the past suffix -de. Under the dimensional theory of laryngeal representation, the present paper provides a fresh analysis of the Netherlandic facts without reference to negative feature values, focusing on the role of phonetic enhancement versus phonology proper. The exposition is anchored in the history of Dutch as a Germanic language that is to a great extent Romance-like in its laryngeal phonology, and takes into consideration evidence from dialects and experimental phonetics.An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Eighth Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC 8) at Indiana University, Bloomington, April 26–28, 2002, and a related paper, “Privativity and the Laws of Enhancement”, was held at a Linguistics Student Organization Colloquium, University of Wisconsin–Madison, in March 2002. In addition to two anonymous reviewers for this journal, we owe thanks to Anthony Buccini, Rob Howell, Monica Macaulay, Bert Vaux, and the audiences at both presentations for valuable input. The usual disclaimers apply.

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.

This paper discusses constructions such as We'll have two beers and a coffee that are typically used for beverage orders in restaurant contexts. We compare the behavior of nouns in these constructions in three Germanic languages, English, Icelandic, and German, and take a closer look at the correlation of the morphosyntactic and semantic-conceptual changes involved. We show that even within such a restricted linguistic sample in closely related languages one finds three different grammatical options for the expression of the same conceptual transition. Our findings suggest an analysis of coercion as a genuinely semantic phenomenon, located on a level of semantic representations that serves as an interface between the conceptual and the grammatical systems and takes into account inter- and intralinguistic variations.Work on this paper was supported by NSF award BCS-0080377 to Boston University. The material is based in part on work done while the second author was serving as Director of the Linguistics Program at the U.S. National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this material are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation. For comments on an earlier version, we would like to thank two anonymous JGL reviewers.

This paper provides evidence that nominative arguments in German and Icelandic not only can be analyzed as remaining in the VP overtly, but that in some constructions these arguments remain internal to VP at all levels of representation, including LF. The paper reviews a variety of recent proposals for Case licensing and argues that only the Agree model (Chomsky 2000) provides for a unified account. Specifically, it is argued that languages such as German lack any syntactic or phonological requirement that SpecTP be filled (that is, the EPP is not universal). In addition, empirical arguments are provided against theories invoking Case transmission and null expletives. Although German lacks the EPP, arguments are also provided that German does have TP and related functional projections.I would like to thank Elena Anagnostopoulou, Jonathan Bobaljik, Željko Bošković, Christine Czinglar, Kleanthes Grohmann, Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson, Winnie Lechner, Friedrich Neubarth, David Pesetsky, Martin Prinzhorn, Norvin Richards, Uli Sauerland, Arnim von Stechow, Hubert Truckenbrodt, Martina Wiltschko, Leo Bobaljik Wurmbrand, Kazuko Yatsushiro, and two reviewers for discussions and comments on various parts of this paper. I am also grateful for the feedback from the audiences at WCCFL 20, PLC 25, NELS 33, Österreichische Linguistiktagung (Innsbruck), GLOW 24 and 26, CUNY, Harvard, Tübingen, and McGill, and to the University of Connecticut students attending my Spring 2006 seminar.

This paper introduces a cognitive framework for perfect auxiliary selection (HAVE versus BE) in Germanic based on transitive (HAVE) and mutative (BE) prototypes as affected by lexical aspect and transitivity parameters (Hopper and Thompson 1980). The phenomenon of “HAVE-switch” is exemplified in the history of several Germanic languages. Here numerous modal and aspectual factors shift the perfect auxiliary with mutatives from the customary BE to HAVE. This shift is then explained in terms of the proposed model. The contexts in question are all seen to reduce the mutativity of a clause (the effective attainment of the resultant state in the patient subject) and hence the motivation for using BE. Several direct parallels between HAVE-switch in Germanic and aspectual usage in Russian are discussed and their motivation in terms of this approach shown.

