The paper presents an in-depth study of the conditions under which unaccusative verbs in German take part in the formation of so-called ADJECTIVAL PASSIVES. It provides corpus-linguistic as well as psycho-linguistic evidence arguing that combinations of sein ‘to be’ with the participle of an unaccusative verb are systematically ambiguous between a present perfect reading (with sein as auxiliary) and an adjectival reading (with sein as copula). The first part of the paper highlights the adjectival character of the construction in question. The second part presents the results of three rating studies that help unravel the pragmatic conditions that govern the adjectival conversion of unaccusatives. This leads to the conclusion that what has become known as the “adjectival passive” construction is a rather general, broadly available word formation process that is characteristically shaped and controlled by pragmatic factors.*

This paper reports on a small-scale exploratory study of metapragmatic perceptions of apologies, directives, and modal particles in two national varieties of a pluricentric language in contact. It investigates the way in which Austrians and Germans (believe they) communicate in German when they are married to each other and living in an environment where the national language is not German, that is, where they do not need to converge toward the national variety of the wider community. The study finds that those informants of Austrian background tend toward negative politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987), focus more on blame and guilt, and engage more in the art of conversation. Those of German background tend more toward positive politeness and the verbal fulfillment of respectability. There is some evidence of convergence but a surprising amount of residual national variation in the realization of the speech acts. However, there is a limited use of modal particles and evidence of a weakening of intuition in relation to their use.We are indebted to the Australian Research Council for financial assistance for the project “Dynamics of Immigrant Language Contact,” and to Leslie Bodi and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions.

A pivotal process in the loss of phonological quantity in West Germanic languages is what is traditionally known as Open Syllable Lengthening. Existing accounts have found no explanation for why languages such as English apply this change in less than 50% of the relevant cases. This paper presents the results of a corpus investigation of four West Germanic languages showing that whether Open Syllable Lengthening occurs in more than 50% of predicted cases correlates with the ratio of closed syllables with short vowels to open syllables with long vowels. We interpret this as the result of frequency effects that have markedly shaped the application of Open Syllable Lengthening in West Germanic. This has implications for phonological change in general, as well as for the relationship between stress and syllable structure in West Germanic languages.*

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.*

This paper seeks to find the best linguistic analysis of the German semispecified, productive pattern N hin, N her (for example, Krieg hin, Krieg her, es muss eine gute Show werden ‘War or no war, it must be a good show’). The basic question is whether the properties of N hin, N her can be accounted for in a rule-based approach or whether they are to be regarded as idiosyncratic properties of this construction. One of the characteristic features of N hin, N her is the identity of the nouns. This raises the question of whether or not N hin, N her is an instance of syntactic reduplication. It is shown that rule-based copying accounts fail when they are applied to the case of N hin, N her. The paper argues for an alternative, constructionist account of N hin, N her, which is able to cover both regular and idiosyncratic aspects of the construction in a systematic fashion. However, the paper goes beyond a standard constructionist account by also arguing that the idiosyncratic features of the construction can be further explained if one takes into account general pragmatic principles. This requires a theory that incorporates a systematic interface with pragmatics.*

In Old Norse poetry, there is a syntactic difference between bound clauses (subordinate clauses and main clauses introduced by a con-junction) and unbound clauses (main clauses not introduced by a conjunction). In bound clauses, the finite verb is often placed late in the sentence, violating the V2 requirement upheld in prose. In unbound clauses, the V2 requirement is normally adhered to, but in fornyrðislag poetry, late placement of the finite verb is occasionally found. Hans Kuhn explained these instances as a result of influence from West Germanic poetry. The present article argues that these instances can be explained as a remnant of the Proto-Norse word order, and that this explanation is better supported by the data.*

In this paper, I argue that quantitative data on relative clause variation in Old English provide additional evidence against the theory of multiple authorship of Beowulf. I show that aspects of various relative clause types in Beowulf are unique in the Old English poetic and prose corpus and homogenous throughout all three proposed parts of the poem. Comparison with the poems attributed to Cynewulf indicates that the frequency, distribution, and selection of relative clause types are consistent throughout an individual poet's compositions. Statistical analysis of the general distribution of relative clause types and factors such as the type of antecedent and its distance to the relative clause supports the hypothesis that Beowulf is a unified poem.I would like to thank R. D. Fulk, Kari Ellen Gade, and Rex A. Sprouse for comments and critiques of drafts of this paper, and audiences at “Studies in the History of the English Language I” at UCLA and “Philology in Germanic Studies at Illinois and Indiana V” at the University of Illinois for helpful discussion. Special thanks to Julie Auger for advice and her generous help with the VARBRUL analysis. Any remaining errors are of course my own.

