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.

This paper concerns the superlative forms of the words many, much, few, and little, and their equivalents in German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dalecarlian, Icelandic, and Faroese. It demon-strates that every possible relationship between definiteness marking and interpretation is attested. It also demonstrates that different kinds of agreement mismatches are found under relative and proportional readings. One consistent pattern is that under a relative interpretation, quantity superlatives with adverbial morphology show neuter singular agreement even if the target noun is plural. In contrast, under a proportional interpretation, quantity superlatives always agree in number. This evidence is taken to show that quantity superlatives are not structurally analogous to quality superlatives such as tallest on either a relative or a proportional reading; however, depending on their interpretation, quantity superlatives depart from a plain attributive structure in different ways. On relative readings, they can have a structure akin to that of pseudo-partitives (as in two liters of milk), while on proportional readings, they tend to have a quantificational structure, sometimes involving a true partitive (as in some of the children). Furthermore, I suggest that the agreement features of a quantity superlative depend on the domain from which the target is drawn (the Target-Domain Hypothesis).

The operation and suspension of resolution in Old English meter, generalized as Kaluza's Law, is shown to be based on mora counting; -VC(C), -VV(C), and -VCV count as bimoric, while -VCVC(C) and -VCVV(C) are trimoric. The maximum moric value of a syllable is two. The proposed mora-based analysis leads to an improved account of a number of phonological processes in pre- and Early Old English.

This article is an investigation of the acoustic properties of the so-called level stress prosody still found in some varieties of North Germanic. Level stress occurs in disyllabic words where a light root syllable has been preserved from Old North Germanic, and is described as having stress more or less evenly distributed across the two syllables. It is argued that level stress is the result of a perceptual ambiguity caused by the delayed synchronization of the accent 2 melody in level stress words, due to the shorter duration of the light root syllable. Due to this delay, both syllables may be interpreted as independent tonal and thereby stressed accent 1 domains, competing with the “normal” interpretation of the two syllables as an accent 2 domain with initial stress.*

I first show that the reduced form of the definite article th’ is present throughout Middle English and Early Modern English. Then I highlight the differences in the pragmatic functions of the reduced form and full form of the article in three prose texts taken from the late 15th century and the 16th century. Given the differences, late Middle English and the first century of Early Modern English are closer to having two definite articles rather than one. The development of the reduced form th’ is part of the DP cycle in that th’ emerges as the function of the weakens. Finally, I tentatively argue that th’ is reanalyzed as the head of DP around 1500, after being initially base-generated in nP, at which point th’ is closer to a nominal marker than to a definite article.*

This study discusses copy raising in English, German, and Dutch from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Synchronically, copy raising has the same purpose in all three languages: to mark direct evidence. However, the languages differ in whether they allow their ‘seem’-verbs to appear in copy-raised constructions: English seem can copy raise, German scheinen cannot, whereas the status of Dutch lijken is undecided. This difference is explained by the diachronic development of these verbs: English seem has developed the furthest along the grammaticalization cline of ‘seem’-verbs, German scheinen is the most conservative in its development, and Dutch lijken has developed quite late, but is quickly catching up to English seem. Even though it is too early to tell, this distribution hints at a Van Haeringen pattern.*

This paper demonstrates that the language of the post-War generations of adult Haredi (that is, strictly Orthodox), primarily Hasidic, speakers of Yiddish in the major Hasidic centers worldwide lacks morphological case and gender. Elicited spoken and written data from native Haredi speakers of Yiddish from Israel and the United States, aged 18–87, and limited additional evidence from Canada and Belgium, reveal a complete absence of distinction between masculine, feminine, and neuter genders as well as between the nominative, accusative, and dative cases. While some speakers make use of a variety of morphological definite determiner and attributive adjective forms, their use is not determined by case or gender distinctions. Most of the speakers in our study have an invariable determiner pronounced as /dɛ/ or /di/, whereas the earlier case and gender suffixes on attributive adjectives have been reanalyzed as a single attributive marker, /ɛ/. These findings are consistent with our previous work on the loss of case and gender in the Hasidic Yiddish of London’s Stamford Hill and support our proposal that the Yiddish spoken in (primarily Hasidic) Haredi communities can be considered a distinct variety of the language known as Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish.*

Present-day Dutch shows an alternation reflecting a transition from the use of the comparative particle dan ‘than’ toward the particle als ‘as’ in comparisons of inequality. We argue that this transition—as well as the replacement of denn/dann by als in Early New High German, and als ‘as’ by wie ‘how’ in present-day German—results from a conflict between two competing principles, Economy and Iconicity. The conflict between these two constraints in German and Dutch gives rise to a cycle, in which having two particles—one for each construction—and having one particle for both, comparatives and equatives, alternate over time.*

It is not uncommon for the naive native speaker of English to confuse German and Dutch. One reason for this lies in the English names for the languages, but another reason is that Dutch and German sound similar to the anglophone ear. Many, perhaps even most, university students of Dutch in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the anglophone world come to Dutch with a good knowledge of German and again, often draw parallels between their mother tongue, and Dutch and German. Of course, professional linguists know that English and German are neighbors of Dutch and members of the same Germanic language family. However, comments by naive native speakers serve to highlight questions about the typological contrasts between these three languages.

