This paper studies the internal structure of definite articles and demon-stratives in twelve Germanic languages. Examining synchronic and diachronic data as well as systematic gaps, it seeks to illuminate the nature of definiteness markers and inflections, d- and -er in German d-er ‘the' and d-ies-er ‘this', with the goal of identifying some consequences for the syntax of the determiner phrase as a whole. Arguing that definite-ness markers are semantically vacuous elements, the paper proposes that articles involve an inflectional head in the syntax and demonstratives consist of an inflectional and a deictic head. Isomorphic correspondences between overt components and abstract syntactic structure may be partially or completely “masked” by postsyntactic operations.*

In consequence of the familiar High German consonant shift, the voiceless stops /p t k/ became the affricates /pf ts kx/, simplifying later to the geminate fricatives /ff ss (‘ƷƷ’) xx/ in certain environments. It has long been assumed that the affricates developed only from aspirated allophones of /p t k/, thus accounting for the retention of plain stops in /s/-clusters and a few other positions, but it is not obvious why particularly aspiration, ensuing from a laryngeal gesture of spread glottis, should have resulted in the oral property of affrication. Neither is it clear how etymologically simplex segments, upon deaffrication in certain environments, might have resulted in geminates without further stipulation. Proceeding from essentially traditional assumptions, and at the same time addressing important questions about Germanic phonetics raised by Vennemann (1984), the present paper attributes the triggering of the affrication event to an early factoring out, or segmentalization, of the feature for aspiration, i.e., pre-OHG [ph th kh] → [ph th kh]. Explanations are then proposed for the development of affricates out of these now disegmental sequences via place assimilation from the stops, and of the affricates into geminate fricatives (postvocalically and in some postconsonantal environments) via assimilatory weakening.

At least since the seminal works on the clause structure of German (Bierwisch 1963, Thiersch 1978, Den Besten 1983 in the generative framework; Drach 1963 and Höhle 1986 within the Topological Field Model), much attention has been devoted to cases of apparent violation of the strict Verb-Second (V2) word order that characterizes matrix but not embedded clauses in German. In particular, phenomena such as multiply-filled prefield (Müller 2003, 2005, 2013; Speyer 2008; Bildhauer 2011; Müller et al. 2012) and so-called postinitial adverbial connectors (Métrich & Courdier 1995, Pasch et al. 2003, Breindl 2008, Volodina & Weiß 2010) in main clauses have been discussed. In this paper, I propose a novel approach to the nature and formal status of V2 in German, showing that a slightly different postulation of its structural features solves the problem of finding ad-hoc solutions to each “deviant” phenomenon.

This article examines the imperative of say as a pragmatic marker in English and Dutch. Present-day say and zeg ‘say’ are contrasted on the basis of comparable corpus data. This comparison, together with additional diachronic data, serves as input for a study of the typical developments of the imperative of say as a pragmatic marker. Further-more, on the basis of a wider range of European and other languages, the article explores the possibility of the developments in English and Dutch being an areal phenomenon.*

This paper is a study of the morphology and phonology of truncations in German (also known as i-Bildungen) within the framework of Optimality Theory. Truncations are shown to constitute a widespread and productive morphological pattern in Modern Standard German. The morphosyntactic properties of these forms are shown to follow from the assumption of a regular binary word-syntactic structure in which the base functions as the head, and a phonologically empty morpheme adds other, non-head, properties. The specific phonological properties can then be derived from the operation of a set of ranked constraints in the sense of Optimality Theory. The analysis implies a strong correspondence between reduplication and truncation as two related aspects of prosodic morphology.A first version of this paper was presented in March 1996; the handout from this presentation (Wiese 1996) has been discussed occasionally since. Members of the research project Prosodische Morphologie (part of SFB 282 “Theorie des Lexikons”) at the universities of Düsseldorf and Cologne, in particular Chris Golston, Martin Neef, Renate Raffelsiefen, Heinz Vater, Markus Walther, and Anja Werner, have contributed to the early stages of the paper in different ways. In addition, I thank Susanne Niedeggen-Bartke, Caroline Féry, and Birgit Alber for helpful input, and two anonymous JGL reviewers for important criticism and clarifications.

