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.

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.

This article investigates the motivations for consonant cluster simplification through an analysis of consonant deletion in Icelandic, in clusters of three consonants created by the addition of the preterite suffix -ti/-di/-ði directly to the verb stem. It is argued that deletion is driven by perceptual factors interacting with sonority requirements. Deletion targets stops and nonstrident obstruents and its likelihood correlates with similarity in manner and place of articulation between the consonants and their adjacent segments. These two generalizations are elucidated in terms of perceptual cues, and an optimality-theoretic analysis is developed in which more perceptible consonants are protected from deletion by higher-ranked faithfulness constraints.I am grateful to Ólafur Páll Jónsson and Haraldur Bernharðsson, as well as Hanna Óladóttir, for patiently going through a long list of verbs with me and answering my questions. Haraldur also provided me with useful references and easy access to them. Thanks also to Michael Kenstowicz, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, and two anonymous JGL reviewers for answering questions, discussing different issues, and commenting on earlier versions of this research.

This paper explores V2 variation in West Flemish and French Flemish dialects of Dutch based on an extensive corpus of authentic spoken data. After taking stock of the existing literature, we probe into the effect of region, prosodic integration, form and function of the topicalized constituent, form of the subject, and the number of constituents in the prefield on (non)inverted word order. This is the first study that carries out regression analysis on the combined impact of these variables in the entire West Flemish and French Flemish region, with additional visualization of effect sizes. The results show that noninversion is generally more widespread than originally anticipated, with unexpected higher occurrence of noninversion in continental West Flemish and lower frequencies in western West Flemish. With the exception of the variable number of constituents in the prefield, all other variables had a significant impact on word order: Clausal topicalized elements, elements that have peripheral functions, and elements that lack prosodic integration all favor noninverted word order. The form of the subject also impacted word order, but its effect is sometimes overruled by discourse considerations.

This paper argues that the Dutch sociolinguistic situation in the 17th and 18th centuries should be analyzed as diaglossic, that is, involving a wide spectrum of variation in between localized spoken dialects and the supposed written standard. In fact, multiple instances of norm selection for writing render this diaglossic situation even more complex. The paper shows that multiple norm selection even occurred in cases when a strict and simple norm was selected early on, that is, in the late 16th–early 17th century. The case study is based on the Letters as Loot Corpus comprising private letters from the 1660s–1670s and the 1770s–1780s and focuses on the object form of the 1st person singular personal pronoun, namely, mij or mijn. Despite the early selection of mij, some language users in the late 17th and 18th century adopted mijn in writing. The analysis shows a normative split in written Dutch of the time, with most language users either converging to or diverging from the supposed standard form mij.*

Standard movement theory stipulates that any X"-phrase that is moved must move to the specifier position (SPEC) of C". In this paper, however, it is argued on the basis of coordination phenomena, verb-final structure, and diachronic evidence that, in relative clauses and indirect questions, the moved pronoun or w-element functions more as a true complementizer than as a fronted X"-phrase and thus should move to the head position C. Movement to C is thus determined not by the phrase-structure level of the moved category, but by feature compatibility.

Several years ago we started work on a new etymological dictionary of the English language and published a short announcement of our plans (Liberman and Mitchell 1988). Now the contours of the dictionary have become clear enough for us to begin writing our first entries and to introduce our project to a wider range of scholars.

Gothic scribes divided words at the ends of lines following basic principles of syllabification except in the case of glide-final clusters, where the division appeared immediately before the glide (-C/G-). Pierce (2006) accepts this practice as evidence that such sequences were heterosyllabified, -C.G-. He rejects arguments that such breaks occur because morpheme boundaries (#) normally precede the glides, -VC0C/#GV-, and that hence these clusters were actually tauto-syllabified: -VC0.C#GV-. Pierce counters that (a) the Law of Initials forbids such tautosyllabification; (b) morphology cannot account for similar division in forms evincing Verschärfung or /-ngw-/, where there are no morpheme boundaries; (c) his opponents are inconsistent because they ignore the role of morphology in the division of stop + liquid clusters; (d) evidence from the other Germanic dialects cor-roborates his position; (e) if -VC0CGV- were truly tautosyllabified, one would expect occasionally to find erroneous divisions exhibiting this, -VC0/.C#GV-. In this rejoinder, I argue that Pierce's arguments rest on false premises.