To the memory of Edgar Polomé, who inspired with his keen interest in Germanic and Indo-European

Modern German existentials with impersonal es gibt are attested only rather late in the German tradition (from late Middle High German, in the fourteenth century), have few compelling cognate constructions (if any) elsewhere in Germanic, and thus are usually taken to be an extension of other senses (e.g., ‘give, produce, yield’) of the verb geben. It is noted here, though, that parallels with existentials based on verbs meaning ‘have, take’ cognate to geben can be found elsewhere in Indo-European, in particular in Old Irish and Latin. When viewed against the backdrop of there being several verbs in Indo-European meaning both ‘give’and ‘take’, these facts suggest an interpretation wherein the existential sense of geben is the archaism, and the meaning ‘give’is a Germanic innovation.*

In this article the development of German können, dürfen, sollen, mögen, müssen, and wollen is examined in the light of grammaticalization theory. It is assumed that these verbs form a class (or subclass) of modal auxiliaries. Some of the assertions made on the development of modal verbs across languages are examined. For example, do the modal meanings develop from nonmodal meanings? Do the epistemic uses of these auxiliaries evolve from deontic ones? Can such an evolution be described in terms of metaphor and can the development of these verbs be described as following a distinct “path” that is “unidirectional”? Some of these questions are answered in the affirmative, but new question arise in the course of the investigation.

In this paper we examine the topicalization paradigm for ten different verbal constructions in German. We argue that a uniform explanation for the observed behaviors follows from the interpretation of the relevant expressions as (parts of) lexical representations. To this end we motivate a revision of Functional Uncertainty as proposed in Kaplan and Zaenen 1989 to account for filler/gap relations in long-distance dependencies. We assume with the original formulation of this principle that topicalized elements share values with the (grammatical) function status of an entity an indeterminate distance away. We appeal to the inventory of functions posited within LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR (LFG), inclusive of the frequently neglected PREDICATE function, which, we argue, is associated with both simple and complex predicates. In addition we show that topicalization, given this function-based proposal, should not be limited to maximal categories. We argue that the need to posit a PREDICATE function for German topicalization is supported by an independent line of research within LFG concerning the analysis of complex predicates. For this purpose we employ the proposals of T. Mohanan (1990/1994), which argue for the independence of the construct PREDICATE from its categorial realization. We show that this type of proposal extends to provide a uniform account of the German topicalization paradigm. This permits us to explain the similarities and differences in the behaviors of various sorts of predicators as well as certain idiomatic expressions interpreted as complex predicates.

The dialect geography and etymology of Dutch, Frisian, and German trVm(e) ‘crossbeam’ suggest that western Dutch triem continues West Germanic +‑ǣ-, which underwent vowel raising to /i./ as in Frisian. Thus, Dutch traam beside triem belongs to an established group of Standard Dutch words showing /a./ next to /i./ from West Germanic +‑ǣ-, such as schraal vs. schriel. It is argued that the survival of words in /i./ in the coastal dialects of Dutch fits into recent theories that Standard Dutch is the result of language contact between medieval Frisian and Franconian.*

This article contains arguments for a revised classification of a number of so-called free datives in German. In particular, a distinction is drawn between an ergative dative of inaction construction and an agentive dative of affect. The construction grammar framework is employed to argue that the unique semantics of the dative of inaction (a potential agent fails to prevent an adversative, mutative event) are associated with the abstract syntactic form of the construction as a whole, not with its constituents. Because its semantics are constructional, i.e., not strictly predictable from the semantics of its constituents, the dative of inaction is considered a grammatical category distinct from the dative of affect, which has compositional semantics.

Magnús Snædal has chosen a modest and understated title for this significant work. The thought of a published concordance often brings to mind earlier times, a volume of reproduced computer printout with endless pages of KWIC (Key Word in Context) format, usually arranged without regard to proper lemmatization or disambiguation. But Snædal has not chosen the easy path. Instead he has used state-of-the-art technology and labored long and hard to make a valuable contribution to Germanic studies in general and Gothic scholarship in particular.

