The papers in the special focus issues of the Journal of Germanic Linguistics (13.4 and 14.1) testify to the continuing significance of Afrikaans sociohistorical linguistics. Even before its official “birth,” recognition, and christening, Afrikaans had been the subject of debate, discussion, dissension, and adulation. Within linguistics, it has excited attention from Hesseling onward on account of the transformation of Dutch grammar evident in some facets of its structure and lexicon. The extent of the transformation and the participation of indigenous and enslaved people in the process have proved what my co-editor, Paul Roberge (1995:72), once called an “enduring crux ” in sociohistorical linguistics. With the promotion (and consequent further politicization) of Afrikaans in the apartheid era (1948–1994), the issue of origins became an ideologically polarized one. It seemed to me in the 1980s and 1990s that linguists in South Africa, with a few exceptions, weren't keeping pace with developments in creolistics; and, conversely, scholars versed in creolistics weren't always paying attention to the full span of the data on the transformation of Dutch in South Africa. With the academic boycott of apartheid South Africa, there seemed little opportunity for full, free, and frank scholarly exchange.

Syntactic constructions may form an alternative to, or compete with the morphological expression of semantic and grammatical content. This applies to the passive forms of verbs, the progressive form, analytic causatives, adjective-noun sequences, and particle verbs in Dutch. In this article I develop a view of the Dutch lexicon in which this interaction between syntax and morphology can be understood. The central notion used is that of the constructional idiom, a construction with a (partially) non-compositional meaning, of which not all terminal elements are fixed. These constructional idioms, like morphological word formation, serve to extend the fund of expressions that are available for concatenation in the syntax.I would like to thank the anonymous referees of this journal, and Farrell Ackerman, Arie Verhagen, and the audience at the MMM3 meeting in Barcelona, September 2001, for their comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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.

The word meanings given in dictionaries normally are “pragmatic meanings,” that is, utterance meanings in prototypical situations. Those glosses are perfectly adequate for the needs of the normal dictionary user but they do not meet scientific standards. As H. P. Grice and L. Horn have shown in various publications, the apparent meanings of many words are in fact combinations of their lexical meanings proper and some superimposed conversational implicatures. Many contradictions can only be avoided by keeping these two parts separate. For example, the use of the adjective rectangular often (but not always) is interpreted as a significant non-use of the (stronger) alternative square. The adjective rectangular thus acquires a second, pragmatic reading ‘rectangular but not square’ that is hyponymous to its semantics; the word appears to be hyponymous to itself, in other words, to be an “autohyponym” (Horn 1984c:110). The purpose of this paper is to show that autohyponymy is pervasive in the lexicon, occurring with nouns, verbs, (scalar/degree) adjectives, conjunctions (e.g., the conditional if); it also occurs in word formation (the German feminine suffix -in), and grammar, for example, the absolute comparative (ein älterer Mann). The data are largely taken from German.This paper is dedicated to Ekkehard König on the occasion of his 60th birthday, January 15, 2001. I am indebted to the anonymous readers of this paper for many very helpful comments.

In this paper, I argue that quantitative data on relative clause variation in Old English provide additional evidence against the theory of multiple authorship of Beowulf. I show that aspects of various relative clause types in Beowulf are unique in the Old English poetic and prose corpus and homogenous throughout all three proposed parts of the poem. Comparison with the poems attributed to Cynewulf indicates that the frequency, distribution, and selection of relative clause types are consistent throughout an individual poet's compositions. Statistical analysis of the general distribution of relative clause types and factors such as the type of antecedent and its distance to the relative clause supports the hypothesis that Beowulf is a unified poem.I would like to thank R. D. Fulk, Kari Ellen Gade, and Rex A. Sprouse for comments and critiques of drafts of this paper, and audiences at “Studies in the History of the English Language I” at UCLA and “Philology in Germanic Studies at Illinois and Indiana V” at the University of Illinois for helpful discussion. Special thanks to Julie Auger for advice and her generous help with the VARBRUL analysis. Any remaining errors are of course my own.

We argue that the distribution of definiteness marking in Scandinavian DPs is best accounted for by a lexical rule converting Ns to Ds, and not by syntactic head movement. The proposed lexical rule, together with the assumption that lexical expressions can block equivalent phrasal expressions, is shown to account for the core facts about definiteness marking distribution in Danish, and is extended to Swedish and Norwegian. In addition, some previously mysterious facts about definiteness marking in DPs containing relative clauses are explained.