A shared feature of the Germanic languages is the occurrence of complex verbs consisting of the verb itself and what I refer to as the adverbal unit (AU). I examine the nature of the units that can be inserted into such complex verbs and compare intercalation patterns in AU-Vs and V-AUs. AU-Vs are found to be much more resistant to intercalation than V-AUs. The former accommodate the past participle marker, the infinitival linker, and—less commonly—verbs, whereas the latter accommodate NPs, ADVPs, and—less commonly—both phrase types concurrently. Thus, V-AUs may be split by more syntactic as well as heavier material than AU-Vs. I argue that this difference in cohesiveness is due to varying degrees of coactivation of Vs and AUs. The constituents of AU-Vs show a higher degree of coactivation than those of V-AUs. Adverbal units depend for their activation on the prior activation of verbs more than verbs depend for their activation on the prior activation of adverbal units. These different activation patterns lead to different degrees of cohesiveness and hence to different intercalation possibilities in the two verb types. Although intercalation is compulsory in some contexts, it proves to be a dispreferred option.*

This paper investigates three verbs expressing necessity in the three West Germanic languages: Dutch hoeven, English need, and German brauchen. These three verbs are all categorized as negative polarity items (npis). However, there are differences in their distribution as NPIs, which posit German brauchen between English need and Dutch hoeven. By analyzing two factors that may influence acquisition, namely, opacity and input frequency, this paper moreover presents a similar pattern for the acquisition of these NPIs: The Dutch NPI hoeven emerges earlier in child language than its German counterpart, which in turn arises earlier than the English NPI need.

In the now extinct Frisian dialect of the island of Wangerooge, the naming verb heit ‘to be called’ had partially grammaticalized into a copular verb ‘to be’ competing, to some extent, with the original copula wízze ‘to be’. In this paper, I discuss the development and the status of the copula heit in some detail and consider what it might tell one about the taxonomy of copular clauses (Higgins 1979). I show that the functional change from naming verb to copula initially occurred in identificational copular clauses. From there heit spread to classifi-cational and specificational copular clauses, but not to predicational ones. This development suggests a principled distinction between predicational copular clauses on the one hand and identificational copular clauses (conceived as comprising classifying, specifying, and equating ones) on the other. This does not imply, however, that heit is an identificational copula or that it selects an identificational small clause. I analyze copular heit used with an identificational small clause as a suppletive allomorph of wízze ‘to be’.*

The scholarship on the Modern German periphrastic future, or the werden future (that is, werden + infinitive) has brought forth different hypotheses about its origins. One of these hypotheses states that it developed from werden + present participle in the 13th century (for example, Bech 1901). While many have criticized this hypothesis, no one until now has proposed a valid solution for the problem. In this study, I carried out a comprehensive examination of the instances of werden in combination with present participles and infinitives in Middle and Early New High German. The analysis indicates that although werden + present participle and werden + infinitive were often used in similar contexts, the former construction was not the source from which the werden future emerged. Old High German data also show the use of werden + infinitive, which suggests that it was already well established in the first two centuries of the Middle High German period. This provides evidence against the view that the construction developed as late as the 13th century. I also address the grammaticalization process that werden + infinitive underwent during the Early New High German period and suggest that it culminated in the 16th century.

In morphological theory, various models have been developed with respect to the appropriate levels of abstraction for stating morphological generalizations. This paper addresses a class of seemingly marginal and/or problematic phenomena in morphology and proposes that morphological descriptions regularly refer to two distinct levels of description. One is the level of “morphosyntax,” and one is the level of “morphophonology.” Furthermore, morphology is considered to be marginal if and only if the degree of isomorphy between representations on these two levels is reduced. This basic proposal is illustrated and tested with several central phenomena of morphology found in German: synthetic compounds, conversion, empty morphs, and trun-cation. The analysis proposed here argues for the necessity of a two-level model of morphology as an approach in which both abstract morphosyntax as well as more concrete morphophonology have a place.*

In the Kiel German regional variety (KG), /ɡ/ undergoes spirantization after vowels and /ʀ/ but not after /l/. KG contrasts with data provided by Wiese (1996) for a dialect that he calls Northern Colloquial Speech (NCS), in which /ɡ/ spirantizes not only after vowels and /ʀ/, but also after /l/. I argue that G-Spirantization in both regional varieties is an example of an assimilation which spreads [+continuant] from a vowel or /ʀ/ in KG (and /l/ in NCS) to a following coda /ɡ/. The difference between the /…lɡ/ environment in the two dialects can be explained by lateral ambivalence, as described in detail by Mielke (2005).*