In German, complex wh-interrogatives can optionally be formed by inserting the 3rd person neuter w h-pronoun was in the matrix [Spec, CP] position instead of long-distance wh-raising. It is generally assumed that “expletive” was serves as a placeholder for a contentful wh-expression lower down in the sentence that substitutes for it at the level of semantic interpretation. It can be shown, however, that the putative wh-expletive was in German is actually a CP-proform basegenerated in matrix object position, and that it is not subject to expletive replacement at LF. As an alternative to previous accounts, I propose a complex predicate analysis of the German was … w construction according to which was is a [thetas]-marked object pronoun capable of licensing a predicative CP in V-complement position. This analysis is consistent with Rothstein's (1995) claim that true object expletives do not exist.*

This paper is about a minor and so far neglected sentence type in German: wh-root infinitivals such as Wohin gehen? ‘Where (should one/we) go?’. I concentrate on describing their formal and interpretive properties in detail, and relate these properties in a nonarbitrary manner by suggesting ways in which the salient aspects of their interpretation, that is, (the specifics of) their modality, their subject interpretation, and their illocutionary use, could be derived from the interpretively relevant properties of their form.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung-Berlin (3/02, 5/02), the University of Pennsylvania (4/02), and the University of Frankfurt (6/02). Thanks to all the audiences for valuable comments and suggestions. Special thanks for constructive discussion and help with specific points of the paper are owed to many: Rajesh Bhatt, Veronika Ehrich, Ewald Lang, Manfred Krifka, Ingo Reich, Inger Rosengren, Joachim Sabel, Hubert Truckenbrodt, Ede Zimmermann, Ilse Zimmermann as well as the editor, Mark Louden, and two anonymous referees. A preprint version of this paper (here considerably revised) appeared as Reis 2002.

This paper aims to shed light on regularities underlying German stress assignment. The results of a pseudoword production task suggest that rhyme complexity of the final syllable is a strong predictor of main stress position in German. We also found that antepenult rhyme complexity and orthographic rhyme structure have significant effect on stress assignment. In general, the effects seem to be probabilistic rather than categorical. Our results suggest that phonological theories of German word stress need to allow for multiple probabilistic factors, including syllabic structure of all stressable syllables and orthographic coding.*

Using map task data, this paper investigates the intonation of polar questions in North American (heritage) Icelandic, and compares it to the intonation of polar questions in Icelandic as spoken in Iceland and in North American English as spoken in Manitoba, Canada. The results show that intonational features typical of Icelandic polar questions are present to a considerable extent in heritage Icelandic. Furthermore, intonational features typical of North American English polar questions can frequently be observed in heritage Icelandic, too. In addition, there is a tendency for intonational features typical of Icelandic polar questions to show up in North American English polar questions produced by speakers of heritage Icelandic more often than in North American English polar questions produced by speakers without Icelandic heritage. Focusing on intonation, the present study adds to the evidence for (bidirectional) prosodic interference between a heritage language (here moribund Icelandic) and the dominant language (here North American English).*

Do-support is a unique characteristic of English. Many languages other than English have do-periphrasis but not English-type do-support. This raises the obvious question: What is special about English? The goal of this paper is to provide an account of English do-support that explains why do-support, with its attendant properties, is found uniquely in English. I review the classical derivational approaches to do-support and argue that they do not satisfactorily capture the generalizations. I suggest an alternative, non-derivational account of contemporary do-support that makes crucial use of constructions. Finally, I propose an account of the history of do-support in English that characterizes the changes in terms of the content and scope of constructions. The rise of do-support can be understood as a consequence of the contraction and re-specialization of particular constructions in the wake of well-documented changes in the overt morphological system of the language.*

In this paper, I provide examples from Germanic of cyclical changes involving the nominal phrase. Using a DP structure, it can be observed that demonstratives in specifier positions of the DP are reanalyzed through time as articles in head positions. The change from demonstrative to article is known as the definiteness cycle and described in Greenberg 1978 and Lyons 1999. Providing examples from Old Norse, Old English, and Afrikaans, I suggest an explanation for the cycle in terms of a cognitive principle, Feature Economy, that assists in language acquisition and hence language change.Many thanks to Werner Abraham, Johanna Wood, Jan Terje Faarlund, two anonymous referees, and especially to Terje Lohndal for helpful discussion and comments.

