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.

The advent of a new millennium marks the completion of our transition from the semiannual American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures to the quarterly Journal of Germanic Linguistics, the first number of which you have before you. Since I assumed the position of Chair of the Editorial Committee just over a year ago, I have been very fortunate to have worked with an exceptionally committed group of colleagues on the Editorial Committee, as well as the reconstituted and expanded Advisory Board. I am happy to report that our efforts have been successful, and the outlook for the future of the JGL is a bright one. I would like to share some of my thoughts on our experiences of the past year and give a sense of where we are headed.

The First International Conference on Linguistics in Southern Africa was held at the University of Cape Town on January 11–14, 2000, and was hosted by the Linguistics Society of Southern Africa in conjunction with UCT's Department of Linguistics and Southern African Languages. The conference was a milestone in that it represented the Society's first international meeting, bringing to Cape Town scholars from Africa, Europe, and North America, and presenting a wide range of scholarship in theoretical, applied, and areal linguistics. Its enormous success was due in no small measure to the tireless efforts of its convenor, Professor Rajend Mesthrie. And if I may add a personal observation, it was a scholarly event that I could never have envisioned when I first traveled to South Africa in October of 1982.

This study investigates why an epistemic interpretation of modal verbs is possible only in the present or preterit, not in the perfect. Epistemic modals are argued to be predicates of propositions; they are not associated with a time variable and therefore cannot be tensed. The tense in which an epistemic modal appears is either a pleonastic tense or a tense determined by the discourse context. This analysis, unlike the analyses provided by Diewald (1993), Zifonun et al. (1997), and Wurmbrand (1998), automatically predicts the scope of temporal adverbials in sentences with modals. It also has implications for two additional issues related to the study of modal verbs: the classification of evidential modals and the grammaticalization of modals.I would like to thank a number of people for their help in various ways with this article (for serving as native informants, for providing language data and valuable references, and for helpful discussion): Susanna Bauer, Byron W. Bender, Amy Dahlstrom, Wolfgang Ertl, Gert Webelhuth, Ann S. Wilke, and Werner W. Wilke. Thanks also to anonymous JGL reviewers for their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft.

In German, complex wh-interrogatives can optionally be formed by inserting the 3rd person neuter w h-pronoun was in the matrix [Spec, CP] position instead of long-distance wh-raising. It is generally assumed that “expletive” was serves as a placeholder for a contentful wh-expression lower down in the sentence that substitutes for it at the level of semantic interpretation. It can be shown, however, that the putative wh-expletive was in German is actually a CP-proform basegenerated in matrix object position, and that it is not subject to expletive replacement at LF. As an alternative to previous accounts, I propose a complex predicate analysis of the German was … w construction according to which was is a [thetas]-marked object pronoun capable of licensing a predicative CP in V-complement position. This analysis is consistent with Rothstein's (1995) claim that true object expletives do not exist.*

Bien loin que l'objet précède le point de vue, on dirait que c'est le point de vue qui crée l'objet (Ferdinand de Saussure 1916:23).

Traditionally, historiographers of Afrikaans have argued that a relatively uniform (spoken) vernacular existed at the Cape from the late eighteenth century, where it constituted the L(ow) variety in a diglossic situation (see Raidt 1991). Standardization of Afrikaans has been described accordingly in a “naturalistic” fashion as the codification and elaboration of this preexistent vernacular. This paper summarizes the results of a variationist study of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century documents that shows the traditional view to be seriously flawed. While “Cape Dutch Vernacular” (or “Afrikaans,” as it came to be called) was a well-defined entity in the popular consciousness from the mid-nineteenth century, the actual patterns of language use in the historical texts indicate the existence of a complex social dialect continuum until the early twentieth century. Variation patterns described for the late eighteenth century are shown still to be productive around 1900. Linguistic standardization, understood as the reduction of variation and the emergence of a linguistic norm, was rapid and strongly marked by cultural and political nationalism.* I should like to thank Roger Lass and Paul Roberge for many stimulating discussions about Afrikaans historical linguistics and for their comments on earlier versions of the work presented in this article. The responsibility for any mistakes remains of course my own.

