This paper surveys the emergence of the category humanness in the 3rd person singular personal pronoun in Alemannic (southwest German) dialects. The first part shows that some Alemannic dialects have developed a human/nonhuman distinction in the 3rd person singular neuter personal pronoun: a marked form encoding the human direct object has emerged. The emergence of this form can be explained by the differential object marking hypothesis. The second part reports on a pilot study of the 3rd person singular personal pronoun in Sense Alemannic on the basis of new data. In this dialect, humanness is distinguished not only in the neuter but also in the masculine and feminine. Additionally, some instances are observed that violate the differential object marking principle. Thus, both principles (humanness marking and the differential object marking) form part of the grammar, but the latter one may be violated.*

Dutch partitive constructions of the type one of the (few) X who Y show a striking pattern of singular subject-verb agreement in their relative clause. This paper presents a corpus study showing that the prescriptively “incorrect” singular agreement pattern is in fact the dominant pattern in Dutch. In order to explain this, we argue that this type of partitive construction often has a specific function in context, namely, to point out that the subject is special or extraordinary, usually for the reason presented by the relative clause. We apply a usage-based approach to this construction within the framework of Construction Grammar, arguing that the prevalent implicature of the subject’s specialness has become a conventionalized part of the meaning of the construction. This analysis then can be used to explain the syntactic pattern of singular agreement within the relative clause. A similar albeit less pronounced pattern can be found in German.*

High Prussian, a variety of East Central German, has a segmentally opaque process of final devoicing: Only some forms with underlyingly voiced obstruents devoice at the end of a word. This phenomenon can also be observed in some morphological alternations where simplex forms show final devoicing but complex ones do not. This paper provides a metrical analysis of final devoicing and two related phenomena: spirantization, and an interaction of vowel length in high vowels and obstruent voicing. It is claimed that nondevoicing items contain disyllabic foot templates and that word-final consonants are then syllabified as onsets of empty-headed word-final syllables. The analysis demonstrates how evidence from West Germanic dialects can contribute to our understanding of the phonology of laryngeal features and to the role that metrical structure can play in shaping phonological alternations.*