In the twelfth-century Middle English Poema morale, perhaps the earliest English composition in a septenary meter, the metrical position at the end of the first hemistich is distinguished from all other positions in admitting a short syllable plus another in a pattern that would disrupt the meter, creating an extra unstressed syllable, if the two were not resolved, as in the word dede in the verse Ic welde more thanne ic dede; | mi wit oh to bi more. Here resolution seems to have been carried over from Old English into a Middle English isometric meter based on Latin models. This constitutes significant evidence for resolution as a genuine property of Old English verse, which in turn lends strong support to Eduard Sievers's metrical analysis of early Germanic alliterative verse.I am grateful to Kari Gade, who read this paper in draft and made some important corrections, and to Geoffrey Russom, Donka Minkova, and Robert Stockwell, who offered valuable comments on the paper when it was presented at the seventh Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference, held in Banff in April, 2001. Tomas Riad generously provided copies of papers, both published and unpublished, and the two anonymous referees for JGL offered lengthy and challenging critiques, resulting in several alterations. To all of these scholars I owe sincere thanks, and of course deficiencies in the paper are in no way attributable to them.

A provisional typological comparison demonstrates that Khoekhoe, Dutch, and Afrikaans are highly similar with respect to a couple of minor features. Therefore, Cape Dutch Pidgin (CDP), which came about as a relexified and pidginized version of Khoekhoe, could often develop compromises between Dutch and Khoekhoe syntax. Exceptions were the use of SOV without V2 and (possibly) the use of certain postpositions. Furthermore, there is evidence showing that CDP and Orange River Afrikaans (ORA) are diachronically related. An investigation of the sentential structure of Khoekhoe, however, shows that the second position (P2) phenomenon differs considerably from V2 in Dutch: P2 is symmetric and is applied in all clause types. Yet, except for a temporary pro-drop phenomenon in wh-clauses, P2 did not really affect the pidgin. Once finite verbs were acquired, the picture changed, and new (optional) subordinate V2 and V1 patterns could be introduced into Cape Dutch and Afrikaans under the influence of Khoekhoe Dutch/Afrikaans.

Contemporary discussions of preverbal negative incorporation usually note Levin's 1958 claim that incorporation is a Western and Southern dialect feature in Old and Middle English. In his Middle English data, Levin reports only two unincorporated forms, both in AB texts. This note demonstrates that these two examples appear in the editions Levin used, but not in the manuscripts now thought to be closer to the original AB language. The conclusions are: 1. Levin's claim still has merit; 2. it would worthwhile to revisit his data with an improved understanding of scribal practices, access to facsimiles, and to electronic searches; and 3. researchers should consider editorial “interference” in manuscripts.I would like to thank Elly van Gelderen, Richard Hogg, and Dhira Mahoney for their helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are my own.

Introduction

Traditionally, research on language change has been a post-mortem activity, focused on isolated changes that are complete and often only documented in written texts. In the 1960s the field was advanced considerably by Labovian sociolinguistics and the investigation of “change in progress” adduced through patterns of community-internal linguistic variation correlated with external facts about speakers such as age and class (see Labov 1994 for an overview). However, despite the many benefits of such work on “dynamic synchrony,” we still know relatively little about how language change unfolds over the lifetimes of individual speakers, that is, in real time (cf. Bailey et al. 1991). The logistical challenges of such research are, of course, considerable. Whereas it is straightforward for psycholinguists to observe language development in children over the course of a few years, documenting changes in the verbal behavior of individuals over several decades is by contrast much less feasible. Nevertheless, present theoretical models of language change could be considerably improved by the results of real-time studies.

As a phenomenon to be explained, convergence in historical linguistics is substantively no different than in creolistics. The general idea is that accommodation by speakers of “established” languages in contact and the formation of new language varieties both involve a process of leveling of different structures that achieve the same referential and nonreferential effects. The relatively short and well-documented history of Afrikaans presents an important case study in the competition and selection of linguistic features during intensive language contact.

In this creative and ambitious book, Giegerich undertakes perhaps the most comprehensive study ever of phonology-morphology interaction in English in the framework of lexical phonology and proposes major modifications of certain aspects of the theory. The book is full of interesting and thought-provoking claims, supported by thorough empirical demonstrations. At the same time, however, it is curiously out of touch with recent developments in the field. For example, Optimality Theory, which has become the de facto lingua franca of phonologists, is not even mentioned. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that many developments in the 1990s in the framework of lexical phonology are also ignored. For example, although Giegerich devotes a whole chapter to Strict Cycle effects, he fails to acknowledge Kiparsky's (1993) approach to such effects (now properly called Non-Derived Environment Blocking, though Giegerich continues to use the outdated term) based on Radical Underspecification and structure-filling default rules.