In some Norwegian dialects, such as older Oslo dialect, the noun mamma ‘mother’ unexpectedly appears to be masculine. The Nordreisa dialect (Northern Norwegian) goes one step further. The word looks like it is masculine, but only in the definite form. This is an unusual “split” because gender mixture is normally based on number, not definiteness (but we find some few corroborative examples in other Norwegian dialects and different, but converging evidence on the Web). The Nordreisa example of mamma is unusual also because agreement targets are affected differently. The preference is for masculine agreement within the noun phrase, but for feminine agreement outside it. This is, therefore, an intriguing example since it combines a split based on definiteness with different gender require-ments according to different agreement targets. On careful analysis, and given strict adherence to the classical, agreement-based definition of gender, the unusual behavior of mamma turns out to conform to the Agreement Hierarchy.*

Although Dutch, English, and German all have a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless plosives, they differ in the way these stops are realized. While English and German contrast voiceless aspirated with phonetically voiceless stops, Dutch has a contrast between voiceless unaspirated and prevoiced stops. This study compares these three laryngeal stop systems and examines the acquisition of the English and German systems by a group of native speakers of Dutch. The analysis reveals that both trained and untrained participants transferred prevoicing from Dutch into English and German but acquired aspiration and thus showed a “mixed” laryngeal system in both their L2 (English) and their L3 (German). Since even untrained participants produced voiceless stops in the target Voice Onset Time range, pronunciation training has only a moderate effect.*

This paper argues that the use of mixed Dutch, the speech style that Flemish linguists have come to name tussentaal (literally ‘interlanguage’) and which is made up of dialect and standard features, can index meanings conventionally associated with dialect and Standard Dutch, depending on the linguistic ecology in which it occurs. Consequently, and in contrast with current explanations that attribute context-independent social meaning to tussentaal, we argue that its meaning needs to be identified relative to the unfolding interaction in particular contexts of use. Using a corpus of Flemish telecinematic discourse, we suggest that this finding calls for a renewed appreciation of tussentaal in relation to burgeoning hypotheses of destandardization.*

One of the enduring cruxes in Afrikaans historical linguistics has been the origin of the so-called “double” or more properly “brace” negation, specifically with respect to the negative particle nie in sentence-final position. Though bipartite negation is well represented in the Germanic languages, the Afrikaans pattern stands alone. The brace negation is an innovation that came about through the reanalysis of a discourse-dependent (pragmatically conditioned) structure in metropolitan Dutch. The agents of the change were Khoikhoi and enslaved peoples at the Cape in the context of wholesale language shift and basilectalization under the pressure of a socioeconomic order based on caste. Given the intensive mixing between mesolectal and basilectal varieties as part of a shared repertoire, the innovation was accepted by rural, lower-class Europeans living in closest proximity to indigenes and slaves, with stylistic and social variation.

In this paper, we investigate an ongoing change in the grammatical gender system of Norwegian. Previous research has shown that the feminine form of the indefinite article is quickly disappearing from several dialects, which has led to claims that the feminine gender is being lost from the language. We have carried out a study of the status of the feminine in possessives across five age groups of speakers of the Tromsø dialect. Our findings show that the prenominal possessives are affected by the change to the same extent as the indefinite article, while forms that have been argued not to be exponents of gender (the definite suffix and the postnominal possessive) are generally unaffected.

In the literature on grammaticalization, it is generally assumed that there are two categories of bound elements, clitics and affixes, and that a development from the former to the latter is an example of gram-maticalization. Frequently, this development in form is assumed to be associated with a change in function. In this paper, we argue that a simple dichotomy between clitic and affix does not do justice to the variation found between bound elements, nor to the changes they undergo over time. We also argue that changes in form are not always accompanied by a change in function. We illustrate our discussion with the history and current distribution of definiteness marking in Scandinavian.*

In the following paper, we claim that the so-called Inversionen nach und are instances of V1 clauses. Although these constructions are attested from Old High German to the 19th century, we focus on the Middle High German period. Our arguments are based upon information- and discourse-structural properties. These clauses share typical properties of V1 clauses, namely, the absence of a topic-comment division, their relevance for textual cohesion, the accessibility status of the subject, the lexical semantics of their predicate, and their expressivity.*

The present paper addresses the issue of spoken features in older and younger runic inscriptions, particularly in the Blekinge group of the seventh century. Despite the general expectation of “high” style, it is argued that runic inscriptions represent a continuum of different styles and registers. The present analysis corroborates the claim that runic writing receives no special status among alphabetic writing systems, and that runic texts constitute no exception to the general rule of textual variation. A strong case is provided by the Bekinge curse formula of Stentoften and Björketorp, whose affinity with oral speech is signalled by a series of stylistic and linguistic features.A related lecture entitled “Der Problemkreis der Übergangsinschriften im Lichte neuerer Forschungsbeiträge” was held at the Academy of Science in Oslo on September 4, 2004. In addition to the audience at this presentation and two anonymous JGL reviewers, I owe thanks to Heinrich Beck, Klaus Düwel, Henrik Williams, James E. Knirk, Jan Terje Faarlund, Wolfgang Dressler, and Paul Kerswill for valuable input. The usual disclaimers apply.

