Reduction of case morphology is not unusual in the history of languages, especially Germanic. What sets Pennsylvania German apart from an otherwise routine process is the fact that two distinct communities are reflecting two distinctly different developments in their case system—one group, the nonsectarians, is linguistically conservative; the other, the sectarians, is innovative. Therefore, it has been suggested that the internal argument for change is not applicable to Pennsylvania German; rather, the linguistic innovation of the sectarians is indicative of external pressure brought about by bilingualism. This paper argues that the reduction in case markings cannot neatly be assigned to one theory or another; instead, it is a combination of factors acting in tandem to bring about change. Data from Ohio, where case markings have been contracted more recently, provide the link, which points to “multiple causation” as the basis for morphological loss. Quantitative and qualitative evidence is presented from sectarian and nonsectarian groups in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

This paper deals with the role of the distinction between Germans from speech islands (the so-called Volksdeutsche) and Germans from Germany (the so-called Reichsdeutsche) in conceptualizing the German community in urban Canada. First, 64 interviews with members of this community were analyzed for stretches of talk in which that distinction was made relevant. Then, a subset of these was chosen for the analysis presented here. Our analysis of these six excerpts employs both conversation analysis and positioning theory in order to show how participants draw on various aspects of place, ethnicity, and time in constructing a German space in Canada and their own ethnic identities in connection with it.*

This paper follows on recent work (Iverson & Salmons 2004, 2007; Kiparsky 2005, 2006) seeking to resolve Kock's 1888 paradox intro-duced in his celebrated “period theory” of Old Norse i-umlaut. The basic finding is this: In paradigms where a phonological innovation has been rendered opaque by the operation of other sound changes, restructuring of the base form incorporates rather than derives the results of the innovation as it dies out; but if the innovation remains transparent in certain other paradigms, its expiration enables reversion to the antecedent phonological form. Both patterns can be subsumed under the traditional rubric of analogy, resulting in allomorphically uniform paradigms, but the former generalizes a sound change to con-texts in which it never occurred naturally, whereas the latter actually undoes, or reverses, a sound change.*

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.

This paper discusses three typological differences between the North Germanic DP and the West Germanic DP. While North Germanic has suffixal definite articles leading to cases of double definiteness, weak adjective endings regulated by definiteness, and doubly-filled definite DPs, West Germanic does not. These three properties cluster together in that they all have to do with definiteness. It is claimed that they can be subsumed under one more general difference. Assuming various subcomponents of definiteness, it is proposed that these components originate low in the structure. North Germanic arranges these components into several individual feature bundles. Some of these bundles move to D, while others remain lower in the structure. Consequently, definiteness components are spelled out separately in different positions. In contrast, West Germanic involves one complex feature bundle containing all definiteness components. In this language family, all of the components move to D as one bundle and, as a consequence, they are all spelled out as one determiner.

The peripheral location of Scandinavian dialects with preaspiration supports the view that preaspiration was present in Common Scandinavian. Sound changes in Common Scandinavian and resulting morphophonemic alternations in the older Scandinavian languages exhibit the articulatory timing characteristic of preaspiration and sonorant devoicing and further bolster the argument that Common Scandinavian is the terminus ad quem for the origin of preaspiration. Dialectal and historical data also indicate that preaspiration is primarily, but not exclusively, a West Scandinavian phenomenon. Finally, it is argued that the reconstruction of preaspiration and sonorant devoicing for Common Scandinavian motivates the development of West Jutlandic stød and the distribution of Common Danish stød in West Jutlandic.

The aim of the present study is to conduct a comprehensive corpus analysis of the constituent order of main declarative clauses with the interjection hwæt ‘what’ in the clause-initial position in Old English prose texts. On the basis of his analysis of Ælfric's Lives of Saints and Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, Walkden (2013) claims that such hwæt-clauses pattern with subordinate clauses with respect to their verb position. My study confirms Walkden's basic empirical findings that hwæt-clauses do not behave like typical main clauses as far as their constituent order is concerned. However, there are numerous differences between them and subordinate clauses introduced by hwæt, that is, free relatives and embedded questions. The analysis suggests that the conditions favoring the use of the V-final order in main hwæt-clauses resemble the ones identified for ordinary V-final main clauses in Bech 2012. What is more, the study shows that the functional differences between hwæt- and hwæt þa-clauses noted in Brinton 1996 are blurred in Old English prose because of a regular variation between hwæt þa-S and hwæt-S-þa patterns. The data also suggest that þa in hwæt þa-clauses should rather be analyzed as an independent clause element.

