The article focuses on the hypothesis that the structural complexity of languages is variable and historically changeable. By means of a quantitative statistical analysis of naturalistic corpus data, the question is raised as to what role language contact and adult second language acquisition play in the simplification and complexification of language varieties. The results confirm that there is a significant correlation between intensity of contact and linguistic complexity, while at the same time showing that there is a need to consider other social factors, and, in particular, the attitude of a speech community toward linguistic norms.*

The present article investigates the patterning of glides in Westphalian German. One question to be addressed is the structure of onglides, for example, the in Nase ‘nose’ and the in ‘village’. I argue that surface onglides are in the nucleus and not in the onset. The proposed representation contrasts with the ones for onglides in related languages, that is, English and Frisian. I show that Westphalian German also possesses a labial approximant [υ]—also known as a consonantal glide—which is distinct from both the onglide and the fricative [v]. I argue that onglides are underlying short vowels, which are parsed as glides by syllabification. The approximant [υ] is argued to be derived from /v/. The proposed analysis is shown to be superior to one in which [υ] derives from /u/, as proposed by Wiese (1996) for New High German.*

In Present-Day English, the particle out is obligatorily adjacent to the following of PP, as in He pulled the plugs out of his ears / *He pulled out the plugs of his ears, even though particles can normally precede or follow the object of the particle verb, as in Hepulled out the plugs / Hepulled the plugs out. Interestingly, in Old English and Middle English, the particle out could occur either adjacent or nonadjacent to the of PP. Based on corpus data covering the period from Old English to Late Modern English, I show that the change in the syntax of directional out of involves grammaticalization: The bleaching of the directional meaning of the preposition of led to a structural reanalysis by which the of PP became included in the particle's phrasal projection and could no longer be separated from the particle out. This in turn led to phono-logical reduction of the preposition of. The loss of the nonadjacent option is argued to be connected to the status of particles as optionally projecting elements.*

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.*

In Afrikaans, medial /g/, /v/, and /d/ have often been lenited or deleted, sometimes giving rise to alternations or the restructuring of stem forms. After an analysis of the distribution of the processes, some of the morphological consequences are briefly sketched. In order to find out more about the determinants of the lenition or deletion processes, which do not seem to have applied exceptionlessly, a quantitative analysis of lexicographical data containing over 200 different items was carried out. A number of probabilistic phonological and grammatical conditions were uncovered that provided insight into the rule-typological status of the processes. The lenition or deletion of /d/ appears to be sensitive to usage frequency as well. Some of the exceptions are due to sporadic reborrowing from Dutch. Cape Dutch Pidgin, one of the two main roots of modern Afrikaans, developed as a result of contact between 17th-century Dutch settlers and Cape Khoekhoen, who spoke Nàmá. Properties of the Nàmá phonology suggest that at least in Cape Dutch Pidgin, the obstruents that were subject to the lenition and deletion processes in question constituted a natural class.*

Dutch reuze(n)(-) has a wide range of synchronic uses that form part of a broad categorical and semantic continuum. Derived from the noun reus ‘giant’, it is often used to express a comparison in nominal and adjectival compounds (for example, reuzegroot ‘as big as a giant’, lit. ‘giant-big’), but it can also have a merely intensifying function (for example, reuzeleuk ‘very nice’, lit. ‘giant-nice’). Moreover, it currently occurs as a free adjective and adverb while keeping its morphological linking morpheme -e- and intensifying value (for example, Het feestje was reuze ‘The party was great’). Drawing on synchronic and diachronic corpus data, this paper argues that the emergence of reuze as a free morpheme should be accounted for by debonding (an instance of degrammaticalization) and clipping.*

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).*

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.*

The fronting of back vowels before the segment represented by the rune algwiz in Old Norse (Runic: kūR ON: kýr‘cows’) is problematic because there is no consensus on the phonetic value to be reconstructed for the conditioner, a reflex of Proto-Germanic+/z/. This study presents an acoustic experiment testing the fronting effect of codas [z], [ʒ], and [ɹ] on realizations of the representative back vowel /u/, as these are possible reconstructed values of algwiz. Based on observed coarticulation, we argue that a voiced alveolar fricative [z]—and not postalveolar [ʒ] or rhotic [ɹ]—is the best reconstruction for the conditioner of R-umlaut, and that this reflex of PGmc+/z/ in North Germaniccaused umlaut before rhotacism and merger with PGmc+/r/.

This paper shows that Dutch verb-particle constructions have been transferred into the Surinamese creole languages as a result of pervasive multilingualism and intensive contact. Particle-verb structures are, at most, marginal in the native grammar of Surinamese creoles. However, recent data show that verb-particle constructions of the Dutch sort are becoming productive and are used with some homogeneity in the creole language context.

Negerhollands (or Virgin Islands Dutch Creole) is the extinct Dutch-lexified creole of present-day US Virgin Islands. One of the typical features of Caribbean creoles is the occurrence of both, overtly marked and unmarked pasts. This has been attested in Negerhollands, where there is variation between preverbal (h)a and the bare verb. Studies in a number of creole languages have shown that such variation is not random. Following up on these results, I investigate the impact of factors such as narrative discourse function, aspect, and syntactic priming on the expression of past time reference in 20th-century Negerhollands through a quantitative variationist study. The results show that the factors conditioning past time reference marking in Negerhollands resemble those in other creole languages but with an entirely different outcome: Whereas other (English-lexified) creoles typically use unmarked pasts, Negerhollands typically uses overt pasts. This may reflect Akan substrate influence rather than being a sign of language death.*