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.

Historical Glottometry, introduced by Kalyan & François (2018), is a wave-based quantitative approach to language subgrouping used to calculate the overall strength of a linguistic subgroup using metrics that capture the contributions of linguistic innovations of various scopes to language diversification, in consideration of the reality of their distributions. This approach primarily achieves this by acknowledging the contribution of postsplit areal diffusion to language diversification, which has traditionally been overlooked in cladistic (tree-based) models. In this paper, the development of the Germanic language family, from the breakup of Proto-Germanic to the latest period of the early attested daughter languages (namely, Old English, Old Frisian, Gothic, Old High German, Old Low Franconian, Old Norse, and Old Saxon) is accounted for using Historical Glottometry. It is shown that this approach succeeds in accounting for several smaller, nontraditional subgroups of Germanic by accommodating the linguistic evidence unproblematically where a cladistic approach would fail.

This paper deals with the misplacement of the infinitival marker zu ‘to’ in German. While this phenomenon only occurs in certain config-urations in the standard language, such as auxiliary fronting, it is common in dialects and shows quite a high degree of variability. I discuss the misplacement of zu in Standard German due to auxiliary fronting, as well as other types of zu-misplacement found in dialects. I propose two parsimonious options for the analysis of the standard language as well as dialect cases, namely, i) precedence rules and ii) a special kind of infixing operation that was first proposed in the framework of Categorial Morphology (Bach 1984, Hoeksema 1985). I show that even though the first approach has its merits, the second one is more advantageous.*