A pivotal process in the loss of phonological quantity in West Germanic languages is what is traditionally known as Open Syllable Lengthening. Existing accounts have found no explanation for why languages such as English apply this change in less than 50% of the relevant cases. This paper presents the results of a corpus investigation of four West Germanic languages showing that whether Open Syllable Lengthening occurs in more than 50% of predicted cases correlates with the ratio of closed syllables with short vowels to open syllables with long vowels. We interpret this as the result of frequency effects that have markedly shaped the application of Open Syllable Lengthening in West Germanic. This has implications for phonological change in general, as well as for the relationship between stress and syllable structure in West Germanic languages.*

The paradigm of some possessive pronouns, adjectives, and some other modifiers in Gothic contains an instance of morphological variation in the neuter nominative and accusative singular, where the bare stem of the modifier alternates with the pronominally inflected form in -ata (for example, jugg versus juggata ‘young’). In an effort to account for this morphological variation, this paper examines the evidence for the competition between the bare stem and inflected forms in -ata attested in the Gothic New Testament. Further, it assesses the synchronic and diachronic implications of the variation with a view to gaining a better understanding of the development of the Germanic strong modifier inflection. It demonstrates that -ata is a stylistically charged form observed in specific contexts and grammatical environments. From a diachronic point of view, the evidence of -ata sheds light on the development of the Germanic strong modifier inflection, pointing toward a lexical diffusion-type development, with the inflection of demonstrative pronouns spreading across the lexicon of modifiers through possessive pronouns and quantifiers to adjectives and participles.*