Abstract This study examines how Uniform Information Density and the lexical verb position, predicting valency knowledge and disambiguation, influence the order of nominal dative and accusative objects in German from the fifteenth to twentieth century using corpus data and regression analysis. As a measure of sentence uniformity, DORM (Deviation of the Rolling Mean, Cuskley et al. 2021) is applied on unigram lemma surprisal values of each clause containing dative and accusative objects. The verb position is determined using the POS-information from the corpora. Further factors included in the analysis are the givenness status of the two objects, their length difference, and the period in which the texts were published. In historical data and with uneven information profiles, Acc>Dat is expectedly more frequent in SVO while Dat>Acc is more common in SOV. In modern German, Dat>Acc is dominant independent of the verb position with uneven information profiles. The known influence of givenness is also attested. A balance between the frequency of grammatical construction and the lexical uniformity of the information profile can explain the results.*
This study examines the phenomenon of word-final /n/ deletion (WFnD) in Central Franconian dialects spoken across parts of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and France. The deletion process occurs after schwa and full vowels and manifests itself in different phonological patterns across dialects. The paper presents a comparative analysis based on a selection of local varieties, investigating the effects of the left-hand and right-hand phonological context on WFnD. The theoretical framework of the 'Life Cycle of Phonological Processes' serves to reconstruct the diachronic development of WFnD, allowing to trace its progression from systematic phonetic variation to a categorical phonological phenomenon and lexicalized forms. By applying this framework, the study demonstrates how different dialects exhibit WFnD at distinct stages of the life cycle, revealing the systematic nature of its historical unfolding. The findings highlight the role and interplay of prosodic, phonological, morphological and lexical factors conditioning WFnD.
Research on German modal particles (MPs) has long noted their tendency to occur in combination with one another. Prior studies have investigated this phenomenon relying mostly on qualitative and introspective methods. The present article demonstrates the benefits of employing quantitative methods to investigate MP combinations. In a corpus-linguistic study of spoken German, we address the question of ordering tendencies within these sequences, as well as the question of co-occurrence, that is, which MPs exhibit a tendency to combine with which others. Based on the results obtained we point out how longstanding questions on MP combinations may profit from the quantitative methods employed.*
While sonority has been studied by linguists for over a century, Parker (2008, 2011) has recently argued that the sonority hierarchy can be quantified specifically by intensity, concluding that laterals are less sonorous than flaps. In this article, we test Parker's (2008, 2011) claim that [l] is less sonorous than [(sic)]. We find that for Bavarian German, [l] is better analyzed as more sonorous than [(sic)] since [l] is both more intense and longer in duration than [(sic)]. The aforementioned phonetic properties, as well as the phonological patterning arguments provided by Noelliste (2019), confirm that [(sic)] is less sonorous than [l] in Bavarian German dialects found in Austria. We conclude by offering our thoughts on whether the sonority hierarchy can be reduced to one specific phonetic property. We argue that, in the spirit of studies such as Price (1980), Miller (2012), phonological sonority can be deduced from a series of properties, including at least the following: intensity, duration, periodicity, presence/absence of noise, and distribution in the phonological syllable. For a great number of speech sounds, these properties will point in the same direction; the challenging cases arise when one or more of these properties contradict each other.
The article reports on a study of the feminine gender in a Western dialect of Norway, using a production experiment eliciting the use of indefinite articles, possessives, adjectives, and the definite suffix. The participants (n=64) are of three age groups: children, adolescents, and adults. The results show that while the feminine gender is stable in the language of the adults, it is becoming vulnerable in the language of the children and adolescents. The main tendency is that feminine gender markers are being replaced with masculine markers. I argue that the innovations are interconnected and not random, and that numerous gender cues do not necessarily make the system more stable.
