Early runic inscriptions are the best evidence for the oldest historical development of North Germanic. Yet among the many unexpected features of the inscriptions as they are usually presented is the apparent presence of vowels before glides that seem to occur contrary to Sievers’ Law. These include perhaps most prominently the sequence usually read as <harija> on the Skåäng stone where the Vimose comb preserves the expected form <harja>. Rather than assume that a Neogrammarian sound law is violated in a runic text, a more profitable approach is usually to assume that it is the interpretation that is at fault. Many of the instances where Sievers’ Law vocalizations seem to occur in an aberrant manner are texts that are better explained in manners other than have traditionally been accepted.

In German, past participles not only occur in root position with a directive force, as in Stillgestanden! ‘Stop!’ lit. ‘stood still(ptcp)’, but also as performatives in responses: A: Du sagst also nichts zu Papi. ‘So you won’t tell dad.’ B: Versprochen! ‘I promise!’ lit. ‘promised(ptcp)’. Here B performs the speech act denoted by the verb by saying that it has been performed. The propositional argument of the participle (what is promised) is resolved contextually, and the agent and the recipient arguments are restricted to the speaker and the hearer, respectively. This article presents a syntactic analysis of this rarely studied phenomenon, arguing that the construction with a performative participle is not ellipsis but an IP with a participial head and null pronominal complements. The syntactic analysis is formalized within Lexical-Functional Grammar. A pragmatic analysis is proposed arguing that the performative participle in its core use alternates with Yes! to express agreement with an assertion or compliance with a request, that is, to express consent to the effect that a proposition p may safely be added to the Common Ground. This analysis is cast within the dialogue framework of Farkas & Bruce (2010) and extended to response performative participles in monological uses.*