In this paper, it is argued that, although Dutch gender assignment is not systematically organized along semantic lines in the lexicon, the gender system has a semantic basis. This semantic basis involves a distinction between masculine/common gender associated with a high degree of individuation on the one hand, and neuter gender associated with a low degree of individuation, on the other hand. This is in line with Audring (2006, 2009), who found that Dutch pronouns often show semantic agreement along these lines. It is shown that the same semantic distinction between the genders can also be found in the nominal domain. It surfaces particularly in cases where lexically stored gender does not play a role. The semantic distinction arguably goes back to Proto-Indo-European. It is argued that, since nominal gender has become an invariable, lexically stored feature of nouns, the semantic basis of nominal gender assignment has become disrupted. This causes a con-flict between lexical and semantic gender agreement in pronouns. It is suggested that the surfacing of semantic agreement in this conflict is connected with a reduced marking of lexical gender on adnominal elements.

In this study, we address the ways in which nouns can give rise to new adjectives in Dutch and German. More specifically, the focus is on words with an evaluative meaning that can be used in a wide range of morphological and syntactic constructions in recent (and informal) language. For example, the German noun Hammer ‘hammer’ can be used in Hammervorstellung ‘very good performance’ or hammer film ‘fantastic film’. In the literature, two distinct hypotheses can be found to account for the adjectival uses of such evaluative nouns. The debonding hypothesis states that the intensifying bound morpheme has developed into a free morpheme. The conversion hypothesis suggests that the new adjectival uses are the result of a syntactic reanalysis of an N as an A that takes place in the predicative position. In our case study, we analyze the synchronic bound and free uses of Dutch top, and we compare them with German top and spitze. We conclude that the emergence of the adjectival uses of these morphemes points toward an interaction between both processes involved, conversion and debonding.

This paper presents an account of st-(middle) verbs in Icelandic that treats -st as the head of a functional phrase-object agreement (AgrO)- and argues that, consequently, st-formation is a syntactic rather than a lexical process. Supporting evidence includes the fact that -st is a clitic rather than an inflectional or derivational element attached to the verb. This analysis has the advantage that st-verbs, which on the surface appear disparate in their interpretation (e.g., reflexive vs. passive), can be unified under a single syntactic operation. The differences in interpretation fall out from argument structure properties of individual verbs. A consistent mapping between morphology and syntax is obtained.*

Given the common ancestry of Dutch and Afrikaans, it is not surprising that they use similar periphrastic constructions to express progressive meaning: aan het (Dutch) and aan die/’t (Afrikaans) lit. ‘at the’; bezig met/(om) te (Dutch) lit. ‘busy with/to’ and besig om te lit. ‘busy to’ (Afrikaans); and so-called cardinal posture verb constructions (zitten/sit ‘sit’, staan ‘stand’, liggen/lê ‘lie’ and lopen/loop ‘walk’), CPV te (‘to’ Dutch) and CPV en (‘and’ Afrikaans). However, these cognate constructions have grammaticalized to different extents. To assess the exact nature of these differences, we analyzed the constructions with respect to overall frequency, collocational range, and transitivity (compatibility with transitive predicates and passivizability). We used two corpora that are equal in size (both about 57 million words) and contain roughly the same types of written text. It turns out that the use of periphrastic progressives is generally more widespread in Afrikaans than in Dutch. As far as grammaticalization is concerned, we found that the Afrikaans aan die- and CPV-constructions, as well as the Dutch bezig- and CPV-constructions, are semantically restricted. In addition, only the Afrikaans besig- and CPV en-constructions allow passivization, which is remarkable for such periphrastic expressions.*

Invoking findings from studies on the grammaticization of tense/aspect meanings, I argue that semantic reconstruction of the Present Day English progressive from an often cited Old English construction (beon + PAP) is semantically very unlikely. Instead I argue for a reconstruction of the progressive from a locative construction source of the type, be on hunting. However, as I also show, there is a kind of formal relationship between the present-day English progressive and the OE construction that was encouraged by the prescriptions and proscriptions of the Early Modern English grammarians. Thus, by paying attention to both semantic and formal aspects of the development of the progressive, I provide a clearer picture of its historical reconstruction.

This article examines the rúnatal stanzas (5–19) of the Eddic poem Sigrdrífumál, particularly as they reflect conventions for deploying runic literacy in Iron Age Europe, the dynamics behind those conventions, and the light they shed on runic origins. Sigrdrífumál represents the insertion of a knowledge message into a framework crafted from the staging, diction, and materials of an inherited Indo-European motif-index.