This article reports on a study of the extent and nature of the use of English loanwords in the writing of German legal professionals. A variety of texts are examined, showing that although the use of English loans is limited, their use across texts is essential for serving various pragmatic functions. The study demonstrates the value of systematic genre-based studies in contributing to a general description of English loan use among speakers of German.

Modern scholars generally agree that in Geoffrey Chaucer's sound system, [e:] and [ε] were both full phonemes, a situation paralleled with the back vowels [o:] and [ɔ:]. Unfortunately, Chaucer's verse fairly frequently rhymes words that should have /e:/ (according to diachronic criteria) with words in which one expects /ε:/. The prevailing explanation for their occurrence insists that Chaucer created the faulty rhymes neither through ignorance nor poetic license; instead, he liberally employed common variant pronunciations from fourteenth-century London English. This paper argues that the study of rhymes has been heavily determined by a belief that this literary artifice, studied in a context informed by the knowledge of historical phonology, may permit us to recover facts of Chaucer's pronunciation that otherwise would be irretrievable. The connections between this presupposition and Derrida's critique of the spoken versus the written are revealed, suggesting that rhymes possess their own unique written properties. In a three-stage analysis, scholarly attention is redirected toward rhymes as a graphological phenomenon.

A much underused resource in the study of Early American English is the anecdotal commentaries provided by the rather large number of contemporary journals which often provide evidence about an important issue in Early American English. This paper addresses the question of “leveling” in Colonial American English: did it take place, and, if so, when, where, and in what form, and shows how at least one contemporary journal provides rather impressive indications of the presence of strong, entrenched dialect differences at the turn ot the 18th century, suggesting that leveling, at least on the scale sometimes assumed by modern commentators, had not occurred by Madam Knight's day.

In einer Reihe von Artikeln haben Joseph B. Voyles und zwei deutsche Linguisten unter dem Einfluß generativistischer Theorien von neuem kritische Erklärungen des ahd. i−Umlauts und der nhd. Verteilung der Umlautsvokale unternommen. Diese Art von linguistischer Historiographie entspricht m.E. nicht der realen Sprachgeschichte.

Den Reichtum der Sprache findet man nicht, wenn man fragt: was hat das Wort x früher bedeutet? oder: woher kommt das Wort x?, sondern wenn man fragt: was sagt man alles für… ? (1)

This essay addresses in general lines the issue of variance within some languages and how such variances are linked systematically, i.e., on the basis of some general abstract theoretical pattern, with the standard language. Several such variances are illustrated ranging from regiolects to sociolects of German, and it is shown what the abstract pattern is that serves as the base of description of the standard as well as the sociolectal and regiolectal variances. The main body of the text is dedicated to a specific criterion of variation, namely the deictic features in the grammars of COME and GO in German, English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. To the extent that the five languages deviate considerably from one another in choosing one against the other of the two verbs of motion, an inventory of sociopragmatic conditions has been uncovered which plays the guiding role in selecting deictic alternatives and which can be considered to be of universal status. The bottom line is that there are conditions, beyond those of semantic and grammatical selection, i.e., sociopragmatic ones which systematically determine choices from some well-conditioned lexical paradigms.

Two incompatible theories of OHG i−umlaut are briefly described—the one proposed by Twaddell in 1938, the other by Voyles in 1991. Five arguments recently adduced by Penzl in defense of the Twaddellian theory are discussed. These five points are critiqued in some detail because they are crucial for understanding and evaluating the two theories.