Resultatives in English and Dutch have developed special degree readings. These readings stem from a reinterpretation of the resultative predicate as indicating a high degree rather than an actual result. For example, when a parent says I love you to death, one need not call the cops, since the sentence is not about love turning lethal, but merely indicative of a high degree of affection. Such cases have often been noted in the literature as idiomatic, but this view ignores the fact that these are not isolated cases but productive constructions that can be used with a variety of verbs. We explore various resultative constructions in English and Dutch, and give a classification of the subtypes involved as well as their diachronic development from ordinary to degree interpretation. We link these subtypes to lexical semantic classes of verbs. Both English and Dutch show a steady growth in the lexical and structural diversity of degree resultatives throughout the early modern and contemporary periods (1600-2000). We focus in our paper on the period 1800-2000, for which we did an extensive corpus study using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and Delpher (a collection of digitized Dutch newspapers, journals, magazines, and other resources). One of our findings is that, similar to other types of expressive language, such as degree modification and emphatic negation, taboo expressions play a role in degree resultatives; in fact, their role is excessive. We outline a number of the commonalities among the semantic domains of expressive language used in resultatives.

The present study uses variationist sociolinguistic methods to examine the intensifier system in Oslo Norwegian. Results indicate that both linguistic and social factors influence intensifier use. Predicative adjectives were intensified more frequently than attributive adjectives, women used intensifiers more frequently than men, and younger speakers had higher intensification rates than older speakers. Apparent time analyses also reveal a change in progress toward the use of skikkelig ‘proper’, a change led predominantly by young women. Although veldig ‘very’ was the most frequently used intensifier, its use decreases in apparent time, whereas skikkelig increases in frequency among younger speakers. The development of the intensifier skikkelig appears to follow a common pathway of change from adjective to manner adjunct to degree adverb, as well as from appropriateness to intensification. Comparisons with work on English, German, and Norwegian reveal several crosslinguistic tendencies about the linguistic and social conditioning of intensifiers. This study provides the first variationist sociolinguistic analysis of intensifiers in Oslo Norwegian; it provides support for several crosslinguistic claims about intensifier use; and it contributes to the visibility of variationist sociolinguistic work in the study of Norwegian variation and change.

In this paper, we investigate gender assignment to recently borrowed English loanwords in Dutch, introducing several innovations to the field of gender assignment to anglicisms. For example, we use multiple mixed-effects logistic regression to determine which factors underlie gender assignment in Dutch. This model indicates that there is variation in the degree of homogeneity in the speech community (that is, agreement among respondents) concerning the gender assigned to an anglicism; therefore, we analyze the contexts in which homogeneity is the lowest. Our analysis reveals that the degree of consensus does not solely depend on how established an anglicism is. In contrast to what has been argued in previous studies, gender assignment to anglicisms in Dutch is not a categorical process: Gender variation increases when respondents are faced with a conflict between the default article de and some factor that favors its neuter counterpart, het.*

The paper is intended to shed light on the so-called Kuhn's laws pertaining to early Germanic word order and intonation. This is done by investigating the metrical function of different morphosyntactic categories in Old Icelandic meters and interpreting their behavior on the basis of insights from modern intonational phonology. Verb forms belonging to independent clauses cannot fill the last foot in lines in dróttkvætt poetry. This is taken to show that phonology was involved in the word order restrictions in Old Icelandic, among them the verb-second (V2) constraint, which is often assumed to be syntactically governed.The work reported in this paper started during a sabbatical at Stanford University under a Fulbright fellowship in 1998–1999. I would like to thank Paul Kiparsky, my sponsor there, for inspiration and help with some crucial issues. I would also like to thank the participants in the Metrics conference in Toronto, October 8–9, 1999, and the GLAC–7 conference in Banff, April 21–23, 2001, for comments on presentations of parts of the work. Finally, thanks go to the editor, Mark Louden, and two anonymous reviewers for suggestions for improvement and editorial guidance.

This study addresses gender assignment in six North Scandinavian varieties with a three-gender system: Old Norse, Norwegian (Nynorsk), Old Swedish, Nysvenska, Jamtlandic, and Elfdalian. Focusing on gender variation and change, we investigate the role of various factors in gender change. Using the contemporary Swedish varieties Jamtlandic and Elfdalian as a basis, we compare gender assignment in other North Scandinavian languages, tracing the evolution back to Old Norse. The data consist of 1,300 concepts from all six languages coded for cognacy, gender, and morphological and semantic variation. Our statistical analysis shows that the most important factors in gender change are the Old Norse weak/strong inflection, Old Norse gender, animate/inanimate distinction, word frequency, and loan status. From Old Norse to modern languages, phonological assignment principles tend to weaken, due to the general loss of word-final endings. Feminine words are more susceptible to changing gender, and the tendency to lose the feminine is noticeable even in the varieties in our study upholding the three-gender system. Further, frequency is significantly correlated with unstable gender. In semantics, only the animate/inanimate distinction signifi-cantly predicts gender assignment and stability. In general, our study confirms the decay of the feminine gender in the Scandinavian branch of Germanic.