This paper presents an OT analysis of hypocoristic (nickname) formation based on previously unanalyzed data from Bernese Swiss German. The Bernese data are compared to the much discussed pattern of i-formation in Standard German, from which they differ in two important ways: the Bernese hypocoristics have Umlaut, and the syllable retained from the full name in the hypocoristic is not consistently the leftmost. The Umlaut phenomenon is shown to be an effect of the underlying shape of the hypocoristic suffix. The choice of syllable, while appearing to be a more marked pattern, can be shown to arise from the satisfaction of high-ranking, position-sensitive markedness constraints, illustrating the “emergence of the unmarked” in truncations.Earlier versions of this paper appeared in the McGill Working Papers in Linguistics (Grüter 2002) and were presented at the Montréal-Ottawa-Toronto (MOT) Phonology Workshop (McGill University, February 2002) and the Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable (UC Berkeley, April 2002). I am grateful to these audiences as well as to two anonymous JGL reviewers for helpful questions and comments. Special thanks are due to Heather Goad, whose extensive advice and encouragement have made this paper possible. All errors are of course my own. This research was supported by a McGill Major Fellowship.

This book is a substantial offering to Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler, the Austrian linguist who recently marked his 60th birthday. It consists of the contents (iii–vii) showing fifty-six studies, ten of which were written by two persons each; a brief foreword and afterword (both ix) with kind words for the Jubilar; a tabula gratulatoria (xi–xiii) listing over 100 names and institutes; Dressler's curriculum vitae (xv–xvii), which begins in 1957 at the University of Vienna, where he has been Head of the Department of Linguistics since 1978; and his bibliography (xix–xxxiv) of over 400 works, some thirty of which were coauthored or coedited with one of twenty-one of the authors in this festschrift. Then come the alphabetically arranged articles (1–514), each limited to roughly ten pages in order to accommodate as many parties as possible. There is no index.

This investigation of certain verb-second structures found in the German dialects Kiezdeutsch, Yiddish (both Eastern and Western), Bavarian, and Cimbrian, and to a more limited extent in colloquial German, leads to the hypothesis that Phonological Form, via the interface with the narrow syntax, provides three strategies for compliance with the verb-second restriction on main clauses. These are i) the remapping of two syntactic constituents into a single prosodic phrase, ii) the reduction and remapping of two or more words into a single prosodic word, and iii) the prosodic marking of the syntactic edge of a main clause where a restart of the clause occurs. The investigation, using minimalist tools, underscores the central role of the syntax-phonology interface without eliminating the need for the semantic interface in the derivation of German verb-second structures.*

In morphological theory, various models have been developed with respect to the appropriate levels of abstraction for stating morphological generalizations. This paper addresses a class of seemingly marginal and/or problematic phenomena in morphology and proposes that morphological descriptions regularly refer to two distinct levels of description. One is the level of “morphosyntax,” and one is the level of “morphophonology.” Furthermore, morphology is considered to be marginal if and only if the degree of isomorphy between representations on these two levels is reduced. This basic proposal is illustrated and tested with several central phenomena of morphology found in German: synthetic compounds, conversion, empty morphs, and trun-cation. The analysis proposed here argues for the necessity of a two-level model of morphology as an approach in which both abstract morphosyntax as well as more concrete morphophonology have a place.*

Middle Low German is generally considered to be a direct successor to Old Saxon. However, later dialects, including Middle Low German, differ from Old Saxon with respect to a number of features, which is unexpected under a direct succession relationship. To account for the presence of such features, some scholars attribute them to High German influence on Middle Low German (Wolff 1934, Stiles 1995, Stiles 2013). Others, however, hypothesize that written Old Saxon (which provides the basis for the comparison) was an artificial grapholect that reflected Old English and Franconian conventions rather than a genuine spoken language (Collitz 1901, Rooth 1973, Doane 1991:45–46). This paper further contributes to this discussion by examining the systems of degree adverbs in Old Saxon and Middle Low German. Based on data from different corpora, it is shown that the system in Old Saxon resembles the one in Old English, while the Middle Low German system is comparable to the systems in Middle High German and Early Middle Dutch. It is concluded that an explanation based solely on language contact is problematic, and that the grapholect hypothesis has more explanatory power.*

This paper suggests a series of schemas aimed at eliminating the main drawbacks of existing schemas of Yiddish proto-vowels. It attempts to complete the schemas developed by other scholars mainly in two aspects, proposing derivational rules that (1) account for Proto-Western Yiddish and its sub-dialects and (2) explain the relation between the vowels of the German donor language and Yiddish proto-vowels. This analysis shows the impossibility of constructing a schema of a single Proto-Yiddish as a historical reality and thus implies the polygenesis of the system of stressed vowels and diphthongs of Yiddish. Proto-Western Yiddish and Proto-Eastern Yiddish had no common, specifically Jewish ancestor. The comparative analysis of various German dialects and Yiddish proposed here provides the basis for determining the regions (East Franconia and Bohemia, respectively) where the stressed vocalism of the Yiddish dialects likely appeared and the corresponding time period (the 14th–15th centuries).

The loss of high-frequency function words is puzzling. Although they form part of core grammar—and, in some cases, have done so for thousands of years—some function words seem to just suddenly disappear. While the grammaticalization of content words into function words correlates with increase in usage, the loss of high-frequency function words cannot simply be explained by decrease in usage because of the indispensable function of these words. This article deals with the loss of the Germanic question particle, of the Germanic coordinating sentence conjunction, and of the Germanic negation particle. It describes their gradual decline as a result of language-specific interactions between phonology, syntax, and information structure: Function words occupy a fixed syntactic position, where they are systematically unstressed. Instead of being strengthened in their old position, they were lost. Instead of linking the loss of elements of core grammar to frequency-based semantic bleaching, it is attributed here to the interaction of linguistic subsystems. It is suggested that this development was unavoidable as the non-Proto-Indo-European structure of Germanic subsystems was eroding old Indo-European lexical material. Germanic prosody was not in harmony with the substance of the inherited Proto-Indo-European lexicon.*