This book is a modern exploration of the feature [tense] introduced in distinctive feature theory by Roman Jakobson and colleagues (Jakobson, Fant, and Halle 1952). By proposing the feature again after years of skepticism toward its phonetic motivation, Jessen aims to provide a contribution to the integration of phonetics and phonology within linguistic theory. This thorough study of the tense/lax opposition in German obstruents is an expanded version of Jessen's 1996 Cornell University Ph.D. dissertation and is of particular significance because it reveals details and clarification of Jakobsonian concepts through personal communication with Linda Waugh, a former student of and later close collaborator with Jakobson himself. As such, the book will be of interest to phonologists, linguistic phoneticians, and those interested in the very concept of distinctive features and their role in describing the sound structure of human languages. Some background in acoustic phonetics and familiarity with experimental phonetic research is desirable to fully appreciate the power of the arguments presented in the study.

In German, past participles not only occur in root position with a directive force, as in Stillgestanden! ‘Stop!’ lit. ‘stood still(ptcp)’, but also as performatives in responses: A: Du sagst also nichts zu Papi. ‘So you won’t tell dad.’ B: Versprochen! ‘I promise!’ lit. ‘promised(ptcp)’. Here B performs the speech act denoted by the verb by saying that it has been performed. The propositional argument of the participle (what is promised) is resolved contextually, and the agent and the recipient arguments are restricted to the speaker and the hearer, respectively. This article presents a syntactic analysis of this rarely studied phenomenon, arguing that the construction with a performative participle is not ellipsis but an IP with a participial head and null pronominal complements. The syntactic analysis is formalized within Lexical-Functional Grammar. A pragmatic analysis is proposed arguing that the performative participle in its core use alternates with Yes! to express agreement with an assertion or compliance with a request, that is, to express consent to the effect that a proposition p may safely be added to the Common Ground. This analysis is cast within the dialogue framework of Farkas & Bruce (2010) and extended to response performative participles in monological uses.*

In this brief paper it is proposed that the problematic Gothic genitive plural suffix in -ē may derive from a grammaticalized deictic particle. Typological and specifically Indo-European evidence for the derivation of genitive markers from deictic particles is presented in support of this hypothesis.

Danish has an optative taking the form of a wh-clause with embedded word order: Hvem der var rig! lit. ‘Who there were rich!’ with the intended meaning Wish I were rich! Such wh-clauses cannot be used as optatives in German or English (or only marginally so). On the basis of a detailed analysis of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of this little-studied phenomenon, this article seeks to explain why a wh-clause with “embedded” word order can be used as an optative. I argue that wh-optatives are compositional in many but not all respects. It is a special construction whose interpretation is determined to a large extent by its grammatical properties but which also has completely idiosyncratic properties. In German and English, such wh-clauses are only potential optatives: They are not used as optatives, but nothing would preclude it.*

The complex sociolinguistic system for Dutch forms of address presents students of Dutch as a foreign language with particular difficulties in learning to use second person pronouns appropriately. This article discusses the role of a period of residence in the Low Countries in advancing these students’ proficiency in this respect. The research is based on interviews with final-year students of Dutch in the UK. The analysis is framed in terms of intercultural communicative competence and approaches to learning.

The present paper investigates the origin and semantics of complex verbs with pleonastic prepositions in the Gothic Bible in comparison with the Greek and Latin sources from which the Gothic was translated. In these constructions, the same directional information is specified by a preverb and its semantically and formally related preposition in a PP-modifier. It is shown that Gothic preverb-preposition redundancy is largely the result of mechanical translation from the Greek source, with the strong possibility of Latin influence in some cases. While there are co-occurrences of formally related preverbs and prepositions in Gothic independent of Greek and Latin textual influence, directionality is usually only fully specified by the preposition, and so these instances are not truly pleonastic. The considerable influence of Greek on redundant preverb-preposition constructions in Gothic ultimately serves as a caution against taking Gothic morphosyntax at face value.I would like to thank Kari Ellen Gade, Robert Dennis Fulk, and Tracy Alan Hall for their valuable input on earlier drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful feedback.

A subset of German control verbs allows for the discontinuous linearization of their infinitival complements, a word-order pattern known as the “third construction” pattern. Compared to alternative word-order options (notably, extraposition), third constructions are very rare in present-day German. Here we ask whether the third construction pattern’s low occurrence frequency can be accounted for by processing factors. We report the results from a self-paced reading task and a production priming task investigating whether third constructions are difficult to comprehend, difficult to produce, or both. Our results show that the third construction pattern’s local structural ambiguity impedes comprehension, and that the pattern is also resistant to priming. We conclude that this word-order pattern is an example of a “latent” construction that is grammatically licensed but strongly dispreferred in language use because easier-to-process word-order variants are available.