This article undertakes the first systematic examination of Frank’s (1979, 1981, 1987, 1990, 2007b, 2008) claim that Old Norse influence is discernible in the language of Beowulf. It tests this hypothesis first by scrutinizing each of the alleged Nordicisms in Beowulf, then by discussing various theoretical considerations bearing on its plausibility. We demonstrate that the syntactic, morphological, lexical, and semantic peculiarities that Frank would explain as manifestations of Old Norse influence are more economically and holistically explained as consequences of archaic composition. We then demonstrate that advances in the study of Anglo-Scandinavian language contact provide strong reasons to doubt that Old Norse could have influenced Beowulf in the manner that Frank has proposed. We conclude that Beowulf is entirely devoid of Old Norse influence and that it was probably composed ca. 700, long before the onset of the Viking Age.

While the study of English intensifiers has been a topic of much empirical discussion (Bolinger 1972, Paradis 1997, Ito & Tagliamonte 2003, Xiao & Tao 2007, Fuchs 2017), intensification in the German language is underexplored. The present study operationalizes variationist methods to comprehensively examine the syntactic intensification of adjectives in German by investigating how adjective intensifiers rank empirically in terms of frequency and whether their use is sensitive to the social factors gender and age. Results indicate that in German, amplifiers are more frequent than downtoners, boosters are more frequent than maximizers, and the gender and the age of the speaker are factors that influence their use. These findings corroborate crosslinguistic findings (Peters 1994, Broekhuis 2013, D’Arcy 2015, Fuchs 2017). Broadly speaking, the present study suggests that the syntactic intensification of adjectives in German is, in many ways, similar to what has been observed previously in other Germanic languages.*

We investigated strong-verb paradigm leveling in German, Dutch, English, and Swedish, and found significant differences in ablaut leveling and class change towards the weak conjugation. Swedish favors ablaut patterns retaining a difference between the preterite and the past participle, while German, Dutch, and English favor a common vowel for both forms. In change from the strong to the weak conjugation in Swedish, the preterite is more resistant than the past participle, while in the other languages it is the reverse. We provide a unified explanation for these facts based on differences in category frequency due to the prominence or lack of an aspectual distinction between preterite and perfect.*

The article focuses on the hypothesis that the structural complexity of languages is variable and historically changeable. By means of a quantitative statistical analysis of naturalistic corpus data, the question is raised as to what role language contact and adult second language acquisition play in the simplification and complexification of language varieties. The results confirm that there is a significant correlation between intensity of contact and linguistic complexity, while at the same time showing that there is a need to consider other social factors, and, in particular, the attitude of a speech community toward linguistic norms.*

This paper is a synchronic investigation of verbal complex phenomena in the West Central German dialects. The types of verbal complexes attested in 187 recordings of West Central German from the Zwirner Corpus are first classified and analyzed. A GoldVarb analysis reveals that in subordinate clause two-verb complexes, the factor groups syntagm and verbal prefix type have statistically significant effects on word order, while in main clause two-verb complexes the factor groups syntagm, verbal prefix type, and a grammatical correlate to focus have statistically significant effects. Taking as a point of departure Lötscher 1978 and Sapp 2007, a multi-causal account of verbal complex pheno-mena involving grammatical, functional, and performance factors is developed, with a close examination of the role of language processing in verbal complex formation. Following Hawkins' (1994, 2004) notions of Early Immediate Constituents and Minimize Domains, it is argued that the type of verbal complex known as Verb Projection Raising can be linked in part to an advantage in language production. The paper concludes with a discussion of the speaker-hearer dichotomy as it relates to German clausal structure and the role of interfaces in the analysis of verbal complexes.*

This paper describes the organization of the Texas German Dialect Project (TGDP), which aims to document and archive the remnants of Texas German. The mission of the TGDP is (a) to document Texas German as it reflects the rich cultural and linguistic traditions of its residents; (b) to gather basic research information about linguistic diversity; (c) to provide linguistic information for public and educational interests, and (d) to use the collected materials for the improvement of educational programs. The paper gives a brief histor-ical overview of the development of the Texas German community and then describes the workflow of the TGDP. We also discuss how the Texas German Dialect Archive (TGDA) is currently used for linguistic research on new dialect formation, language contact, and language death. Since the open-ended sociolinguistic interviews contain a wealth of information on the history and cultural practices of the Texas German community, the archive is also of interest to historians and anthropologists. Finally, we show how the archive has been used for community outreach programs throughout central Texas.*

This article addresses the question of whether the influence of thematic roles (in particular, experiencers and patients) on word order is an epiphenomenal effect of other factors (such as information structure and animacy). For this purpose, I have investigated argument realization with different verb classes, including canonical verbs and either agentive or nonagentive experiencer-object verbs with varying case marking (dative or accusative), in a large corpus of written German. The obtained results indicate that the experiencer-first effect is at least to some extent triggered by other factors, in particular animacy. However, after subtracting the effect resulting from these factors, the impact of the thematic properties remains, and therefore it is necessary to explain the whole range of data.*

