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.

Dutch consonant cluster assimilations have come to play a central role in the debate over whether laryngeal features are restrictedly privative (single-valued) or must be encoded as binary (marking both positive and negative values). It has been argued, in particular, that the negative specification [–voice] is necessary in order to capture the difference in directionality of assimilation between stop-final and fricative-final clusters in Dutch as well as to accommodate the contrary behavior of the past suffix -de. Under the dimensional theory of laryngeal representation, the present paper provides a fresh analysis of the Netherlandic facts without reference to negative feature values, focusing on the role of phonetic enhancement versus phonology proper. The exposition is anchored in the history of Dutch as a Germanic language that is to a great extent Romance-like in its laryngeal phonology, and takes into consideration evidence from dialects and experimental phonetics.An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Eighth Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC 8) at Indiana University, Bloomington, April 26–28, 2002, and a related paper, “Privativity and the Laws of Enhancement”, was held at a Linguistics Student Organization Colloquium, University of Wisconsin–Madison, in March 2002. In addition to two anonymous reviewers for this journal, we owe thanks to Anthony Buccini, Rob Howell, Monica Macaulay, Bert Vaux, and the audiences at both presentations for valuable input. The usual disclaimers apply.

In this paper we argue for the following properties of clause-bound scrambling, as they are manifested in German. First, scrambling presupposes head-final projections. Only selected constituents, notably arguments, scramble, the reason being that phrases selected by a head have a unique base order. Second, scrambling involves antecedent-gap dependencies with A-chain properties. Third, scrambling is overt and non-string-vacuous. Fourth, scrambling is syntactically optional, clause-bound, category neutral, and may apply to more than one phrase per clause. Fifth, scrambled elements remain transparent for extraction; they are licit binders and take scope.

Furthermore, we evaluate our conclusion that scrambling is contingent on the “OV” property by examining Yiddish, an uncontroversial scrambling Germanic language with controversial VO versus OV status. We argue that Yiddish is a variant of an OV language—thus allowing scrambling—and that it is the only Germanic language with alternative V-positions in a VP-shell structure, like Hindi, and, arguably, like Slavic languages.We wish to thank two anonymous JGL reviewers for their constructive comments and for pointing out various shortcomings in the previous version. Special thanks go to Marga Reis for valuable suggestions on various sections. The responsibility for remaining shortcomings remains ours, of course. We are very grateful to Mark Louden for his generous support in enhancing the readability.

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.

This study analyzes prosodic cues and discourse markers in varieties of Low German and Alemannic in order to uncover how narrative structure is cued lexically and prosodically in different varieties of German. Intonational boundary tones, discourse markers, and pauses turned out to be sufficient to cue discourse units at different levels. Although the varieties under discussion use the same type of linguistic features, there are important differences of detail in pause distribution and categorization, functions of certain pitch contours, and the use and function of discourse markers, so that the particular set of contextualization cues is quite different for the various levels of discourse in each variety.

Frans van Coetsem, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Cornell University, prolific scholar, and esteemed teacher and colleague, died at his home in Ithaca, New York, on February 11, 2002. Over the course of his long professional career, Van Coetsem made numerous important and lasting contributions to Germanic linguistics and general linguistics and did so both directly through his own research and indirectly through the generous and inspiring mentoring he gave to his students.In writing this piece I have drawn in a number of places on a coauthored obituary to appear in the spring of 2003 in the Memorial Statements of the Faculty, 2001–2002, Cornell University; the authors of that statement are Anthony Buccini, James Gair, Wayne Harbert, and John Wolff. I have also included some facts that I learned from the obituary by Frans's close friend, Odo Leys, which appeared in Leuvense Bijdragen 91.1–2 (2002); the brief quote of Leys is also from that article.

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 paper is about a minor and so far neglected sentence type in German: wh-root infinitivals such as Wohin gehen? ‘Where (should one/we) go?’. I concentrate on describing their formal and interpretive properties in detail, and relate these properties in a nonarbitrary manner by suggesting ways in which the salient aspects of their interpretation, that is, (the specifics of) their modality, their subject interpretation, and their illocutionary use, could be derived from the interpretively relevant properties of their form.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung-Berlin (3/02, 5/02), the University of Pennsylvania (4/02), and the University of Frankfurt (6/02). Thanks to all the audiences for valuable comments and suggestions. Special thanks for constructive discussion and help with specific points of the paper are owed to many: Rajesh Bhatt, Veronika Ehrich, Ewald Lang, Manfred Krifka, Ingo Reich, Inger Rosengren, Joachim Sabel, Hubert Truckenbrodt, Ede Zimmermann, Ilse Zimmermann as well as the editor, Mark Louden, and two anonymous referees. A preprint version of this paper (here considerably revised) appeared as Reis 2002.

This study is the result of “substantial changes and revisions” (v) undertaken on an MIT dissertation completed in 1998 that brings into focus a large body of research on infinitive constructions. It consists of an introductory chapter, four core chapters, and a closing chapter with a summary and conclusion; it also includes an appendix with a sizable collection of data from German, as well as a table of verb classifications from five languages.

Nils Langer wrote this book with one major aim: to explore whether prescriptive grammarians influenced the formation of standard German. He does this by comparing language use and metalinguistic comments in the Early New High German period and by eliminating other factors, including “… system-internal reasons (as illustrated by an analysis of ENHG language use), sociolinguistic identification (as illustrated by distributional patterns of language use, e.g., with regard to text type)” (4), or random variation. Langer aims to establish that certain constructions disappeared from standard-language use after prescriptive grammarians' objections. He does not claim that grammarians are the major “creators” of standard German, but that we must assume a certain degree of influence for certain constructions, in particular when it comes to excluding features from the standard language. With this aim in mind, he investigates the use of periphrastic tun and to a lesser degree polynegation and double perfect constructions.

The prospect of writing a grammar of Notker's German has long been a goal of those involved in editing his adaptations of Latin philosophical works and school tracts. In his capacity as director of the monastery school at St. Gallen, Notker der Deutsche, or Notker Labeo, (ca. 950–1022), translated or adapted a number of Latin works derived from the philosophical traditions of late antiquity (cf. Ochsenbein 1999, Sonderegger 1970). Among these was the allegorical introduction to Martianus Capella's De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a text of decided importance for the instruction of the seven liberal arts throughout the rest of the Middle Ages. The linguistic and contextual difficulties of Martianus's work prompted various commentaries especially during the later Carolingian period. The commentary on Martianus by Remigius of Auxerre became associated with the St. Gallen monastery school and is cited by Notker at the opening of his translation of De nuptiis (cf. King 1986). Despite whatever resolution of philosophical conundrums Notker's translation might have yielded, it is his use of German in translating the first two books of Martianus that has attracted predominant critical and editorial attention.

This book describes the word order in sentences with a modal and a main verb, with an auxiliary and a present participle, and with an auxiliary and a past participle. The term MULTIPLE PREDICATE is defined as a construction “involving two predicates, one finite and the other non-finite” (1). The data mainly come from Ælfric's Catholic Homilies and the CD contains a list of files with the example sentences from the book. It is not clear (e.g., page 8) whether the author transcribed the text himself or used the Old English Dictionary e-text of the homilies (from page 44, it appears that he used the latter, since he uses other texts from that project).

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.