This study presents a corpus-based analysis of the verb bl & icirc;ven in combination with the present participle and the infinitive in Middle Low German (thirteenth-seventeenth century), with the goal of identifying the aspectual and semantic properties of these constructions. In contrast to previous research, which focused primarily on the verbs w & emacr;rden and w & emacr;sen or relied on limited textual material, the present study draws on a broader corpus, allowing for a more comprehensive assessment of usage patterns across different periods and genres.The analysis shows that bl & icirc;ven in combination with a present participle or an infinitive can express both mutative and nonmutative meanings, with the nonmutative interpretation clearly predominating regardless of form. The study further explores how the aspectual interaction between bl & icirc;ven and the nonfinite verb influences the overall interpretation of the construction.The semantic patterns observed for bl & icirc;ven are compared with those found in w & emacr;rden and w & emacr;sen + present participle constructions, revealing significant semantic convergence among Middle Low German predicative structures. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the development and aspectual behavior of periphrastic constructions in the historical Germanic languages.*
This study investigates the shared versus autonomous representation of grammatical gender in the mental lexicon of Polish-Danish bilinguals. Polish has three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), while Danish distinguishes between two (common, neuter), making their gender systems not only asymmetric but also dissimilar. Using a timed gender decision task, we tested 37 late unbalanced Polish-Danish bilinguals across varying proficiency levels and compared them to a baseline group of 38 Polish-German bilinguals, whose gender systems are symmetric and similar. The results suggested no effect of the Polish gender system on Danish, even for neuter gender, which is present in both languages. In contrast, Polish-German bilinguals showed clear lexical gender congruency effects influenced by their proficiency in German. For masculine and feminine nouns, Polish influenced gender assignment more strongly at lower German proficiency, while for neuter nouns, congruency effects only appeared at higher proficiency levels. Additionally, both groups struggled with neuter-gender assignment. These findings suggest that in the bilingual mental lexicon, asymmetric and dissimilar gender systems are represented autonomously. The results from Polish-German bilinguals are attributed to the underuse of neuter gender, potentially masking gender congruency effects for neuter nouns, and are further discussed in relation to the Parasitic Model of Vocabulary Acquisition.*
Old Saxon shows sporadic vowel insertions, a phenomenon whereby a vowel is inserted into heterorganic post-nucleic liquid-consonant sequences. The process is highly variable, and differences occur within and across manuscripts and lemmas. Moreover, the phenomenon is under-researched and has hitherto been analyzed as a mechanism to dissolve challenging liquid-consonant clusters by causing resyllabification of the liquid. This article provides a corpus-based analysis of the Old Saxon vowel insertions to establish the most detailed investigation of the process thus far. The findings suggest that the Old Saxon phenomenon is an instance of vowel intrusion rather than phonological vowel epenthesis. *
This article examines how and why auxiliaries combine into complex verb constructions in Old West Germanic. It integrates findings from prior corpus studies on Old Dutch and Old English with original corpus research on Old Saxon, Old High German, and Early Middle High German up to 1150. The combined results indicate that all Old West Germanic varieties combine only two auxiliaries, with the finite auxiliary always being a modal. These finite modals could have scope over a wide range of potential auxiliaries, including passive, perfect, modal, aspectual, and causative auxiliaries, as well as perception verbs. The range of auxiliary combinations is shown to expand progressively over time and across regions. The article reveals that the combinatorial potential of auxiliaries relates to their degree of grammaticalization and the availability of a nonfinite verb form. This relationship is argued to be bidirectional: (a) the ongoing grammaticalization of auxiliaries creates and expands their combinatorial potential, while (b) the combination of auxiliaries into complex verb constructions in turn stimulates the emergence of auxiliaries as a category of their own. This implies that the combination of auxiliaries is not only a symptom of their grammaticalization but also a catalyst for further change.*
Three Germanic verbs with the meanings 'to know', 'to teach', and 'to learn' can all be traced back to the same PIE root *leis- 'to follow a track'. While evidence for all three verbs is recoverable from Gothic, only two verbal derivates passed down into the West Germanic languages, and none survived into North Germanic (although there was later reborrowing from Old English). This article charts these developments as well as subsequent ones, including the emergence of new verbs that came to express these key concepts in West and North Germanic up to present times. This etymological trail is guided by insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which seeks to understand how more familiar concrete concepts (e.g. 'to follow a track', 'to grasp', 'to see') capture more abstract ones like 'to know', 'to teach', and 'to learn' in language. The main findings are: (i) that the original system "stative similar to causative similar to present" reconstructible for Proto-Germanic on the PIE root *leis- is best continued today in German, whereas English already refashioned it early on in its history. North Germanic does not directly continue any verbal formation on that root, whereas Gothic displays a "perfect" system; (ii) formations on PIE *neh3- 'to recognize' and *ueid- 'to see' are of common Indo-European heritage, whereas those on *leis-, also found in nominal formations in Italic, may have arisen polygenetically in the two branches, as also possibly those on PIE *teng-. Finally, (iii) only one conceptual metaphor among those found can be said to be of common Indo-European descent, namely to know is to recognize/have recognized.*
This article unifies two adjectival phenomena of Germanic languages: the double definiteness of Norwegian, Swedish, and Faroese, and the attributive-only inflection of West Germanic adjectives. I argue that the functional head Agr(eement) is responsible for both. Since Agr can perform only one of these two functions in a given language (the second definiteness marker of Scandinavian and the attributive inflection of West Germanic), these two phenomena are in complementary distribution. *
