Dutch consonant cluster assimilations have come to play a central role in the debate over whether laryngeal features are restrictedly privative (single-valued) or must be encoded as binary (marking both positive and negative values). It has been argued, in particular, that the negative specification [–voice] is necessary in order to capture the difference in directionality of assimilation between stop-final and fricative-final clusters in Dutch as well as to accommodate the contrary behavior of the past suffix -de. Under the dimensional theory of laryngeal representation, the present paper provides a fresh analysis of the Netherlandic facts without reference to negative feature values, focusing on the role of phonetic enhancement versus phonology proper. The exposition is anchored in the history of Dutch as a Germanic language that is to a great extent Romance-like in its laryngeal phonology, and takes into consideration evidence from dialects and experimental phonetics.An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Eighth Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC 8) at Indiana University, Bloomington, April 26–28, 2002, and a related paper, “Privativity and the Laws of Enhancement”, was held at a Linguistics Student Organization Colloquium, University of Wisconsin–Madison, in March 2002. In addition to two anonymous reviewers for this journal, we owe thanks to Anthony Buccini, Rob Howell, Monica Macaulay, Bert Vaux, and the audiences at both presentations for valuable input. The usual disclaimers apply.

This paper presents an OT analysis of hypocoristic (nickname) formation based on previously unanalyzed data from Bernese Swiss German. The Bernese data are compared to the much discussed pattern of i-formation in Standard German, from which they differ in two important ways: the Bernese hypocoristics have Umlaut, and the syllable retained from the full name in the hypocoristic is not consistently the leftmost. The Umlaut phenomenon is shown to be an effect of the underlying shape of the hypocoristic suffix. The choice of syllable, while appearing to be a more marked pattern, can be shown to arise from the satisfaction of high-ranking, position-sensitive markedness constraints, illustrating the “emergence of the unmarked” in truncations.Earlier versions of this paper appeared in the McGill Working Papers in Linguistics (Grüter 2002) and were presented at the Montréal-Ottawa-Toronto (MOT) Phonology Workshop (McGill University, February 2002) and the Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable (UC Berkeley, April 2002). I am grateful to these audiences as well as to two anonymous JGL reviewers for helpful questions and comments. Special thanks are due to Heather Goad, whose extensive advice and encouragement have made this paper possible. All errors are of course my own. This research was supported by a McGill Major Fellowship.

This study is the result of “substantial changes and revisions” (v) undertaken on an MIT dissertation completed in 1998 that brings into focus a large body of research on infinitive constructions. It consists of an introductory chapter, four core chapters, and a closing chapter with a summary and conclusion; it also includes an appendix with a sizable collection of data from German, as well as a table of verb classifications from five languages.

Nils Langer wrote this book with one major aim: to explore whether prescriptive grammarians influenced the formation of standard German. He does this by comparing language use and metalinguistic comments in the Early New High German period and by eliminating other factors, including “… system-internal reasons (as illustrated by an analysis of ENHG language use), sociolinguistic identification (as illustrated by distributional patterns of language use, e.g., with regard to text type)” (4), or random variation. Langer aims to establish that certain constructions disappeared from standard-language use after prescriptive grammarians' objections. He does not claim that grammarians are the major “creators” of standard German, but that we must assume a certain degree of influence for certain constructions, in particular when it comes to excluding features from the standard language. With this aim in mind, he investigates the use of periphrastic tun and to a lesser degree polynegation and double perfect constructions.

The prospect of writing a grammar of Notker's German has long been a goal of those involved in editing his adaptations of Latin philosophical works and school tracts. In his capacity as director of the monastery school at St. Gallen, Notker der Deutsche, or Notker Labeo, (ca. 950–1022), translated or adapted a number of Latin works derived from the philosophical traditions of late antiquity (cf. Ochsenbein 1999, Sonderegger 1970). Among these was the allegorical introduction to Martianus Capella's De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a text of decided importance for the instruction of the seven liberal arts throughout the rest of the Middle Ages. The linguistic and contextual difficulties of Martianus's work prompted various commentaries especially during the later Carolingian period. The commentary on Martianus by Remigius of Auxerre became associated with the St. Gallen monastery school and is cited by Notker at the opening of his translation of De nuptiis (cf. King 1986). Despite whatever resolution of philosophical conundrums Notker's translation might have yielded, it is his use of German in translating the first two books of Martianus that has attracted predominant critical and editorial attention.

This book describes the word order in sentences with a modal and a main verb, with an auxiliary and a present participle, and with an auxiliary and a past participle. The term MULTIPLE PREDICATE is defined as a construction “involving two predicates, one finite and the other non-finite” (1). The data mainly come from Ælfric's Catholic Homilies and the CD contains a list of files with the example sentences from the book. It is not clear (e.g., page 8) whether the author transcribed the text himself or used the Old English Dictionary e-text of the homilies (from page 44, it appears that he used the latter, since he uses other texts from that project).

This book is a substantial offering to Wolfgang Ulrich Dressler, the Austrian linguist who recently marked his 60th birthday. It consists of the contents (iii–vii) showing fifty-six studies, ten of which were written by two persons each; a brief foreword and afterword (both ix) with kind words for the Jubilar; a tabula gratulatoria (xi–xiii) listing over 100 names and institutes; Dressler's curriculum vitae (xv–xvii), which begins in 1957 at the University of Vienna, where he has been Head of the Department of Linguistics since 1978; and his bibliography (xix–xxxiv) of over 400 works, some thirty of which were coauthored or coedited with one of twenty-one of the authors in this festschrift. Then come the alphabetically arranged articles (1–514), each limited to roughly ten pages in order to accommodate as many parties as possible. There is no index.

One might think that after seventy-plus years of debating the phonological status of the velar versus palatal fricative in German (the “ach-Laut” and the “ich-Laut” respectively), nothing new could be said about it. The monograph under review shows why this is not the case. And nowhere will one find a more exhaustive historical overview of the various positions taken since 1929, when Daniel Jones first treated the question (he writes of it, however, as a bit of common knowledge among linguists). From Jones to the latest views from Optimality Theory, the reader is skillfully guided through the various questions this issue has raised: Is this one phoneme or two? Is morphological information included or not? Are boundary phenomena included or not? Is /x/ underlying or /ç/? Is -chen a “phonological word” or are there in fact two different suffixes? To what extent should loanwords be brought into the discussion? And there are other issues, too, which have not been raised before, especially the one posed in the title. Thus, every possible question raised about these two sounds and every conceivable answer is given its due; this comprehensive survey makes up the whole of chapter 3. The first two chapters clear the ground for this history of the discussion: Chapter 1 deals with the issue of the definition of “Standard German”, and chapter 2 deals with the “bare facts” regarding the distribution of [x] and [ç].