West Germanic Languages Research Articles

Mutual Comprehensibility of Written Afrikaans and Dutch: Symmetrical or Asymmetrical?

The two West-Germanic languages Dutch and Afrikaans are so closely related that they can be expected to be mutually intelligible to a large extent. The present investigation focuses on written language. Comprehension was established by means of cloze tests on the basis of two newspaper articles. Results suggest that it is easier for Dutch subjects to understand written Afrikaans than it is for South African subjects to understand written Dutch. In order to explain the results, attitudes as well as several types of linguistic distances were assessed. The relations between attitude scales and intelligibility scores were few and weak. Asymmetries in the linguistic relationships between the two languages are probably more important, especially the asymmetries in the number of noncognates and the opacity of the relatedness of cognates. These asymmetries are caused by historical developments in Dutch and Afrikaans, with respect to the lexicon, grammar, and spelling.

Sharpening, Confiding, and OE getryccad

THE series of changes commonly known as Holtzmann's Law or sharpening has traditionally been described as follows: Intervocalic j w after short vowels show in many words strengthened articulation; we may represent the Germanic forms as jj ww…In West Germanic, the first part of the lengthened semi-vowel forms a diphthong with the preceding short vowel, but in Gothic and Norse it is narrowed to a stop [<ddj>, <ggj>, <ggv>].1 Thus, it may seem that analysing the effects of this process could be very rewarding for the scholar trying to identify the Norse-derived terms recorded in Old English texts. The contrast between OE trēow(i)an and OE <getryccað>, which renders L confidete ‘trust, confide’ in JnGl (Li) 16.33,2 would appear to offer a very good testing ground for the different results of these changes in West and North Germanic. The presence of the geminated consonant in the latter, together with the fact that the Aldredian glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels are not lacking in Norse-derived terms,3 could easily lead us to entertain the possibility that <getryccað> exhibits Norse influence (cp. ON tryggva ‘to make firm and trusty’). However, the stream of changes referred to by the umbrella-term sharpening is extremely problematic and this makes such a straightforward suggestion unconvincing.

THE ACQUISITION OF GERMAN MODAL PARTICLES: A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH

THE ACQUISITION OF GERMAN MODAL PARTICLES: A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH. Martina Mollering. Bern: Peter Lang, 2004. Pp. 290. $52.95 paper.Particles of the modal particle type—also referred to as flavoring, toning, or discourse particles—are a phenomenon in the West-Germanic languages that is well known for its descriptive complexity and its considerable demands on second language (L2) learners. High among the descriptive challenges ranks the fact that these particles cannot be adequately captured by structurally oriented theories of language because they cross syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discursive domains and nonuniquely express assumptions, intentions, judgments, and affective stances among the partners in communication. Along with real and imagined co-texts, these are highly contextualized and interpreted aspects of the languaging event. High among their acquisitional challenges ranks the fact that, in addition to their culturally and interpersonally situated and dialogic nature, they are formally ambiguous because all belong to other functional classes with divergent distributional and meaning characteristics. Small wonder that their competent use serves as a strong indicator of advanced levels of L2 ability. Small wonder, too, that researchers and instructors of German continue to explore more effective approaches to describing and teaching them.

Understanding Isolation and Change in Island Human Populations through a Study of Indigenous Cultural Patterns in the Gulf of Carpentaria

This paper presents a set of hypotheses to explain the cultural differences between Aboriginal people of the North and South Wellesley Islands, Gulf of Carpentaria and to characterise the relative degree and nature of their isolation and cultural change over a 10,000-year time-scale. This opportunity to study parallelisms and divergences in the cultural and demographic histories of fisher-hunter-gatherers arises from the comparison of three distinct cultural groupings: (a) the Ganggalida of the mainland, (b) the Lardil and Yangkaal of the North Wellesley Islands, and (c) the Kaiadilt of the South Wellesley Islands. Despite occupying similar island environments and despite their languages being as closely related as for example, the West Germanic languages, there are some major differences in cultural, economic and social organization as well as striking genetic differences between the North and South Wellesley populations. This paper synthesizes data from linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, genetics and environmental science to present hypotheses of how these intriguing differences were generated, and what we might learn about early processes of marine colonization and cultural change from the Wellesley situation.