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.

According to Hesselman's Law, lengthenings in closed syllables (CSL) precede lengthenings in open syllables (OSL). This paper surveys dialectal and philological evidence from North Germanic and Upper German in support of Hesselman's Law. The paper argues that CSL serves as a catalyst for OSL. After CSL, short vowels are always followed by long consonants and short consonants are always preceded by long vowels in stressed heavy syllables, a pattern consistent with crosslinguistic tendencies for V/C duration ratios. OSL occurs when language learners extend the pattern by lengthening short vowels followed by heterosyllabic short consonants. The Moraic Preservation Principle (MPP) accounts for the precedence of CSL over OSL despite the preference for bimoraic stressed syllables in Germanic known as Prokosch's Law. A generalization of the Moraic Conservation Principle proposed by Hayes (1989), the MPP states that lengthening processes preserve mora count. CSL does not violate MPP since it results in a bimoraic syllable remaining bimoraic. However, OSL constitutes a violation of MPP by adding to the mora count of the word.I would like to thank two anonymous JGL reviewers and Mark Louden for helpful comments and suggestions.

This article compares the social and linguistic factors present in the development of three languages (Afrikaans, African American Vernacular English, and Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese), demonstrating that the balance of native and nonnative speakers of their source languages during their early formation led to semicreoles retaining a substantial amount of the source languages' morphosyntax, but also a significant number of substrate and interlanguage structural features. The article concludes with the proposal of a formal theoretical model identifying the linguistic processes that lead to partial restructuring, showing how the insights gained in the study of one semicreole can cast light in understanding the diachronic development and synchronic structure of another.* I would like to thank the Linguistic Society of Southern Africa for providing a travel grant that enabled me to attend the First International Conference on Linguistics in Southern Africa, held at the University of Cape Town, January 12–14, 2000, where I presented an earlier version of this article. I would also like to thank Paul Roberge for his helpful comments on this paper. Responsibility for any errors, however, remains solely my own.

The success of the volumes in the series Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft has encouraged the publisher to plan revisions of them every fifteen years or so in order to incorporate newly assembled corpora of data, newly emerging methodologies, and new research; to recognize changing empirical domains as the boundaries between them shift or disappear; and to reflect new political realities and linguistic trends within a rapidly changing Europe. The two volumes of the first edition of Sprachgeschichte appeared in 1984 and 1985, respectively. The second edition, of which only the first of three volumes is under consideration here, is—as the subtitle promises—an expansion and elaboration of the first, taking into consideration recent research, new theoretical approaches to old problems, newly developed method-ologies, and the increased interest in linguistic developments in the German-speaking world since 1945.

The book consists of eleven chapters, all showcasing in one way or another linguistic approaches to literature and other arts. Several chapters (on Kafka, Jandl, Trakl, Mayröcker, and Jonke) are revised versions of the author's older articles, some going back to the early seventies. It is—this might be said at the outset—unfortunate to see that most of the references are also to older scholarship and that some of the issues and concerns seem to be formulated in reaction to a somewhat obsolete literary discourse. In these chapters, the entire poststructuralist movement, surely the most influential paradigm of literary scholarship in the past thirty years, as well as several other important currents in literary scholarship, are overlooked.

An influential rule proposed by Alistair Campbell assigns stress to the subordinate root in lexicalized compounds such as compound proper names if and only if the subordinate root stands in word-medial position, with an unstressed syllable following. A medial nonroot syllable receives stress by the same rule if it is long. Apparent exceptions are attributed to analogy or to a late rule of stress reduction. In this paper I argue that the exceptions have been misunderstood due to uncritical reliance on the metrical theory of Eduard Sievers. As it turns out, no late rule of stress reduction is required, and the reduction rule for synchronic roots does not distinguish word-medial position from wordfinal position. Such a distinction figures only in stress rules for nonroot syllables.*

The study of adjectival inflection in Afrikaans provides evidence against the supposition that deflection is a necessary consequence of creolization. In particular, the expected outcome did not materialize in Cape Vernacular Afrikaans, a nonstandard variety that was exposed to creolization conditions substantially more than the standard variety. The analysis presented here is a refutation of rather simplistic characterizations of language varieties by means of checklists of linguistic features.