Introduction

Traditionally, research on language change has been a post-mortem activity, focused on isolated changes that are complete and often only documented in written texts. In the 1960s the field was advanced considerably by Labovian sociolinguistics and the investigation of “change in progress” adduced through patterns of community-internal linguistic variation correlated with external facts about speakers such as age and class (see Labov 1994 for an overview). However, despite the many benefits of such work on “dynamic synchrony,” we still know relatively little about how language change unfolds over the lifetimes of individual speakers, that is, in real time (cf. Bailey et al. 1991). The logistical challenges of such research are, of course, considerable. Whereas it is straightforward for psycholinguists to observe language development in children over the course of a few years, documenting changes in the verbal behavior of individuals over several decades is by contrast much less feasible. Nevertheless, present theoretical models of language change could be considerably improved by the results of real-time studies.

We investigate the intonation of information-seeking and rhetorical questions in Icelandic. The results for the information-seeking questions largely confirm observations in previous literature based mostly on introspective data: Polar questions are mostly realized with late rise nuclear accents where the peak aligns after a stressed syllable (L*+H), wh-questions with peak accents (H*); wh-questions often start high (%H, H*). Illocution types (that is, information-seeking versus rhetorical questions) differ in nuclear pitch accent types and in the type and frequency of prenuclear accents. The default boundary tone is low (L%) across question types and illocution types. The results are discussed against the background of previous findings with respect to the relationship between question and illocution type, and prosody.*

As a starting point, this paper offers a theoretical discussion of a number of widely used yet diversely conceived concepts: (standard) language ideology, identity, agency, and indexicality. Using these concepts, we analyze a number of illustrative interview extracts from a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with Flemish primary and secondary school teachers. Our goal is twofold. First, we discuss how Flemish teachers perceive (the importance of) Standard Dutch and other, nonstandard varieties of Dutch. Second, we show how these perceptions discursively shape teacher identities of authenticity, authority, and professionalism.

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.

Three Dutch creoles, all of them extinct, have been documented, but not all to the same extent. Negerhollands of the Virgin Islands has been documented throughout a 250-year period, Berbice Dutch of Guyana during two decades of solid fieldwork in the 1970s and 1980s, and Skepi Dutch is only known through a handful of sentences and some 200 words collected in the 1970s. In this article, the lexical and grammatical data from the three creoles are compared, to the extent that they are available and comparable. The lexicons are compared on the basis of the etymological sources (from Dutch and other languages, and when the source is Dutch, whether the same or different words provide source for the same meanings), and the phonological and phonotactic patterns of the roots. The grammatical comparison is done initially on the basis of the 10 grammatical traits deductible from the scarce Skepi material, and then on the basis of a larger set of 22 traits, where Skepi could not be taken into account. Typologically, Berbice Dutch appears closer to Dutch than the other two creoles, but lexically it is farthest from Dutch. For some of the analyses, phylogenetic software was used to visualize connections and distances between each of the creoles and Dutch. The conclusion is that the three creoles came into being independently, with some areal contact between Skepi Dutch and Berbice Dutch. It is also argued that the varieties of the 20th-century Negerhollands had become so typologically distinct from those of the 18th century that they should be treated as varieties of two separate languages. The documented forms of the language show a gradual move away from Dutch and toward a more creole-like profile in the 20th century.*

A standard assumption in work on binding in Norwegian is that a reflexive must have an antecedent that is “visible,” that is, either phonologically realized or PRO. The purpose of this article is to show that this restriction is not observed by many speakers. There are two cases of reflexives with invisible binders. First, an implicit argument can be a binder in a nominalization (Første fase bestod av analyse av seg selv. ‘The first phase consisted of analysis of oneself’). Second, a “semantic subject” can be a binder in an indefinite noun phrase with a propositional interpretation (Et helt hus for seg selv er et slit. ‘A whole house for oneself is hard work’). Some younger speakers also allow a reflexive form with a generic interpretation to occur with no binder (En motorsag kan skade seg selv og andre. ‘A chain saw can hurt oneself and others’).I would like to thank colleagues and students for discussion and intuitions, especially Kjell Johan Sæbø, Eirik Welo, Atle Grønn, Dag Haug, Anneliese Pitz, Gunnar Hrafn Hrafnbjargarson, Mads Haga, and Trine Egebakken. Thanks also to Thorstein Fretheim, Marit Julien, Stephen Wechsler, Annie Zaenen, and to the three anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to my daughters Julie and Therese for their intuitions.