A comparative approach to syntactic change in the history of English

This programmatic article suggests that crucial aspects of syntactic change in the history of English derive from the resetting of a single parameter, the pied piping parameter. Whereas Old English (and the Modern Continental West Germanic languages) treats VP material individually, yielding characteristic patterns of object, particle, and verb placement, Modern English treats the VP as a collective, moving it to a position to the left of certain ‘low’ adverbs and adverbials. The shift from individual to collective movement is described in detail, with its repercussions on the position of the verb, its object(s), and the verbal particle. The emergence of a zero reflexive and the development of have as the exclusive perfect auxiliary are suggested to be long-term effects of the shift from individual to collective movement.

Limits on P: filling in holes vs. falling in holes

All Germanic languages make extensive use of verb-particle combinations (known as separable-prefix verbs in the OV languages). I show some basic differences here distinguishing the Scandinavian type from the OV West Germanic languages, with English superficially patterning with Scandinavian but actually manifesting a distinct type. Specifically, I argue that the P projection is split into p and P (in accordance with earlier work), roughly analogous to v and V in the verb phrase. In English, p is always present in PP, and enables P to assign case, if P has an internal argument (as it does in "fall in the hole"). The arguments of particle verbs are then arguments of p, external arguments of the particle (as in "throw the rock in"). OV West Germanic allows p to be missing completely, thus having a type of unaccusative particle whose inner argument must receive case from the verb (corresponding to "fall the hole in," impossible in English). Scandinavian allows p to be missing, so that there is no external argument of the particle, but provides an alternative source for case for the internal argument (giving examples corresponding to "pour in the glass"). Thus English and Scandinavian are different from OV West Germanic in lacking the unaccusative type of particle, while Scandinavian differs from OV West Germanic and English in having an alternative source of case.

The Derivation of VO and OV (review)

Reviewed by: The derivation of VO and OV ed. by Peter Svenonius Kleanthes K. Grohmann The derivation of VO and OV. Ed. by Peter Svenonius. (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics today 31.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. vi, 370. $114.00. This volume contains eleven papers that grew out of a 1998 University of Tromsø workshop on analyzing VO word orders, or headedness issues more generally, plus an elaborate, paper-length ‘Introduction’ (1–26) by the editor. Svenonius offers some valuable background on the theme of the book, introduces the major theoretical issues employed here (antisymmetry, universal base hypothesis, mirror effects), and puts the contributions into perspective, also pointing to some potential tensions and points of reconciliation. In ‘Word order, restructuring and mirror theory’ (27–43), Michael Brody presents the essence of his framework and points out that it does not allow covert incorporation. Applying his theory to Romance restructuring and Hungarian verbal clusters, he aims to show that this approach is superior to covert head movement analyses. Hubert Haider, ‘OV is more basic than VO’ (45–67), defends his claim that head-final structures are less complex than head-initial ones. This means that VO is the result of head movement, in direct competition to the antisymmetric universal base hypothesis which assumes all structures to be head-initial and derives head-final (OV) ones by massive phrasal movement. In ‘Remnant movement and OV order’ (69–96), Liliane Haegeman proposes a modified antisymmetric analysis of verb-final patterns in West Germanic embedded clauses. It involves two steps: first, short movement of the verb (morphologically-driven [End Page 670] V-to-I movement) and second, remnant XP-movement (namely, of VP to the specifier of a high TP). Knut Tarald Taraldsen addresses ‘V-movement and VP-movement in derivations leading to VO-order’ (97–122) from the perspective that all Germanic languages exhibit overt argument movement. He proposes that all arguments leave the VP, leading to an intermediate OV order (the surface structure in German). VO languages are then derived by subsequent (remnant) VP-raising across all objects. In ‘Deriving OV order in Finnish’ (123–52), Anders Holmberg also employs remnant XP-movement. The major claim is that head-final orders in the mixed order language Finnish are derived by movement of the complement of a head to the specifier of that head in a right-branching structure. Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir, in ‘Parameter change in Icelandic’ (153–79), evaluates various accounts of the loss of OV orders in the history of Icelandic. Her proposal is also in line with an antisymmetric approach that involves remnant movement, in this case remnant VP-preposing. It further allows (initial) comparative correlations in Germanic with regard to the issues at hand. Sjef Barbiers looks at ‘The right periphery in SOV languages: English and Dutch’ (181–218) from a modified antisymmetric point of view. He considers both languages to be OV underlyingly (except for propositional CPs, which are generated to the right of the verb) but only English to have overt short V-movement. Naoki Fukui and Yuji Takano, in ‘Nominal structure: An extension of the symmetry principle’ (219–54), contrast Japanese and English. After applying their symmetry principle to the analysis of relative clauses, they argue that a variety of differences between the two languages fall out from one parametric difference, N-to-D raising (which Japanese lacks as it doesn’t have a D-category). In his own contribution, Peter Svenonius shows that ‘Quantifier movement in Icelandic’ (255–92) is not subject to Holmberg’s Generalization. This could have interesting consequences for a derived analysis of OV-orders in West Germanic, as Holmberg’s Generalization is operable not only in related contexts in Norwegian but also in all other relevant contexts in Icelandic. In ‘Licensing movement and stranding in the West Germanic OV languages’ (293–326), Roland Hinterhölzl investigates the distribution of syntactic elements beyond arguments, arguing that these elements also move out of their vp-internal position. such licensing movement can be reconciled with stranding by a particular...

