Pronominal adverbs in German, which consist of da ‘there’, hier ‘here’, or wo ‘where’ as first element and a preposition as second element, like davor ‘before’, hierbei ‘hereby’, worin ‘wherein’, have often been explained by a movement of the first element out of the complement position of the preposition. This article points out some of the problems of movement analyses and presents an alternative account based on the diachronic development of pronominal adverbs. It is argued that the pattern after which pronominal adverbs are formed can be traced back to the univerbation of two adverbs with spatial meaning. This is accompanied by processes often associated with grammaticalization, such as semantic bleaching, phonological reduction, and a loss of separability in the standard variety. Some of the reduced forms are obligatory in phrasemes and particle verbs, thus constituting a split which can occur during grammaticalization. The reduction of the first element of pronominal adverbs and a doubling of the first element can be seen as part of a grammaticalization cycle.

Norwegian, like Swedish and Faroese, exhibits double definiteness: modified definite phrases normally contain both a prenominal determiner and a suffixed definite article on the noun. However, exceptions—phrases with only the determiner or only the suffixed article—can be found. This article investigates adjectives which do not need to be preceded by the prenominal determiner in Norwegian. Corpus data and acceptability judgments are used to describe these exceptions and to propose a syntactic analysis. The study shows that there are three types of adjectives in Norwegian: regular ones that require double definiteness, exceptional adjectives that allow determiner omission, and quantifier adjectives that never occur with a determiner. I argue that phrases with exceptional adjectives can be accounted for by the same movement that is proposed for determiner-less phrases in Icelandic and Northern Swedish (Julien 2002, 2005). Finally, the article presents a brief exploration of the patterns of variation in omission versus presence of the determiner, including historical and dialectal variation.

This article presents the results of a corpus study of clausal postpositioning, that is, the occurrence of a sentential constituent in the postfield of the matrix clause to which it is syntactically linked, in German regional language. Analysis of 11,027 clauses from 60 spoken regiolect and dialect texts reveals that clausal postpositionings occur most frequently as non-relative finite clauses, followed by relative clauses, and lastly, infinitival constructions. Notably, while non-relative finite clauses comprise a smaller proportion of postpositionings in regiolect compared to dialect, relative clauses and infinitival constructions show the opposite trend. Adjunct clauses occur most frequently, followed by complement clauses, in both regiolect and dialect. Furthermore, in both varieties, postpositioning is more prevalent in verb-first and verb-second clauses than in verb-final clauses. This finding is attributed to restrictions on syntactic subordination. Finally, non-relative finite clause and relative clause types that may be embedded in both the postfield and inner field are center-embedded at mean relative frequencies of 13.42% and 28.17%, respectively. These findings shed light on contradictory claims in the literature regarding the possibility and frequency of clausal embedding in the inner field.

This article addresses the shift asymmetries of the High German Consonant Shift. In one part of this sound change, Pre-Old High German ⁺/p/, ⁺/t/, and ⁺/k/ shifted to the Old High German affricates [pf], [ts], and [kx], respectively. However, the voiceless stops did not shift in every dialect of Old High German. The uneven distribution of the shift is referred to in the literature as shift asymmetry. Much work by Iverson, Davis, and Salmons has attributed the asymmetry to markedness. While maintaining their overall analysis of the shift, this article shows that markedness can be dispensed with in accounting for the shift asymmetries. In accordance with Evolutionary Phonology, perceptual and phonetic data are presented which account for the asymmetries without making any reference to markedness. Since it rejects markedness in diachronic sound change, the present analysis also has broader implications for markedness diachronically and synchronically.

In Standard Yiddish, -s and -ən are used as default allomorphs for plural word formation. It is argued here that the choice is left to the phonology, with -s acting as a default within a default. This status is used to explain the exclusive use of -s in the pluralization of proper names, which are claimed to be formed with no sensitivity to the phonological form of the base.

In phonological theory there are multiple ways to represent mid vowels. SPE conventions maintain that they are non-[high] and non-[low]. Conversely, frameworks like Element Theory argue that mid vowels are simultaneously [high] and [low]. This article examines eight processes (and groups of processes) within the Germanic language family, which strongly indicate their specification as simultaneously [high] and [low]. That specification is manifest from developments that tease out the [high] and [low] features of a single mid vowel into separate [high] and [low] elements of sound (e.g., [e] > [ja]). It also falls out from changes in which separate [high] and [low] segments coalesce into a single mid vowel (e.g., [au] > [o]).

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.