This paper investigates the aspectual potential of posture verb pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus study of sitzen ‘sit’ and stehen ‘stand’, it is shown that despite a preference for activity verbs, verbs of all aspectual classes occur in the second conjunct. The posture verb imposes its durative meaning component on the second verb, thus making a progressive interpretation of the construction possible. Apart from this emergent aspectual function, German posture verb pseudo-coordination has a subjective function (conveying the speaker’s beliefs about the subject referent’s stance), and a discourse pragmatic function (information packaging).*

In this article, we report a large-scale corpus study aimed at tackling the (controversial) question to what extent the European national varieties of Dutch, that is, Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, exhibit morpho-syntactic differences. Instead of relying on a manual selection of cases of morphosyntactic variation, we first marshal large bilingual parallel corpora and machine translation software to identify semiautomatically, in an extensively data-driven fashion, loci of variation from various “corners” of Dutch grammar. We then gauge the distribution of con-structional alternatives in a nationally as well as stylistically stratified corpus for a representative selection of twenty alternation patterns. We find that natiolectal variation in the grammar of Dutch is far more prevalent than often assumed, especially in less edited text types, and that it shows up in inflection phenomena, lexically conditioned syntactic variation, and pure word order permutations. Another key finding is that many cases of synchronic probabilistic asymmetries reflect a diachronic difference between the two varieties: Netherlandic Dutch often tends to be ahead in cases of ongoing grammatical change, with Belgian Dutch holding on somewhat longer to obsolescent features of the grammar.*

Previous studies on the development of PGmc. */ga-/ have been inadequate due, in part, to a misunderstanding or underestimation of the roles of word accent and syntactic accent. Purported evidence for stressed */ga-/ in Proto-Germanic or later stages is dubious and can be refuted convincingly. This article suggests that PGmc. */ga-/ never received primary word stress because it had become a clitic. Such a hypothesis allows for an unproblematic phonological derivation from Proto-Indo-European and is a logical premise for interpreting subsequent developments in the Germanic languages.

The German derivational suffix -in primarily marks female sex on nouns that denote people. This paper investigates the attachment of the suffix to masculine noun bases that refer back to feminine nouns denoting inanimate referents in the same construction, seemingly as a means of making the gender of the two nouns match. The same phenomenon is also observed in Dutch despite the absence of a masculine/feminine distinction in the standard language. It is argued that the gender matching observed is a form of agreement. Using the evidence of corpus data and other attestations, it is concluded here that, because the inanimate referents of the subject nouns in the constructions involved all appear close to animate referents on animacy hierarchies (that is, they fall just outside the suffix's usual sphere of use), the gender agreement performed by -in (and its Dutch counterparts) is an extension of the suffix's prototypical derivational role, but resembles inflection in some respects and may indicate that the suffix is undergoing grammaticalization.*

Southern varieties of Dutch use the 1st person plural form of the possessive pronoun ons as a marker of consanguinity with proper names, as in ons Emma ‘Emma, our consanguineous family member’. This use of ons ‘our’ has some remarkable properties: It is incompatible with adjectival modification and contrastive stress. These properties are shared with a construction from Standard Dutch: complex prenominal s- possessors consisting of the 1st person singular form of the possessive pronoun and a kinship term as in mijn vaders fiets ‘my father's bike’. We propose that both these constructions are constructional idioms (Booij 2002), a lexical template with a variable part. This offers a straightforward account of the properties of these constructions.*

In this short paper, the author takes a closer look at Einar Haugen's (1906–1994) writings in as far as they touch upon the historiography of linguistics. After a sketch of his scholarly background and the role he played in the Linguistic Society of America generally and, more particularly, as a historian of linguistic thought from his well-known LSA presidential address of 1950 onwards, Haugen's treatment of the so-called First grammatical treatise comes under closer scrutiny. In particular, the author discusses two expressions in Haugen's 1950 edition of the text that seem to have given rise to much speculation, namely, the word grein and the (probably juridical) phrase skipta máli. It is argued that Haugen and others—notably Hreinn Benediktsson—are at best overinterpreting them by assigning modern structural phonologist meanings to the words, turning them into metalinguistic terms. It is maintained instead that the First Grammarian had made a practical argument in favor of the addition of four vowels not found in the five-vowel Roman alphabet necessitated by the facts of Old Icelandic, and that the text was basically a pedagogical treatise on orthographic requirements and not a precocious phonological discussion.

Investigations of vowel lengthening and shortening in German have sought to identify either the ultimate cause of these changes, e.g., the need to achieve an ideal and uniform word length, or the specific conditions for them, e.g., open vs. closed syllable. Little light has been shed on the problem since Paul's formulation of 1884. Typically absent are references to real evidence that might be adduced from Middle and Early New German orthographic practices.

The ME term falding, used of a heavy cloth type imported from Ireland, has been traced to MIr.fallaing. It is proposed that this, in turn, derives not from ON feldr ‘cloak’ but from faldr ‘fold’, reference being made to the voluminous folds of the garment or to the weaving technique of folding short lengths of yarn around the threads of the warp to give a shaggy exterior finish. Also reviewed are questions of early Irish dress, the medieval cloth trade, and Irish motifs in the Icelandic Laxdæla saga.