The Early Runic Language of Scandinavia: Studies in Germanic Dialect Geography (review)

Reviewed by: The early runic language of Scandinavia: Studies in Germanic dialect geography by Hans Frede Nielsen Marc Pierce The early runic language of Scandinavia: Studies in Germanic dialect geography. By Hans Frede Nielsen. (Indogermanische Bibliothek: Reihe 1.) Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2000. Pp. 445. € 61. Classifying the Germanic languages is one of the classic problems of historical Germanic linguistics. While most scholars today seem to accept the view that the Germanic language family can be divided into three branches—East, West, and North Germanic, and further that the first dialectal split was into Northwest and East Germanic—this view is not undisputed. For instance, East and North Germanic exhibit sufficient parallels that some scholars have argued in favor of an initial split into Northeast and West Germanic. In the volume under consideration here, Nielsen returns to this thorny problem, albeit from a somewhat different perspective, in that he is primarily interested in the dialectal position of the language of the older runic inscriptions of Scandinavia attested from between ad 200 and 500. Two introductory chapters, (‘The project’, 19–38, and ‘Research history’, 39–75), outline the scope of the project reported on in this book, survey some of the relevant research, and summarize the views of a number of earlier scholars including Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Kuhn, Herbert Penzl, and Theo Vennemann. The project proper gets underway with Ch. 3, ‘The North and North-Sea Germanic sound systems in perspective’ (77–146). In this chapter, N compares the sound systems of the North Germanic languages (Old Norse and Early Runic) with those of the North Sea Germanic languages (Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon), beginning with the unaccented vowels and then proceeding to the accented vowels and the consonants. This chapter leads smoothly into the next, ‘Towards a dialectal profile of Early Runic’ (147–202). Here N examines the phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of Early Runic. The role of syntactic features in dialect grouping and the onomastic evidence are also discussed. Ch. 5, ‘Morphological and phonological parallels between North and North-Sea Germanic/West Germanic’ (203–40), considers parallels between these subfamilies. This chapter demonstrates clearly why the classification of the Germanic languages has proved so troublesome. Features found in Early Runic (North Germanic) link North with West Germanic, but there are as well features not exhibited by Early Runic that link North with West Germanic. Also, though, there are other parallels between North and East Germanic, between Gothic, North, and North Sea Germanic, and between North Germanic and Old High German specifically. Ch. 6, ‘Separate morphological and phonological developments: West Germanic, North-Sea Germanic, and North Germanic’ (241–70), surveys the divergent developments found in these subfamilies. Ch. 7, ‘From Proto-Germanic to Early Runic and beyond’ (271–98), offers a chronological perspective on the linguistic developments examined in earlier chapters. Two models for the dialect geographical position of Early Runic are also considered, one more static and one more dynamic. In Ch. 8, ‘External evidence’ (299–368), N reviews various nonlinguistic sources of evidence in hopes that they will help determine the linguistic position of Early Runic. The chapter opens with a brief discussion of the Germanic homeland, which, although it does not exactly fit with the rest of the chapter, is necessary because it has influenced how [End Page 823] some scholars have interpreted some of the evidence, especially the onomastic. Other sources of evidence considered in this chapter are place names, ethnological evidence (e.g. Tacitus’s Germania), and archaeological evidence. The final chapter, ‘Conclusions’ (369–83), summarizes the results of the work. There is also an extensive bibliography and a detailed index. This is an impressive work of scholarship. N has tackled an extremely complex issue and provided an illuminating account of it. It is reasonably user friendly as well (for instance, quotations not originally in English are generally, although not always, translated). Somewhat troublesome for the careful reader are the extensive endnotes which necessitate constant page turning. Moreover, a number of endnotes consist solely of references which presumably could have been eliminated. These are relatively minor quibbles, however, and do not detract from the genuinely high quality of the work. Marc...

