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.*

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.*

Since prosodic units were introduced as a point of reference in sound change, Sievers' alternation of [i] and [j] in Gothic has been examined in terms of the syllable or the foot. However, such prosodic studies fail to capture the empirical fact that Sievers' alternation of [i] and [j] is consistently manifested only in the masculine ja-stem nouns and ja-stem verbs in Gothic. Furthermore, to account for the alternation, these studies rely on exceptional syllabification (Murray and Vennemann 1983), problematic foot parsing (Dresher and Lahiri 1991), or unmotivated abstract rules (Calabrese 1994), among other devices.

It has been hypothesized that separable complex verbs (SCVs, for example, ópzoeken ‘look up’) and inseparable complex verbs (ICVs, for example, doorzóeken ‘search’) form part of the same historical development, SCVs representing a stage intermediate to constructions with syntactic resultatives and ICVs. This paper shows that such a hypothesis is untenable, since many SCV preverbs and ICV preverbs are nonpredicative and thus semantically different from resultatives. Instead, it is claimed that predicative preverbs and nonpredicative preverbs result from two independent historical developments. In addition, the particular semantic and structural properties of SCVs are assumed to suggest a specific SCV structure, to be positioned in between syntactic phrases and morphologically complex words.I would like to thank Geert Booij, Hana Filip, Beth Levin, Andrew McIntyre, Ariane van Santen, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. Of course, any remaining errors are entirely my own.

A survey of the literature on Old Saxon derivational suffixes and suffixoids does not yield a neat and clear-cut picture of forms. The reason is that some researchers take a diachronic view of the data, while others take a synchronic view. In this article I recommend a panchronic view of the data in hopes of clarifying the situation. As part of the discussion I argue that affixoids are a good example of grammaticalization. I thus also discuss and—as far as research on German is concerned—aim to resurrect the notion of AFFIXOID as a linguistic category. If successful, the results of this paper may be applied to other languages.

The Norwegian pronoun det ‘it, that’ is basically third person neuter singular. Under certain conditions, it can have antecedents that are not neuter singular (for example, Marit kjøpte en kylling—Detkjøpte John også ‘Marit bought a chicken.masc—John bought one too’). Used this way, the pronoun does not refer to the same object as its antecedent; Borthen 2003 refers to it as a “type anaphor.” This article argues that type anaphora are not a unitary phenomenon. There are two groups with very different properties. One group realizes what was called surface anaphora in Hankamer & Sag 1976. The other group has a generic or eventive interpretation.*

This study investigates the roles of phonetic analogy and lexical frequency in an ongoing sound change, the devoicing of fricatives in Dutch, which occurs mainly in the Netherlands and to a lesser degree in Flanders. In the experiment, Dutch and Flemish students read two variants of 98 words: the standard and a nonstandard form with the incorrect voice value of the fricative. Dutch students chose the non-standard forms with devoiced fricatives more often than Flemish students. Moreover, devoicing, though a gradual process, appeared lexically diffused, affecting first the words that are low in frequency and phonetically similar to words with voiceless fricatives.*

Recent studies on spoken Dutch emphasize an ongoing recategorization of pronominal gender on semantic grounds, with no apparent con-nection to lexical gender (Audring 2006, 2009; De Vogelaer 2006, 2009; De Vogelaer & De Sutter 2010; De Vogelaer & De Vos 2011). In fact, gender instability is not confined to the pronominal domain: Some Dutch nouns display more than one lexical gender (de/het-nouns), a phenomenon that has not been linked to the process of pronominal re-semanticization. The aim of this paper is to identify the common semantic and pragmatic basis for pronominal gender agreement and the choice of a determiner for double gender nouns.