This paper provides the first overview of the history, sociolinguistics, and structures of Namibian Kiche Duits (lit. “kitchen German”), which is today a dying contact variety. The analysis draws on archival records, colonial publications, and memoirs, as well as over 120 sociolinguistic interviews conducted in 2000. Early varieties of Namibian Kiche Duits emerged from 1900 under German colonial rule. The language was used primarily for inter-ethnic communication within the work context. However, speakers also “crossed” playfully into Kiche Duits in a number of within-group speech genres (competition games, scolding, banter, etc.), thus appropriating the colonial language—alongside cultural borrowings (Truppenspieler, “traditional” dress)—for new in-group practices. These within-group uses contributed to the linguistic stabilization of the language as well as the formation of new (post-)colonial (neo-African) identities.*

Dutch reuze(n)(-) has a wide range of synchronic uses that form part of a broad categorical and semantic continuum. Derived from the noun reus ‘giant’, it is often used to express a comparison in nominal and adjectival compounds (for example, reuzegroot ‘as big as a giant’, lit. ‘giant-big’), but it can also have a merely intensifying function (for example, reuzeleuk ‘very nice’, lit. ‘giant-nice’). Moreover, it currently occurs as a free adjective and adverb while keeping its morphological linking morpheme -e- and intensifying value (for example, Het feestje was reuze ‘The party was great’). Drawing on synchronic and diachronic corpus data, this paper argues that the emergence of reuze as a free morpheme should be accounted for by debonding (an instance of degrammaticalization) and clipping.*

In English, auxiliaries form a cohesive category—unlike main verbs, they all raise to T. In Danish, it is not so obvious that auxiliaries form such a unified category. In root clauses, all verbal elements can raise to T (and then to C), while in embedded clauses they always stay in situ. Therefore, determining the position of a verbal element in the extended verbal projection is a challenging task. We examine the Danish verbal element g⊘re ‘do’ that shows up when the verb phrase has been topicalized, elided, or pronominalized. Even though on the surface g⊘re might appear to be of category T or v, we argue that it is located right in the middle. We argue that it is an auxiliary, but, unlike other auxiliaries, g⊘re is defective because it only subcategorizes for vPs that are pronominal.*

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the semantics of the German am V-inf sein construction, or am-progressive. Like its English counterpart and many other progressive constructions in the world's languages, the am-progressive is shown to convey not only a variety of aspecto-temporal meanings, but also a range of (inter)subjective qualifications, such as intensification, irritation, and evasiveness. These (inter)subjective connotations are argued to reflect the am-progressive's core meaning of epistemic contingency, which we believe is instantiated in all of its uses.*

This paper investigates the use of aspectual constructions in Dutch, Norwegian, and German, languages in which aspect marking that presents events explicitly as ongoing, is optional. Data were elicited under similar conditions with native speakers in the three countries. We show that while German speakers make insignificant use of aspectual constructions, usage patterns in Norwegian and Dutch present an interesting case of overlap, as well as differences, with respect to a set of factors that attract or constrain the use of different constructions. The results indicate that aspect marking is grammaticalizing in Dutch, but there are no clear signs of a similar process in Norwegian.*

This paper explores areas of reflexive and pronominal noncomplementarity in German Accusativus cum Infinitivo (AcI)-constructions and other configurations that involve embedding of a subclausal (smaller than IP) constituent. The main empirical finding is that there are several non-complementarity-inducing contexts that have not been noticed before. In examples with embedded AcIs or complex DPs, a reflexive may be bound across an intervening subject, and a pronominal may be free even if its antecedent is only a vP-, DP-, or PPboundary away. The proposed account of these facts is based on the claim that vP, DP, and PP are all potentially phase-defining categories (Chomsky 2000). The expected “regular” cases of complementarity are accounted for by postulating as the relevant binding domain for both reflexive and pronominal the minimal phase containing the anaphoric element. Newly discovered cases of non-complementarity that exist at least for some speakers stem from the ability of reflexives, but not pronominals, to covertly raise to the edge of their phase (Safir 2004). Finally, well known cases of non-complementarity in AcIs where the anaphoric element is embedded in a PP can be explained if θ-independent (that is, internally saturated) PPs are adjoined high, to the AcI (vP)-phase-edge. This then achieves a unified account of both the well established binding facts documented in the literature and the surprising long-distance binding of reflexives reported as acceptable for some speakers.My thanks to Judith Aissen, Jorge Hankamer, and especially Jim McCloskey, who have helped me with and greatly contributed to the various drafts of this paper. Thanks also to my JGL reviewers for their helpful feedback. (Any remaining errors are my own.) Finally, I am indebted to all my native speaker consultants.