This book is a modern exploration of the feature [tense] introduced in distinctive feature theory by Roman Jakobson and colleagues (Jakobson, Fant, and Halle 1952). By proposing the feature again after years of skepticism toward its phonetic motivation, Jessen aims to provide a contribution to the integration of phonetics and phonology within linguistic theory. This thorough study of the tense/lax opposition in German obstruents is an expanded version of Jessen's 1996 Cornell University Ph.D. dissertation and is of particular significance because it reveals details and clarification of Jakobsonian concepts through personal communication with Linda Waugh, a former student of and later close collaborator with Jakobson himself. As such, the book will be of interest to phonologists, linguistic phoneticians, and those interested in the very concept of distinctive features and their role in describing the sound structure of human languages. Some background in acoustic phonetics and familiarity with experimental phonetic research is desirable to fully appreciate the power of the arguments presented in the study.

This book explores aspects of early medieval Germanic social organization and cultural practice on the basis of word semantic studies. The lexical data are taken from three layers of the vocabulary in Old Germanic, corresponding to the three cultural tradition—native Germanic, Roman, and Christian—that were fused to form a new identity in the early medieval Germanic world. By careful interpretations of a wide range of literary and historical sources and by rigorous linguistic analyses, Green examines the rise and fall of closely associated words in relation to the complex of political, military, legal, and religious forces working through society. Taken as a whole, the work provides a broad, richly informative, and well-balanced survey on the contacts that the early Germanic tribes made with Rome and Christianity during the period from classical antiquity to the early Middle Ages, ranging from approximately 300 B.C.E. to 900 C.E. No less wide is the geographical coverage of the book, from Ireland and Visigothic Spain to the Crimea and the eastern Baltic.

This publication, which is part of the series Studien zur deutschen Sprache, is a valuable contribution to sociolinguistic research on speakers of Colonial German dialects,particularly speakers of German from Russia.

Zur historischen Lexikostatistik der starken Verben im Deutschen (henceforth ZHLSVD) is an attempt to catalogue all of the strong verbs for each period of the German language (OHG, MHG, ENHG, and NHG) and to describe and analyze the loss and regularization of strong verbs across these periods. The book is an abridged version of Kühne's 1996 Bochum doctoral dissertation (7). The printed part of ZHLSVD consists of an introduction and three chapters. A CD-ROM is included with the book.

In this book, Eggers weighs in on debates over the nature and origins of Yiddish from the perspectives of general contact linguistics and German and Slavic historical linguistics and philology. The book attempts much, and indeed makes contributions. At the same time, however, there are numerous and pervasive shortcomings and mistakes which seriously undermine any book which undertakes the tasks that this one sets for itself.

This book assesses the phonological features of Pennsylvania German English (PGE) and the social factors that give rise to the creation of this variety. The topic has been secondary in the study of Pennsylvania German speakers until now, and for this reason the volume deserves special notice. The study deals with two groups of speakers of Pennsylvania German (PG): the sectarians (i.e., Amish and Mennonites) and the nonsectarians. Paradoxically, although the sectarians are more isolated from mainstream society, their English has fewer features of interference from PG; the nonsectarians, who are integrated into the English mainstream, exhibit more features of interference from PG in their spoken English. The other half of the Pennsylvania German paradox is that the nonsectarians also have fewer convergence features in their PG. As Kopp discusses in his final chapter, the explanations for these two halves of the paradox can be found in the unique aspects of the features of language use and language attitudes found within each group.

The edited volume under review contains an introduction followed by fifteen articles, most of which grew out of a workshop on wh-scope marking held in December 1995 at the University of Tübingen. Earlier versions of twelve of the contributions to the present collection have previously appeared in the workshop proceedings edited by Lutz and Müller (1996). Several of these have undergone rather substantial changes, though, and three articles (Cheng, Cole and Hermon, and Horvath), as well as the editors' introduction, were not included in the earlier collection of working papers at all.