In Present-Day English, the particle out is obligatorily adjacent to the following of PP, as in He pulled the plugs out of his ears / *He pulled out the plugs of his ears, even though particles can normally precede or follow the object of the particle verb, as in Hepulled out the plugs / Hepulled the plugs out. Interestingly, in Old English and Middle English, the particle out could occur either adjacent or nonadjacent to the of PP. Based on corpus data covering the period from Old English to Late Modern English, I show that the change in the syntax of directional out of involves grammaticalization: The bleaching of the directional meaning of the preposition of led to a structural reanalysis by which the of PP became included in the particle's phrasal projection and could no longer be separated from the particle out. This in turn led to phono-logical reduction of the preposition of. The loss of the nonadjacent option is argued to be connected to the status of particles as optionally projecting elements.*

This paper is an investigation of the early use of the Old High German demonstrative as a definite article. Previous work has often failed to take into account the many ways that the definite article can be employed or the fact that new grammatical structures sometimes evolve over great lengths of time. This paper discusses the evolutionary process and stages of article use in three individual OHG documents, the Isidor translation, the Tatian translation, and Otfrid's Evangelien-buch, the three longest OHG documents in Franconian dialects. It proposes that a definite article did exist from the earliest recorded examples of OHG although with differing uses at different times (and places).*

The fronting of back vowels before the segment represented by the rune algwiz in Old Norse (Runic: kūR ON: kýr‘cows’) is problematic because there is no consensus on the phonetic value to be reconstructed for the conditioner, a reflex of Proto-Germanic+/z/. This study presents an acoustic experiment testing the fronting effect of codas [z], [ʒ], and [ɹ] on realizations of the representative back vowel /u/, as these are possible reconstructed values of algwiz. Based on observed coarticulation, we argue that a voiced alveolar fricative [z]—and not postalveolar [ʒ] or rhotic [ɹ]—is the best reconstruction for the conditioner of R-umlaut, and that this reflex of PGmc+/z/ in North Germaniccaused umlaut before rhotacism and merger with PGmc+/r/.