This article examines a remarkable case of analogy in the verbal systems of German and Dutch which to date has hardly received any attention. In both languages, the ablaut pattern that originally stems from the second Germanic ablaut class (“oPRETERITE = oPAST PARTICIPLE”) spread to other strong verbs by analogy, as in German heben–hob–gehoben or Dutch binden–bond–gebonden. It is argued that the low token frequency of these verbs triggered this analogy. As in both cases a new type of ablaut class arises through the convergence of several strong verbs, I refer to it as the eighth ablaut class.*

This paper attempts to determine a more precise timeline for the onset of Open Syllable Lengthening in Dutch. We examined two late 14th-century Brabantic texts in the Manuscript Marshall 29 (1375 AD), Mellibeus and Saladijn, and compared these with an older Brabantic text Lutgart to ascertain when exactly Open Syllable Lengthening originated in (Brabantic) Middle Dutch. A combination of diachronic correspondences and a careful examination of the texts written in verse during the course of approximately 75 years has helped us to establish the synchronic systems of 13th- and 14th-century Middle Dutch, and, furthermore, has allowed us to determine the onset of prosodic changes such as Open Syllable Lengthening. Orthographic, rhythmic, and metrical evidence from the three texts suggests that the process was incomplete in the earliest period and was finalized in the late 14th century in Brabant, thereby refuting the standard assumption that the lengthening was completed before the onset of Middle Dutch in general.*

Negerhollands (or Virgin Islands Dutch Creole) is the extinct Dutch-lexified creole of present-day US Virgin Islands. One of the typical features of Caribbean creoles is the occurrence of both, overtly marked and unmarked pasts. This has been attested in Negerhollands, where there is variation between preverbal (h)a and the bare verb. Studies in a number of creole languages have shown that such variation is not random. Following up on these results, I investigate the impact of factors such as narrative discourse function, aspect, and syntactic priming on the expression of past time reference in 20th-century Negerhollands through a quantitative variationist study. The results show that the factors conditioning past time reference marking in Negerhollands resemble those in other creole languages but with an entirely different outcome: Whereas other (English-lexified) creoles typically use unmarked pasts, Negerhollands typically uses overt pasts. This may reflect Akan substrate influence rather than being a sign of language death.*

Based on two sociolinguistic field studies from 2003 and 2009, this paper discusses the language attitudes of High German speakers (H-speakers) toward Low German (the L-variety) in the county of Bentheim, a diglossic speech community in northwestern Germany. While language attitudinal studies are largely absent from the sociolin-guistic corpus in Germany and from Low German research altogether, diglossic studies largely focus on the L-variety and its speakers and evolution. This paper is one of the first attempts to analyze the H-speakers’ perceptions and evaluations of the L-variety over a longer period of time within the fields of diglossia and Low German.

Barrack (1991) argues against the reconstruction of PGmc. syllable structure proposed in Murray and Vennemann (1983), namely, . According to Murray and Vennemann, this reconstruction is compatible with characteristics of early Germanic verse as well as Gothic word divisions and provides a basis for a coherent interpretation of major phonological changes in early Germanic; namely Sievers's Law, West Germanic gemination, North Germanic resyllabication, and glide strengthening in Gothic. Focusing on these same points, Barrack attempts to reinterpret them as providing evidence for . In this response, I demonstrate that Barrack fails on all counts. Most importantly, he fails to provide a coherent, well-motivated interpretation of the pertinent phonological changes on the basis of his assumed .

It is argued that Cimbrian German requires reference to the natural class of affricates and fricatives and that this grouping is captured by analyzing both sets of sounds as [+continuant]. This finding is problematic for theories that treat affricates as strident stops without a [+continuant] component.*

