This paper investigates the aspectual potential of posture verb pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus study of sitzen ‘sit’ and stehen ‘stand’, it is shown that despite a preference for activity verbs, verbs of all aspectual classes occur in the second conjunct. The posture verb imposes its durative meaning component on the second verb, thus making a progressive interpretation of the construction possible. Apart from this emergent aspectual function, German posture verb pseudo-coordination has a subjective function (conveying the speaker’s beliefs about the subject referent’s stance), and a discourse pragmatic function (information packaging).*

In this brief paper it is proposed that the problematic Gothic genitive plural suffix in -ē may derive from a grammaticalized deictic particle. Typological and specifically Indo-European evidence for the derivation of genitive markers from deictic particles is presented in support of this hypothesis.

Danish has an optative taking the form of a wh-clause with embedded word order: Hvem der var rig! lit. ‘Who there were rich!’ with the intended meaning Wish I were rich! Such wh-clauses cannot be used as optatives in German or English (or only marginally so). On the basis of a detailed analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of this little-studied phenomenon, this article seeks to explain why a wh-clause with “embedded” word order can be used as an optative. I argue that wh-optatives are compositional in many but not all respects. It is a special construction whose interpretation is determined to a large extent by its grammatical properties but which also has completely idiosyncratic properties. In German and English, such wh-clauses are only potential optatives: They are not used as optatives, but nothing would preclude it.*

A subset of German control verbs allows for the discontinuous linearization of their infinitival complements, a word-order pattern known as the “third construction” pattern. Compared to alternative word-order options (notably, extraposition), third constructions are very rare in present-day German. Here we ask whether the third construction pattern’s low occurrence frequency can be accounted for by processing factors. We report the results from a self-paced reading task and a production priming task investigating whether third constructions are difficult to comprehend, difficult to produce, or both. Our results show that the third construction pattern’s local structural ambiguity impedes comprehension, and that the pattern is also resistant to priming. We conclude that this word-order pattern is an example of a “latent” construction that is grammatically licensed but strongly dispreferred in language use because easier-to-process word-order variants are available.

In German, past participles not only occur in root position with a directive force, as in Stillgestanden! ‘Stop!’ lit. ‘stood still(ptcp)’, but also as performatives in responses: A: Du sagst also nichts zu Papi. ‘So you won’t tell dad.’ B: Versprochen! ‘I promise!’ lit. ‘promised(ptcp)’. Here B performs the speech act denoted by the verb by saying that it has been performed. The propositional argument of the participle (what is promised) is resolved contextually, and the agent and the recipient arguments are restricted to the speaker and the hearer, respectively. This article presents a syntactic analysis of this rarely studied phenomenon, arguing that the construction with a performative participle is not ellipsis but an IP with a participial head and null pronominal complements. The syntactic analysis is formalized within Lexical-Functional Grammar. A pragmatic analysis is proposed arguing that the performative participle in its core use alternates with Yes! to express agreement with an assertion or compliance with a request, that is, to express consent to the effect that a proposition p may safely be added to the Common Ground. This analysis is cast within the dialogue framework of Farkas & Bruce (2010) and extended to response performative participles in monological uses.*

The complex sociolinguistic system for Dutch forms of address presents students of Dutch as a foreign language with particular difficulties in learning to use second person pronouns appropriately. This article discusses the role of a period of residence in the Low Countries in advancing these students’ proficiency in this respect. The research is based on interviews with final-year students of Dutch in the UK. The analysis is framed in terms of intercultural communicative competence and approaches to learning.

The present paper investigates the origin and semantics of complex verbs with pleonastic prepositions in the Gothic Bible in comparison with the Greek and Latin sources from which the Gothic was translated. In these constructions, the same directional information is specified by a preverb and its semantically and formally related preposition in a PP-modifier. It is shown that Gothic preverb-preposition redundancy is largely the result of mechanical translation from the Greek source, with the strong possibility of Latin influence in some cases. While there are co-occurrences of formally related preverbs and prepositions in Gothic independent of Greek and Latin textual influence, directionality is usually only fully specified by the preposition, and so these instances are not truly pleonastic. The considerable influence of Greek on redundant preverb-preposition constructions in Gothic ultimately serves as a caution against taking Gothic morphosyntax at face value.I would like to thank Kari Ellen Gade, Robert Dennis Fulk, and Tracy Alan Hall for their valuable input on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful feedback.

In this article, we report a large-scale corpus study aimed at tackling the (controversial) question to what extent the European national varieties of Dutch, that is, Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, exhibit morpho-syntactic differences. Instead of relying on a manual selection of cases of morphosyntactic variation, we first marshal large bilingual parallel corpora and machine translation software to identify semiautomatically, in an extensively data-driven fashion, loci of variation from various “corners” of Dutch grammar. We then gauge the distribution of con-structional alternatives in a nationally as well as stylistically stratified corpus for a representative selection of twenty alternation patterns. We find that natiolectal variation in the grammar of Dutch is far more prevalent than often assumed, especially in less edited text types, and that it shows up in inflection phenomena, lexically conditioned syntactic variation, and pure word order permutations. Another key finding is that many cases of synchronic probabilistic asymmetries reflect a diachronic difference between the two varieties: Netherlandic Dutch often tends to be ahead in cases of ongoing grammatical change, with Belgian Dutch holding on somewhat longer to obsolescent features of the grammar.*