Based on a comparative corpus study, the present paper contrasts conditionals containing the modal verbs sollte in German, should in English, and mocht/moest in Dutch. The conditionals are examined with respect to the linkage levels between protasis and apodosis, the tense/mood patterns in the two clauses, and the degree of syntactic integration of the protasis into the apodosis. We argue that sollte, should, mocht, and moest are undergoing a process of grammaticalization as markers of conditionality, understood as upwards reanalysis in the hierarchy of functional projections. We show that this grammaticalization process is at different stages in the different languages, not showing any “sandwich”-like pattern.

When predicate constituents appear in the midfield in German, they must follow their sister constituents. When a midfield cannot be clearly identified, however, as in many matrix V2 clauses, predicate constituents may precede (certain of) their nonpredicate sister constituents. The contrast in serialization possibilities is curious. This paper provides a dependency grammar analysis of the phenomenon. Presenting four principles of word order for German, the analysis concentrates on the dependency grammar understanding of WEIGHT and RISING and how predicate constituents behave with respect to these areas. The relative flatness of dependency structures provides an opportunity for a theory of weight that does not exist for the more layered structures of most constituency grammars. The term RISING refers to discontinuities. When a discontinuity is perceived, the assumption is that rising has occurred. The understanding of predicates builds on the CHAIN concept. The words corresponding to the predicate in the semantics of an utterance always qualify as a chain in the syntax of that utterance.

In einer Reihe von Artikeln haben Joseph B. Voyles und zwei deutsche Linguisten unter dem Einfluß generativistischer Theorien von neuem kritische Erklärungen des ahd. i−Umlauts und der nhd. Verteilung der Umlautsvokale unternommen. Diese Art von linguistischer Historiographie entspricht m.E. nicht der realen Sprachgeschichte.

This paper investigates the possibility of subject omission in the history of Icelandic, including the syntactic and pragmatic conditions under which it could arise. Based on regression analysis of substantial data drawn from the IcePaHC corpus, we provide robust quantitative support for Hjartardóttir's (1987) claim that null subjects persist until a very late stage in Icelandic. We also argue, contra Sigurðsson (1993), that only one licensing mechanism is needed for null subjects in early Icelandic. Moreover, on the basis of the position of the null subjects and their person features, we argue that the modern stage, where (predominantly 3rd person) pro-drop yields to a system permitting topic drop of all persons, arises in Icelandic in the early twentieth century.*

This paper re-examines the notions of “linguistic purism” and “linguistic nationalism” with respect to public discourses of language cultivation in recent years in a number of Germanic-speaking countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, and, briefly, Norway). In particular, the paper considers domain protection and attitudes to spelling variability and spelling reform. While in Germany linguistic nationalism and linguistic purism meet in speaker attitudes towards loanwords and spelling reform, in other Germanic-speaking countries linguistic nationalism may also take different forms, and linguistic purism may have other targets and motivations.

German words like Siedl-ung [] ‘settlement’, which contain a sequence of obstruent plus sonorant consonant between vowels, pose two problems assuming the heterosyllabic parse: (a) the first syllable is superheavy, but superheavy syllables are otherwise restricted in their occurrence to word-final position; and (b) the /d/ does not devoice, contrary to what one would expect, since Final Devoicing operates without exception in coda position. The problem in assuming that consonant clusters like [dl] are tautosyllabic is that they are otherwise non-occurring in word-initial position. In the present study, it is argued that the heterosyllabic parse for words like Siedl-ung is correct, and that (a) and (b) derive an explanation by appealing to paradigm uniformity. It is shown in an optimality-theoretic analysis that the canonical patterns capturing the distribution of superheavy syllables and Final Devoicing require the ranking “markedness ” input-output faithfulness.” The paradigm uniformity effects, that is, (a) and (b), require a specific output-output faithfulness constraint to dominate the markedness constraint. The proposed paradigm uniformity approach is compared to earlier treatments in which the notion of paradigm does not play a role. It is also shown that the tautosyllabic parse in examples like Siedl-ung is problematic.This paper was presented at Indiana University in December 2004 and at the Old World Conference in Phonology 2 (OCP-2) at the University of Tromsø in January 2005. Thanks are due to the respective audiences for their comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank two anonymous JGL reviewers for their remarks on an earlier written version. All disclaimers apply.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, eastern Wisconsin went from being heavily German speaking to almost entirely English speaking. The largest city, Milwaukee, is claimed to have experienced language shift more rapidly than the state's rural German communities. We examine this apparent asymmetry, comparing evidence for language shift in urban Milwaukee, the city of Watertown, and the small town of Lebanon, drawing on census data, reports on language of church services, and information on the German language press. Our findings show little asymmetry in rate of shift across the three communities, but evidence is consistent with a correlation between shift and Warren's Great Change.*