Rhotic articulation and the early Upper German gemination of *r

Under the rubric of West Germanic consonant gemination the grammatical handbooks treat the Upper German development of geminate r immediately preceding the reflexes of West Germanic */j/. There is, however, no evidence that this rhotic doubling occurred during the same period in which all other consonants were affected by gemination in the emerging West Germanic dialects. Indeed, West Germanic consonant gemination generally describes a process in which all consonants except */r/ were geminated before */j/, voiceless stops were geminated before */l/ and */r/ and voiceless velars before */w/. It is the rhotic's conspicuous escape from this process in the remaining West Germanic dialects which makes its gemination in Upper German so exceptional. Geminate r begins to appear in this particular environment in Alemannic, Frankish and Bavarian manuscripts just prior to 800. It therefore appears that this gemination was a later one, perhaps an outgrowth or generalization of the earlier process, perhaps a separate process altogether. Of course to understand why */r/ was impervious to gemination by */j/ in West Germanic only to become subject to it a few centuries later, we must understand something of the mechanics of the gemination process itself. Determining the articulation of r in both West Germanic and the Upper German dialects also becomes of prime importance in accounting for this chronology.

West Flemish Negation and the Derivation of SOV-Order in West Germanic

This paper focuses on the expression of sentential negation in West Flemish (WF), which it examines with respect to competing theories for deriving the West Germanic verb-final sentence pattern. The empirical adequacy of three hypotheses proposed to account for the verb-final order in the West Germanic languages is tested: (i) the ‘traditional’ OV analysis with head-final base structures; (ii) an antisymmetric approach with only head-complement order and without V-to-I movement; (iii) an antisymmetric approach with head-complement order, but with V-to-I movement and remnant movement of the projection containing the trace of V. Specifically, the question is asked to what extent these analyses capture the surface distribution of WF negation markers (niet, enand negative quantifiers). The paper shows that the traditional OV analysis is certainly adequate for the description of the data concerned. As far as antisymmetric approaches are concerned, a double movement analysis fares better than antisymmetric approaches without V-to-I movement. The paper also shows that, contrary to what has often been assumed, the WF morphemeenis not necessarily analysed as the head of NegP, the canonical projection to encode sentential negation, but that it could also plausibly be analysed as the head of PolP, a higher functional projection which encodes polarity.

Focus and antifocus in Modern Afrikaans and West Germanic

Based on morphological evidence from modern spoken Afrikaans, this paper argues for the existence of a designated antifocus position in West Germanic, licensing the destressing of anaphoric elements under a Spec-head configuration. The head of the antifocus projection is an abstract feature (AF), controlling the distribution of main stress in the sentence. The defocusing license is tied to categorial membership, triggering scrambling movement of pronouns and definites toward the functional domain. Only if all discourse themes have their AF eliminated can maximal focus be assigned in the sentential domain. The main advantage of such a defocusing license is its violability: the structural realization of discourse functions affects contextual felicity, but not the syntactic derivability of the numeration. Unused defocusing licenses will not cancel the derivation but attract narrow focus and a deviant, rhematic interpretation of VP-internal definites at LF. In this way, word-order variation can be directly exploited by the production system to achieve refocusing effects and discourse shifts in the interpretation of arguments. The concept of violable feature checking allows us to derive the definiteness effects and the optionality of scrambling from the interaction of the licensing requirements of the antifocus feature and Cinque's (1993) stress-assignment rules.