This article presents the first quantitative study into coronal stop deletion in Surinamese Dutch. It maps the frequency and conditioning of word-final [t]-deletion in the Dutch spoken by 22 Creole women in five speech settings and compares these data to results of previous studies on European Dutch. A multivariate analysis of 7,418 tokens of word-final /t/ preceded by an obstruent indicates that [t]-deletion is a highly frequent phenomenon in Surinamese Dutch, strongly influenced by both the segment following the final stop and the formality of the speech setting. The age of the speaker, the morphological status of /t/, the segment preceding the final stop, the frequency of the word containing the final stop, and the cluster length are also observed to be relevant, but the impact of these factors is much smaller and highly dependent on the phonetic context. Interestingly, the conditioning of [t]-deletion diverges from the one observed in European Dutch in some respects, which, along with the observed age effect, substantiates the idea that an endoglossic Dutch norm is developing in Suriname and that there are fundamental differences between Surinamese and European Dutch. *
This study compares postnominal finite relative clauses and their translation equivalents in a parallel corpus of German and English. Of particular interest are cases where one language, generally English, used a syntactically and semantically reduced nominal modifier instead of the finite relative. Such contrasts in language use are linked to contrasts in their grammars whereby German has been described as having a "tighter fit" in general between forms and their corresponding semantic representations and English a "looser fit." This same typology is now seen as operating in actual usage as well, even though both languages share the same finite structure plus numerous reduced modifiers. The data presented here illustrate how the tight-fit/loose-fit typology can be extended into quantitative predictions for testing on cross-language corpora and they support a hypothesized correspondence between grammatical variation and performance variation.*
This article argues that the stock of personal names in Frisian can be enriched by means of omitting the diminutive suffix in diminutive names. Although suffix subtraction is not a common morphological process, either in general or in Frisian, assuming this process for this particular type of personal name formation provides an insightful and plausible analysis. The analysis also underlines the importance of paradigmatic relations in morphology, as formalized in Construction Morphology.*
In this article, we evaluate (a) which major life events (MLEs) in the personal domain (relocation, new friendship, romantic relationship, marriage, parenthood, and grandparenthood) impact on perceived linguistic change among 309 Austrians, and (b) which quantitatively and qualitatively captured individual differences affect this relationship. Bayesian regression modeling revealed that age at the time of the MLE and proficiency in (non)standard varieties were particularly predictive of individual-level perceived linguistic change, as were psychological factors such as event-related characteristics and psychological resilience. Qualitative analyses focusing on whether individuals reported an MLE-related strengthened orientation towards vernacularity or standard language illustrated that individual-level perceived linguistic change was mediated by a complex constellation of MLE-resultant changes in social networks and socioaffective factors.*
This article examines Afrikaans V1-constructions with the verb laat 'let' and compares them with similar constructions in Dutch. I refer to these as pseudo-let imperatives (or PLI-constructions). Although PLI-constructions have the same form as some let-imperatives in both languages, they no longer function as commands and lack the directive force typically associated with imperatives. Instead, PLI-constructions are used to express the speaker's perspective on a certain event or action. Drawing on grammaticalization criteria used by Van Craenenbroeck & Van Koppen (2015, 2017) in their work on perception and causative verbs in imperative(-like) constructions in Dutch, this article argues that PLI-laat/laten has undergone grammaticalization in both Afrikaans and Dutch. Additionally, I demonstrate that the Afrikaans PLI-laat has grammaticalized further than its Dutch counterpart. I propose that Afrikaans' contact with a variety of other languages throughout its history may have accelerated the grammaticalization of laat relative to its Dutch counterpart, resulting in the observed differences in the grammaticalization of PLI-laat/laten constructions.
The doubling of auxiliaries 'have' and 'be' in perfect tense constructions is a European areal phenomenon. It is present in languages of different filiations that have been in contact for a long time. In Dutch its distribution is largely restricted to the southeastern part of Dutch-speaking Belgium and some communities of North Brabant in the Netherlands. Double perfects are attested in contemporary Afrikaans, which is contrary to what we should expect, given that its metropolitan dialectal base is Hollandic, not southern Netherlandic. The Cape Dutch and Afrikaans evidence, sparse as it is, suggests that the range of this feature was significantly broader in vernacular Early Modern Dutch than one might infer from contemporary metropolitan norms.*
This article discusses the variation between masculine and neuter anaphoric pronouns in Afrikaans, especially in reference to inanimate entities such as objects, abstracts, collectives, and masses. The fact that books, governments, and wine can be referred to as both hy 'he' and dit 'it' is well known, but it is surprising given what is known about pronominal gender systems. Such systems are usually organized according to clear semantic principles, yielding predictable choices. The article summarizes the available literature, provides new data from the NWU-Kommentaarkorpus, and presents an approach that helps to make sense of the synchronic variation and, to some extent, the diachronic developments.
The development of a sound change can be influenced by linguistic and social factors, both within the language community and from cases of language contact. The present study is an examination of the internally generated ongoing tonogenesis process in Afrikaans, specifically analyzing production and perception of word-initial plosives among different age and gender groups. Results show that female speakers are devoicing significantly more often than male speakers, and the perception of female voices is influenced more by f0 levels than the perception of male voices. This study finds that gender is a larger predictor overall of tonogenetic patterns than age.*