While the transfer of English nouns into Texas German has received substantial scholarly attention, there currently exist no detailed studies on the transfer of English verbs into Texas German in particular and German-American dialects in general. This paper therefore discusses English verbs that are code-switched and loan-translated into Texas German from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective, using data collected by the Texas German Dialect Project since 2001. The analysis serves two purposes. The first is to provide an overview of English verbs used by Texas German speakers: how these verbs are integrated into German structures, and whether they have become established in the Texas German lexicon. The second goal is to show how analyzing verbal transfers in contact situations underscores the dynamic, interactive nature of language contact and structure. This part of the analysis is motivated by Backus & Dorleijn’s (2009) discussion of loan translation, which emphasizes that existing classifications of language contact phenomena must be rethought, as many instances of transference are not clearly captured by existing categories. Thus, this study goes beyond a lexical analysis of English verbs in Texas German by discussing how lexical transfer interacts with morphology, semantics, and syntax.*

This paper examines the cause of the decline of the preterite tense in favor of the present perfect tense in Early New High German. This development has long been attributed to apocope, which rendered the 3sg. weak preterite suffix -te homophonous with the 3sg. present suffix -t. By analyzing a database of over 20,000 past-tense clauses, this study evaluates the apocope account and more recent hypotheses. The resulting data lead to a new explanation: syncope in the 2sg. and 2pl. of weak verbs yielded dispreferred final clusters (-tst and -tt), resulting in a preference in these contexts for the present perfect, which then spread to other contexts.*

An examination of documents reflecting the change in late Middle High German and Early New High German of <s> to <sch> initially before a sonorant shows that it can be described as a “processual change,” one that affects one environment after another in a regular fashion. This change occurred first before a lateral; thereafter it was extended to nasals—alveolar then labial—and finally to the labial glide. After the late MHG merger of <s> with <z> following a vowel, <s> came to stand in complementary distribution with <sch>. The processual change took place by a process of “phonetic analogy,” whereby <s> before a lateral was gradually replaced by the alveopalatal on the basis of a relation of acoustic-auditory similarity with strident plus trill. The remainder of the procession proceeded in a similar manner.

The words discussed here are vaguely connected, for all three may originally go back to sound complexes designating objects capable of swelling and making frightening noises. In boy, we probably have a blend of *boi ‘devil’ and *bo ‘little brother’. (A close parallel is German Bube.) The etymon of beacon seems to be *bauk-, which, like OE būc ‘stomach’, referred to swelling. Its original meaning was ‘portent’ ‘banner’ and ‘signal fire’ were added to ‘portent, sign’ under the influence of the word for ‘token’. A reflex of another word that denoted an inflatable object is buoy, borrowed from Middle Dutch.

We measured orthographic differences between five Germanic languages. First, we tested the hypothesis that orthographic stem variation among languages does not correlate with orthographic variation in inflectional affixes. We found this hypothesis true when considering the aggregated stem and affix distances between the languages. We also correlated the stem and affix distances within the cognate pairs in each language pair. We found low correlations, the lowest of them being not significant. Second, we tested the hypothesis that orthographic stem variation among languages is larger than orthographic variation in inflectional affixes. This hypothesis was also found to be true. Orthographic distance is likely to be a potential predictor of written intelligibility, but our results suggest that when modeling written intelligibility, a distinction needs to be made between stem and affix distances.*

This paper discusses grammatical gender in Norwegian by bringing together data from first language acquisition, Norwegian heritage language, and dialect change. In all these contexts, gender is often claimed to be a vulnerable category, arguably due to the relative non-transparency of gender assignment. Furthermore, the feminine gender is in the process of being lost in many Norwegian dialects, as feminine agreement forms (for example, the indefinite article) are merged with the masculine. The definite suffix, in contrast, is quite stable, as it is acquired early and does not undergo attrition/change. We argue that the combined data provide evidence that gender and declension class are separate phenomena, and we outline a possible formal analysis to account for the findings.*

As a complement to C. B. van Haeringen's classic comparative study (1956) that positioned the grammar of Dutch in between the grammars of English and German, this study compares the productivity of three kinds of “raising” patterns in these languages: Object-to-Subject, Subject-to-Object, and Subject-to-Subject raising. It establishes the extent to which Dutch, as well as English and German, have evolved from the old West Germanic starting point these languages are assumed to have shared in this area of grammar. The results are a test case for Hawkins' (1986) case syncretism account of the difference in “explicit-ness” between the grammars of English and German.*