English marks the distinction between adjectives and adverbs with an adverbial suffix, whereas Dutch and German allow adjectives to be used adverbially without extra morphology. This may give rise to the idea that English, like Latin, is more specific in its classification of various types of modifiers. We propose an alternative analysis: Dutch and German draw a different dividing line, between attributive modifiers (NP-level) on the one hand, and predicative and adverbial modifiers (clause-level) on the other. To this end, they use adjectival inflection instead of derivational morphology. We describe how the adverbial systems in these three West-Germanic languages have developed and try to explain the changes that have occurred.

In the twelfth-century Middle English Poema morale, perhaps the earliest English composition in a septenary meter, the metrical position at the end of the first hemistich is distinguished from all other positions in admitting a short syllable plus another in a pattern that would disrupt the meter, creating an extra unstressed syllable, if the two were not resolved, as in the word dede in the verse Ic welde more thanne ic dede; | mi wit oh to bi more. Here resolution seems to have been carried over from Old English into a Middle English isometric meter based on Latin models. This constitutes significant evidence for resolution as a genuine property of Old English verse, which in turn lends strong support to Eduard Sievers's metrical analysis of early Germanic alliterative verse.I am grateful to Kari Gade, who read this paper in draft and made some important corrections, and to Geoffrey Russom, Donka Minkova, and Robert Stockwell, who offered valuable comments on the paper when it was presented at the seventh Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference, held in Banff in April, 2001. Tomas Riad generously provided copies of papers, both published and unpublished, and the two anonymous referees for JGL offered lengthy and challenging critiques, resulting in several alterations. To all of these scholars I owe sincere thanks, and of course deficiencies in the paper are in no way attributable to them.

This paper demonstrates the rise of a new distinction in the first-person plural pronouns in Jerusalemite Yiddish, a contemporary dialect of Yiddish spoken in Israel by ultra-orthodox (Haredi) Jews. The distinction is semantically-pragmatically motivated, where a particular pronoun is used to refer to a specific subgroup of “us” compared with “them.” This innovation evolved as a result of both dialect contact and of the special sociolinguistic characteristics of the Haredi community in Israel. A rare phenomenon in the languages of the world, it reflects the unique self-imposed seclusion that is the social reality of speakers of Haredi Yiddish.*

This paper aims to establish a framework for the investigation of Vienna Jewish speech (VJS)—the German spoken natively by Jews in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s. The role of the ideological approach or perspective in the investigation of Jewish ethnolects of German (JG) is discussed at length. It is argued that the investigation of VJS—and of JG generally—must recognize the context of Yiddish linguistics in the broader sense. The paper also considers possible Jewish varieties of German that may have served as models for VJS. Consideration of VJS sheds light on the general linguistic discussion of borrowing vs. language shift.

This paper examines the diachronic development and synchronic status of morphological doublets in Dutch derivation (adjectives in -(e)lijk) and German inflection (genitives in -(e)s) in the light of the commonly held view that functionally equivalent doublets are rare in morphology and, where they do exist, tend to be small in number and diachronically unstable (see, for example, Kroch 1994). It is shown here that large numbers of doublets can thrive for centuries, despite the fact that they require a high degree of arbitrary lexical information, while others tend to be eliminated systematically by organizing words into lexical “gangs” defined by phonological and morphological properties. It is also argued that the lexically conditioned nature of the inflectional doublets provides evidence for the wholesale lexical listing of German genitives.I am very grateful to Martin Durrell, and to Roel Vismans and other Dutch speakers present at the Association for Low Countries Studies Conference in Sheffield (January 2004), at which the Dutch section of this paper was presented, for their very helpful comments. I would also like to thank the two anonymous referees for their invaluable feedback.

In a time of rapid shift and loss of smaller, regional and minority languages it becomes apparent that many of them continue to play a role as post-vernacular varieties. As Shandler (2006) points out for Yiddish in the United States, some languages serve the purpose of identity building within a community even after they have ceased to be used as a vernacular for daily communication. This occurs according to Shandler through a number of cultural practices, such as amateur theatre, music and folklore, translation, attempts to learn the language in evening classes, etc. This paper demonstrates that the paradigm developed by Shandler for Yiddish can be applied to other linguistic communities, by comparing the post-vernacular use of Yiddish with Low German in Northern Germany. It focused on the linguistic strategies that individuals or groups of speakers apply in order to participate in a post-vernacular language community.