Antisymmetry and verb-final order in West Flemish

This paper focuses on the derivation of the verb-final pattern in West Flemish, a West Germanic OV language. The paper compares antisymmetric approaches which assume short or no V-movement and antisymmetric approaches which postulate double movement: V-to-I movement + remnant movement. The data discussed concern (i) the position of the verb, (ii) the observed correlation of V-movement with certain patterns of argument distribution (object shift, the transitive expletive construction), and (iii) the expression of sentential negation. The data suggest that a double movement analysis is preferable to accounts without V-to-I movement.

The Continental West-Germanic Languages: Contacts and Conflicts

L'A. montre comment certaines langues ont evolue independamment du continuum dialectal germanique occidental. Il analyse les raisons du developpement d'une langue autonome au Luxembourg (luxembourgeois), alors que ce n'est pas le cas en Suisse (suisse allemand) et propose une explication aux conditions d'apparition de cette difference. Il examine ensuite les asymetries existant dans diverses varietes de la meme langue pluricentrique, prenant pour exemple l'allemand et le neerlandais. Tout au long de l'etude, il examine en detail les interrelations entre linguistique et conditions politiques

John his book vs. John's book : possession marking in English

The unusual development of the PDE [present-day English] s-genitive can be historically motivated, if the 's form is supposed to be not a mere leftover of the Old English (henceforth OE) casemarking, but the outcome of the merging of two patterns: the inflectional genitive ending (levelled to -s) and the construction "John his book" (henceforth 'possessive-linked genitive') during the Middle and the Early Modem English phases.&#x0D; &#x0D; As my corpus analysis will show, the semantic and syntactic constraints ruling the occurrence of the 's pattern in the time interval of the rise of the 's-pattern (1400 - 1650) are the same ones as those ruling the occurrence of the possessive-linked genitive.&#x0D; &#x0D; This hypothesis is further confirmed by cross-language comparison (with the other West Germanic languages, especially Afrikaans).&#x0D;

Open Syllable Lengthening in West Germanic

Vowels in stressed syllables in the West Germanic languages-e.g. Middle English, Middle Dutch and Middle High German-were lengthened under certain circumstances. There have been two different explanations for this change. The traditional assumption is that a process of open syllable lengthening (OSL) was introduced to standardize the quantity of stressed syllables (Prokosch 1939, among others). The second, quite different, approach assumes that the lengthening process (at least in Middle English) is not OSL but some sort of compensatory lengthening caused by the loss of a final schwa (Minkova 1982, 1985, Lass 1985, Hayes 1989, Kim 1993). We attempt to show that OSL was part of the grammar of all three languages, but that the motivation depended on the local contexts. We claim that all three languages endeavored to maintain and maximize the Germanic foot (Dresher & Lahiri 1991), and OSL contributed in different ways to do so.

On the word order 'XP-subject' in the Germanic languages

Among the Germanic languages, variation can be found with respect to the occurrence of a constituent in a position immediately preceding a definite subject. Whereas 'XP-subject' orders are possible in some languages, they are ruled out in other languages. Focusing on the West Germanic languages, this paper proposes that cross-linguistic variation with respect to 'XP-subject' orders can be related to other grammatical properties which vary among the different languages. Based on proposals made within the Minimalist framework, it will be argued that the presence or absence of the word order 'XP-subject' in the West Germanic languages follows from independent properties such as subject-verb agreement morphology and the licensing of non-overt expletives.