This article investigates the motivations for consonant cluster simplification through an analysis of consonant deletion in Icelandic, in clusters of three consonants created by the addition of the preterite suffix -ti/-di/-ði directly to the verb stem. It is argued that deletion is driven by perceptual factors interacting with sonority requirements. Deletion targets stops and nonstrident obstruents and its likelihood correlates with similarity in manner and place of articulation between the consonants and their adjacent segments. These two generalizations are elucidated in terms of perceptual cues, and an optimality-theoretic analysis is developed in which more perceptible consonants are protected from deletion by higher-ranked faithfulness constraints.I am grateful to Ólafur Páll Jónsson and Haraldur Bernharðsson, as well as Hanna Óladóttir, for patiently going through a long list of verbs with me and answering my questions. Haraldur also provided me with useful references and easy access to them. Thanks also to Michael Kenstowicz, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, and two anonymous JGL reviewers for answering questions, discussing different issues, and commenting on earlier versions of this research.

This study compares speech production data of agrammatic aphasic speakers in Dutch, German, and English to examine the relative importance of different properties of determiners and pronouns (such as case, gender, definiteness) in these three languages. Agrammatic aphasic speakers omit determiners and use relatively few pronouns in their speech production. Ruigendijk (2007) compared Dutch and German-speaking agrammatic speakers’ performance and showed that the German group omitted more determiners. The current study adds data from English-speaking agrammatic aphasics to test the hypothesis that the more severe problems in German agrammatism were caused by case morphology, which is not present on Dutch and English determiners. The results show that English patterns with Dutch, and thus support the hypothesis that it is case morphology that makes the German determiners more problematic.

Previous studies on the development of PGmc. */ga-/ have been inadequate due, in part, to a misunderstanding or underestimation of the roles of word accent and syntactic accent. Purported evidence for stressed */ga-/ in Proto-Germanic or later stages is dubious and can be refuted convincingly. This article suggests that PGmc. */ga-/ never received primary word stress because it had become a clitic. Such a hypothesis allows for an unproblematic phonological derivation from Proto-Indo-European and is a logical premise for interpreting subsequent developments in the Germanic languages.

Investigations of vowel lengthening and shortening in German have sought to identify either the ultimate cause of these changes, e.g., the need to achieve an ideal and uniform word length, or the specific conditions for them, e.g., open vs. closed syllable. Little light has been shed on the problem since Paul's formulation of 1884. Typically absent are references to real evidence that might be adduced from Middle and Early New German orthographic practices.

This paper argues that the Dutch sociolinguistic situation in the 17th and 18th centuries should be analyzed as diaglossic, that is, involving a wide spectrum of variation in between localized spoken dialects and the supposed written standard. In fact, multiple instances of norm selection for writing render this diaglossic situation even more complex. The paper shows that multiple norm selection even occurred in cases when a strict and simple norm was selected early on, that is, in the late 16th–early 17th century. The case study is based on the Letters as Loot Corpus comprising private letters from the 1660s–1670s and the 1770s–1780s and focuses on the object form of the 1st person singular personal pronoun, namely, mij or mijn. Despite the early selection of mij, some language users in the late 17th and 18th century adopted mijn in writing. The analysis shows a normative split in written Dutch of the time, with most language users either converging to or diverging from the supposed standard form mij.*

This paper examines the distribution of schwa-initial versus schwa-less allomorphs in specific areas of Dutch derivational morphology, with particular reference to Shannon's (1991) argument that schwa epenthesis is motivated by the need to improve poor syllable contacts. The present paper makes two basic claims. First, although optimization of syllable contacts may play a role in certain segmental constraints on the distribution of schwa, its main motivation is prosodic. That is to say, schwa-less suffix allomorphs follow a branching foot. If the foot is non-branching, schwa is inserted as a linking element to make it branch. Furthermore, it is also argued that monosyllabic feet can be branching, so that “heavy” syllables of this type pattern in the same way as two syllables. The second claim made here is that these prosodic conditions on schwa allomorphy are best formulated not in terms of a rule but rather as a schema in the sense of Bybee and Slobin 1982.I would like to thank Michael Wardle and Ricardo Bermudez-Otero for their very helpful advice and comments. I am also grateful to the following native speakers of Dutch for their cooperation: Arachne van der Eijk, Roel Vismans, Henriette Louwerse, Christy Irosemito, Willemien Reckman, Maarten Dijkstra, and Philip van der Eijk. Thanks also to an anonymous JGL reader for valuable feedback.

In standard German, the non-occurrence of -s plurals as the first element of a lexical compound (e.g., *Auto-s-berg ‘heap of cars') vs. the regular occurrence of the other plural suffixes (e.g., Kind-er-club ‘children's club', Frau-en-fete 'women's party') has often been quoted as evidence for a dual mechanism model of morphology, which sees irregular forms as stored in the mental lexicon while regular forms are generated by rule (see Marcus et al. 1995). However, in colloquial northern German, where the s-plural is more widely used than in the standard language, it is possible to form productive compounds containing this suffix (e.g., Mädel-s-treff ‘girls’ meeting'). This paper investigates to what extent -s plurals are acceptable within compounds in colloquial northern German, whether they are subject to any linguistic constraints (for example, morphological or phonological), and what implications they might have for current morphological theory.*