This paper is an investigation of the early use of the Old High German demonstrative as a definite article. Previous work has often failed to take into account the many ways that the definite article can be employed or the fact that new grammatical structures sometimes evolve over great lengths of time. This paper discusses the evolutionary process and stages of article use in three individual OHG documents, the Isidor translation, the Tatian translation, and Otfrid's Evangelien-buch, the three longest OHG documents in Franconian dialects. It proposes that a definite article did exist from the earliest recorded examples of OHG although with differing uses at different times (and places).*

In Modern English, function words such as this, that, and the are pronounced with a voiced onset, while content words have the original voiceless onset. A statistical analysis of the distribution of <ð> and <þ> in Vices and Virtues, a text preserved in London, British Library, Stowe MS 34 (circa 1200), reveals a distribution, whose most plausible interpretation is that these two letters were used to encode stress-conditioned differences in voicing. This sets the voicing of function words, normally dated to the fourteenth century, back to circa 1200 or earlier.*

This article discusses methodological aspects of using Gothic orthography for the purposes of deducing phonological properties of the language. The vowel/glide alternation known as Sievers' law is used as an example. In order for scholars to propose an analysis of this alternation they must form a view of how syllable structure works in Gothic, and in order to do that they must interpret the orthography and determine to what extent it reflects phonology. It is primarily consonant clusters and word divisions that serve as orthographic sources for syllabification, beside alternation of i/j and u/w in related forms. A closer methodological look at some of the arguments that have been brought to bear on the issue of orthography and syllabification reveals that the strongest position that word division consistently reflects phonological syllabification cannot be upheld. Furthermore, it is shown that word division has little bearing on which word-initial clusters are possible in Gothic.I would like to thank Jonas Carlkvist, Rune Palm, Santeri Palviainen, Marc Pierce, and Rudolf Rydstedt for their help and willingness to discuss different aspects of this article. I am also very much indebted to the three anonymous JGL reviewers, whose comments have been of considerable help. All errors are mine.

Several kinds of systematic deviations from the Greek original, including simple insertions and omissions of subject pronouns and transformations of nonfinite or impersonal Greek constructions into personal finite clauses, provide evidence concerning the distribution of null and overt referential subject pronouns in Gothic. While the evidence leaves no doubt that Gothic was a null-subject language, it also reveals a tendency, not found in Ancient Greek, toward the use of overt subjects for nontopic antecedents. This Gothic pattern is reminiscent of what a number of researchers have found recently in some other null-subject languages such as Italian, but Gothic appears to occupy an intermediate position between Ancient Greek and Italian.*

This study provides an empirical analysis of light verb constructions in Old Swedish. These constructions contain a semantically light verb, such as giva ‘give’ or göra ‘make’, that may be paired with an abstract nominal object, as in giva radh ‘give advice’ or giva hiälp ‘give help’. Using a corpus of nine Old Swedish texts written in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, I track the frequency of light verb constructions and analyze the range of transitive light verb + object pairings. I consider the effects of time, genre, and the type of modification to the nominal object in the quantitative analysis. The results contribute to ongoing discussions in crosslinguistic, diachronic research on the reasons for the increase in frequency of light verb constructions as well as the possibility that this construction exhibits characteristics of grammaticalization or lexicalization.