Foot Structure and Word Stress in Middle Dutch

Whereas word stress in modern Dutch is subject to continuous debate (cf. Kager 1989, Trommelen and Zonneveld 1989, Booij 1995), word stress in the older stages of the language is seldom discussed. One of the few exceptions is Zonneveld's (1992, 1993a) investigation of word stress in the Middle Dutch (MNL) text 'Het Leven van Sinte Lutgart' [Saint Lutgart's Life]. Zonneveld's work points out several interesting issues. His main conclusions are, however, challenged in this paper. Zonneveld's first conclusion is that not much has changed in the last 700 years with respect to word stress and that the stress system in 'Lutgart' is very similar to that of modern Dutch. In this paper I argue that the prosodic system of 'Lutgart' resembles that of the old and middle stages of the other West Germanic (WGmc) languages. It still has a Germanic foot, and moreover, Open Syllable Lengthening (OSL) has not yet run its full course. This latter claim challenges the assumption of all MNL grammars, namely that OSL took place in Old Dutch (ONL) and was a fact in MNL. The only evidence given for this assumption comes from rhyme. However, rhyme in 'Lutgart' does not motivate this assumption. Zonneveld's second conclusion is that the prosodic variation found in 'Lutgart' is largely due to the status of the schwa as a stress attractor. This confirms his synchronic analysis of modern Dutch, which also assumes the stress attracting nature of schwa (Trommelen and Zonneveld 1989, Kager and Zonneveld 1986). I will argue that the variation is not due to the nature of schwa per se, but is due to prosodic preferences at play at the time of 'Lutgart'. Variation is found only in certain environments, which partly coincide with those where English showed Trisyllabic Shortening (TSS) (Lahiri and Fikkert, 1996). Dutch did not have TSS but chose another way of dealing with less favoured prosodic structures, as we will see below.

Phonetic Perspectives on West Germanic Consonant Gemination

The distribution of geminates resulting from North and West Germanic consonant gemination suggests that velar obstruents were the segments most favored by the change, whilerwas least favored and blocked the operation altogether. In an attempt to account for this behavior, the phonetic characteristics of these sounds are examined in the context of the geminating environments. It is demonstrated that these preferences can be accounted for through coarticulatory and acoustic effects of the trigger on the preceding consonant and vice versa. Although many previous analyses have glossed over the details of consonant gemination in West Germanic, it is argued here that in order to understand sound change, coarticulation, perception, and allophonic variation must be taken into account.

How difficult are complex verbs? Evidence from German, Dutch and English

Most research on the acquisition of verbs has focused on acquiring the syntactic category verb and on the verb's argument structure. It is assumed that due to their specific syntactic nature verbs are acquired in a different fashion than nouns, and that due to their specific semantic nature verbs do not simply denote activities or situations, but rather package meaning components in a (language-) specific way. This paper refines the problem of acquiring verbs by paying attention to differences in the internal constituency of the verb lexicon in three closely related West Germanic languages - German, Dutch, and English. It is argued that the verb lexicon is not a uniform class but consists of various semantically or morphologically defined subsets, most notably simplex verbs like cover and complex verbs like uncover or cover up. It is shown that while complex verbs do not form an acquisition problem per se, not all (groups of) verbs are acquired in the same fashion and with the same ease. In particular, differences in the acquisition of particle and prefix verbs are discussed as well as differences in the lexical diversity of the verbal subsets in the three languages under investigation

A new approach to an old problem: Gemination and constraint reranking in West Germanic

This paper presents an Optimality Theoretic (Prince and Smolensky1993; McCarthy and Prince 1995) analysis of diachronic phonological change as the reranking of violable constraints, taking thee mergence of word-medial geminates in West Germanic as a case study. West Germanic is characterized by, among other things, the gemination of all consonants – except *r – after a short vowel and before *j (Gmc. *skapjan > OS skeppian, OE scieppan vs. Got. skapjan, ON skepja ’tocreate‘) and the gemination of voiceless stops before *r and*l (*akr- > OHG akkar, OS akkar vs. Got. akrs, ON akr ’field‘). Evidence from versification and word division in original documents suggests that all Germanic dialects favored bimoraic stressed syllables, syllabifying *skapjan as *skap.jan, for example. This often resulted in faulty syllable contacts in which the coda consonant was less sonorous than the following onset. Murray and Vennemann (1983) propose that geminates arose in order to repair such faulty syllable contacts (e.g., *skap.jan > *skap.pjan),but their analysis fails to satisfactorily account for the full scope of the West Germanic Gemination. I propose here that while gemination before *r and *l was driven by unfavorable sonority differences at syllable margins, the more pervasive appearance of geminates before *j simply resulted from a well-attested Germanic dispreference for *j in onset-initial position.