The notion of SYLLABLE CUT (Silbenschnitt), which was introduced and motivated in classical works by Sievers, Jespersen, Trubetzkoy, and others, has been discussed and developed recently in Germanic linguistics, including by Vennemann (1991), Maas and Tophinke (1991), Becker (1996, 1998), and Murray (2000). Along with the issue of tonal accents, syllable cut is also featured in a volume edited by Auer, Gilles, and Spiekermann (forthcoming).

In 1993 and 1994, starting from a seminar series led by Norbert Dittmar, Professor of Sociolinguistics at the Free University of Berlin, a considerable number of interviews with Berlin residents were recorded on the topic of the Wende, the events of 1989–1990 from the mass exodus of East Berliners to the west via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, through the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the GDR regime, to the unification of the two German states. Of the 77 interviews conducted by participants in Dittmar's seminars and other students at the University, 56 were of adequate quality for transcription and analysis, 31 with East Berliners (33 interviewees, as some interviews involved 2 informants), and 25 with residents of the western part of the city (28 interviewees). Of the eastern interviewees 19 were women and 14 men; in the west there were 15 women and 13 men. Ages ranged from around 20 to around 60 (some ages were unknown), with a considerable clustering of informants in the age ranges 30 to 39 in the east and 40 to 49 in the west. Despite the reasonably representative nature of the sample, the data have not, to my knowledge, been submitted to quantitative analysis but have formed the basis of two qualitative studies, Braber 2001 and the current book.

In this volume, Marcin Krygier seeks to chronicle the loss of morphological alternations resulting from Old English i-umlaut in the inflectional systems of the various dialects of Middle English. The author argues that while the extent of i-umlaut in Old English is well researched, no detailed analysis of the subsequent process of leveling of i-umlaut alternations in Middle English has been produced. To address this lack of analysis of the Middle English i-umlaut alternations, the author organizes the volume into three main parts.

By way of wrapping up this two-part special issue, Focus on Afrikaans Sociohistorical Linguistics (JGL 13.4 and 14.1), I will touch on some of the significant issues raised by the contributors from my own, mainly dissident, point of view.

Afrikaans linguistics suffered a major loss with the death of our colleague Carla Luijks, from cancer, on December 30, 2001, at the cruelly young age of 43 (two weeks shy of her 44th birthday).

In recent years, the study of negation has motivated an impressive amount of work devoted to the study of the grammatical representation of sentential negation and its implications for syntactic and semantic theory (see the bibliography in Horn and Kato 2000 for a reasonably exhaustive compilation). The current volume includes twelve papers, the majority presented at a conference in Leiden in late 1994, that examine a range of intersecting issues in the historical development of modern English negation. While the papers are ordered alphabetically in the volume, they fall into two natural classes as defined by theoretical or descriptive orientation: four are explicitly directed to current issues in generative theory, while the remaining eight are of a more purely descriptive nature, although these papers contain sufficient detail to be of interest to practitioners of a variety of grammatical frameworks. I will briefly summarize the papers in the volume before commenting on selected points.

The task of writing a history of English that can serve as a textbook is not an enviable endeavor. For every point that an author chooses to include, a host of others may be omitted; for every detail an author chooses to address, a host of terminological and theoretical issues must often be explained in order to make the details comprehensible. Perhaps for these reasons, despite the numerous textbooks that have tackled this challenge, there is still room for scholars drawing on different methodologies and theoretical approaches and, therefore, raising different questions, to add their voice to the scholarly and pedagogical conversation. And perhaps, in the end, we must resign ourselves to the fact that not everyone will be satisfied with any one textbook. Barbara Fennell's explicitly sociolinguistic approach in her new textbook, A History of English, distinguishes her work from many of the textbooks that precede hers and means that she addresses a range of important and interesting research questions that do not typically appear in such texts. Perhaps the compromise is that this book may better serve as a supplemental text, with a focus on the significant sociolinguistic perspective that it adds on the relevant historical issues, rather than as a primary textbook for most introductory university courses on the history of the English language.

This volume contains thirty-five articles dedicated to Dieter Stellmacher, professor for Low German language and literature at the Universität Göttingen. The articles address a wide range of topics with an emphasis on German and Low German philology and linguistics. A number of articles are also devoted to literature and to linguistic topics in languages other than German or Low German. Most of the articles in this volume are fairly short, but they are generally of high quality. In addition to articles, this volume contains a list of approximately 200 well-wishers and a list of Dieter Stellmacher's numerous publications.