Syntactic constructions may form an alternative to, or compete with the morphological expression of semantic and grammatical content. This applies to the passive forms of verbs, the progressive form, analytic causatives, adjective-noun sequences, and particle verbs in Dutch. In this article I develop a view of the Dutch lexicon in which this interaction between syntax and morphology can be understood. The central notion used is that of the constructional idiom, a construction with a (partially) non-compositional meaning, of which not all terminal elements are fixed. These constructional idioms, like morphological word formation, serve to extend the fund of expressions that are available for concatenation in the syntax.I would like to thank the anonymous referees of this journal, and Farrell Ackerman, Arie Verhagen, and the audience at the MMM3 meeting in Barcelona, September 2001, for their comments on previous drafts of this paper.

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 Tomas Riad generously provided copies of papers, both published and unpublished, and the two anonymous referees for JGL offered lengthy and challenging critiques, resulting in several alterations.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.

Contemporary discussions of preverbal negative incorporation usually note Levin's 1958 claim that incorporation is a Western and Southern dialect feature in Old and Middle English. In his Middle English data, Levin reports only two unincorporated forms, both in AB texts. This note demonstrates that these two examples appear in the editions Levin used, but not in the manuscripts now thought to be closer to the original AB language. The conclusions are: 1. Levin's claim still has merit; 2. it would worthwhile to revisit his data with an improved understanding of scribal practices, access to facsimiles, and to electronic searches; and 3. researchers should consider editorial “interference” in manuscripts.I would like to thank Elly van Gelderen, Richard Hogg, and Dhira Mahoney for their helpful comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are my own.

In 1993 and 1994, starting from a seminar series led by Norbert Dittmar, Professor of Sociolinguistics at the Free University of Berlin, a considerable number of interviews with Berlin residents were recorded on the topic of the Wende, the events of 1989–1990 from the mass exodus of East Berliners to the west via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, through the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the GDR regime, to the unification of the two German states. Of the 77 interviews conducted by participants in Dittmar's seminars and other students at the University, 56 were of adequate quality for transcription and analysis, 31 with East Berliners (33 interviewees, as some interviews involved 2 informants), and 25 with residents of the western part of the city (28 interviewees). Of the eastern interviewees 19 were women and 14 men; in the west there were 15 women and 13 men. Ages ranged from around 20 to around 60 (some ages were unknown), with a considerable clustering of informants in the age ranges 30 to 39 in the east and 40 to 49 in the west. Despite the reasonably representative nature of the sample, the data have not, to my knowledge, been submitted to quantitative analysis but have formed the basis of two qualitative studies, Braber 2001 and the current book.

The task of writing a history of English that can serve as a textbook is not an enviable endeavor. For every point that an author chooses to include, a host of others may be omitted; for every detail an author chooses to address, a host of terminological and theoretical issues must often be explained in order to make the details comprehensible. Perhaps for these reasons, despite the numerous textbooks that have tackled this challenge, there is still room for scholars drawing on different methodologies and theoretical approaches and, therefore, raising different questions, to add their voice to the scholarly and pedagogical conversation. And perhaps, in the end, we must resign ourselves to the fact that not everyone will be satisfied with any one textbook. Barbara Fennell's explicitly sociolinguistic approach in her new textbook, A History of English, distinguishes her work from many of the textbooks that precede hers and means that she addresses a range of important and interesting research questions that do not typically appear in such texts. Perhaps the compromise is that this book may better serve as a supplemental text, with a focus on the significant sociolinguistic perspective that it adds on the relevant historical issues, rather than as a primary textbook for most introductory university courses on the history of the English language.

This book is a pleasure for the second language (L2) researcher to read, and a challenge for the teacher of second language acquisition (L2A) theory to use. It offers an extremely clear and engaging introduction and overview of current L2A research from the generative 380 Reviews perspective. It successfully brings classical older findings to bear on the contemporary research issues. It highlights the most important issues in the field with admirable intellectual precision and honesty. At the same time, it is an introductory text that also has another agenda, namely, presenting and arguing for the author's own theory of second language development. Thus, it is not clear whether the text is intended exclusively as a teaching aid or as a research book. I am afraid the combination of the two is daunting for the unsuspecting reader.

Word prosodic systems in the languages of Europe (WPS), edited by van der Hulst, is the fourth in a nine-volume series titled EUROTYP, which is the twentieth work of the series “Empirical Approaches to Language Typology,” the aims of which are to put to use the intellectual capital of the European Union, and to catalog the characteristics of a European Sprachbund (vi).The reader who is curious as to why word level prosody should have a thousand pages devoted to it, and why it is the only remotely phonological topic of the nine EUROTYP topics indicating a Sprachbund and representative of the intellectual capital of Europe, will find by scanning the published papers from the Workshop on Typology of Languages in Europe (Bechert et al. 1990) that only one real reference to accent/intonation/stress appears in Bechert's (1990) article on nominal morphology. In short, WPS is about metrical structure. As such, WPS will be an influential resource to anyone working on prosody because metrical structure in general provides compelling empirical support to classical generative arguments in favor of an unconscious grammar and facilitates insight into other aspects of phonology (vowel length and tone placement, to note just two examples). Nespor reminds readers that although this book and topic are supposed to be limited to word level phenomena, the “word” domain has no privileged status with respect to prosody (117). That is, the principles of prosody do not begin or end with the word (although the notion of “word” holds social and pragmatic importance outside of the community of generative linguists). Thus, notions regarding word accent preclude antecedent notions about smaller and larger domains. Nevertheless, the task of metrical theory, and WPS specifically, is the elucidation of a simple notational device that can predict complex verbal behavior (Hayes 1982). This is in line with EUROTYP's purpose to “study the patterns and limits of variation” (v).

Regionale Sprachgeschichte erhebt den Anspruch, die Entwicklung des Deutschen nicht bloß teleologisch im Hinblick auf die moderne Gemeinsprache darzustellen, sondern die je eigenen Entwicklungen in den Regionen nachzuzeichnen, auch jene, die sich vom neuhochdeutschen Standpunkt aus als “Umwege” oder “Irrwege” herausgestellt haben. Zurecht machen die Herausgeber des anzuzeigenden Buchs aber schon in ihrem Vorwort klar, dass letztlich auch regionale Sprachgeschichte auf die Gemeinsprache ausgerichtet ist: Sie ist eine Geschichte der Gemeinsprache, in der die Regionen ihr Wort mitzureden haben, und sie wird deshalb auch die mündlichen Sprachformen systematischer einbeziehen, in denen das Sprachregionale sozusagen inkarniert ist. Für die älteren Zeiten können die gesprochenen Sprachformen jedoch nur über die Schrift unvollständig erschlossen werden.