While there is general agreement about many aspects of Gothic syllable structure, a number of important issues remain controversial. This paper offers an Optimality Theory analysis, with a focus on the syllabification of intervocalic consonants and consonant clusters. It is argued that Gothic syllabification generally results from the interaction of constraints requiring that syllables have onsets, that syllables may not have complex codas, or codas in general, and regulating the relationship between the input and the output. A family of constraints banning various types of complex onsets is also proposed. With this analysis of Gothic syllabification in hand, a new analysis of Sievers' Law, one of the classic problems of Gothic phonology, is developed. From this perspective, Sievers' Law is contingent on syllable structure and falls out from the interaction of the proposed constraints on syllable structure. It is also argued that the correct underlying representation of the segment affected by Sievers' Law is an archiphoneme, as this enables a better account of the Sievers' Law alternations, their morphological sensitivity, and the exceptions to Sievers' Law. Although alternative analyses are possible, the analysis presented here sidesteps some of the problems they face and is more philologically rigorous.This paper is a substantially revised version of a portion of my doctoral dissertation (Pierce 2002). For their assistance in the preparation of this revised version, I thank James Cathey, San Duanmu, Benjamin Fortson, Robert Kyes, Tomas Riad, Martti Sloan, and Bruce Spencer. I am especially grateful to the two anonymous JGL referees, who provided a number of helpful comments that caused me to rethink much of the analysis, and to Robert Murray for his assistance in his role as editor.

This paper seeks to explain syntactic and structural features that have puzzled earlier scholars and editors of poems composed in kviÐuháttr, one of the oldest attested Old Norse skaldic meters. More precisely, I attempt to answer the following questions: first, why do poems in kviÐuháttr fail to adhere to the stanzaic eight-line division and the four-line helmingr (half-stanza) division, which are so firmly entrenched in the ON skaldic tradition? Second, why does the syntax of kviÐuháttr poetry depart from other patterns of skaldic (and eddic) verb syntax? It will become clear that the metrical innovation that characterizes kviÐuháttr, namely, the introduction of regularized catalectic a-lines of Sievers' Types A, C, and D, imposed significant restrictions on verb syntax. Rather than violating the verb-second constraint in independent clauses, the poets were forced to relax structural rules that are observed strictly in other branches of ON poetry.I am grateful to my colleague, Robert D. Fulk, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to the two anonymous JGL reviewers for valuable suggestions.

The word order in a phrase such as all John's friends, in which a universal quantifier is immediately followed by a genitive, is perfectly grammatical in Dutch but unacceptable in German. This article shows that there are three explanations for this difference between the two closely related languages. First, in German, the Saxon Genitive is a true case assigned in Spec, NP. In contrast, in Dutch and English, genitive case cannot be assigned in Spec, NP without a preposition. The Saxon Genitive in these languages is comparable to a possessive adjective that originates as the head of PossP and moves to D. Second, in a definite DP in a Germanic language, either D or Spec, DP must be occupied; if one of these positions is overtly occupied, and if genitive case has already been assigned, the movement of a genitive phrase to D or Spec, DP is unmotivated and causes ungrammaticality. Third, there is evidence that the -e inflection on the universal quantifier alle ‘all’ in German and Dutch has the characteristics of a determiner.*

This article demonstrates that at least one reflex of the oral-formulaic compositional device called ‘the theme of the Hero on the Beach’ is to be found in the Heliand. It is suggested that its presence can enhance the interpretation of another incident in that poem. Further, the author considers the implications of its use in this text for our understanding of the nature of indigenous Germanic poetry prior to the conversion to Christianity.

Contemporary discussions of preverbal negative incorporation usually note Levin's 1958 claim that incorporation is a Western and Southern dialect feature in Old and Middle English. In his Middle English data, Levin reports only two unincorporated forms, both in AB texts. This note demonstrates that these two examples appear in the editions Levin used, but not in the manuscripts now thought to be closer to the original AB language. The conclusions are: 1. Levin's claim still has merit; 2. it would worthwhile to revisit his data with an improved understanding of scribal practices, access to facsimiles, and to electronic searches; and 3. researchers should consider editorial “interference” in manuscripts.I would like to thank Elly van Gelderen, Richard Hogg, and Dhira Mahoney for their helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are my own.

A survey of the Old High German texts provides a number of significant finds relating to the early use, frequency, and distribution of alliterating word-pairs. In the presentation and analysis of selected data, parameters for addressing a more complete rhetorical evaluation of the phraseologisms as they appear in the texts are outlined, with consideration of issues such as transmission, source influence, genre, and dialect. Contours of the early history of the alliterating word-pair in German are presented, while perspectives for further research are sketched. An appendix lists the entire corpus of Old High German alliterating word-pairs.