Germanic linguistics

Das Wort für, Biber' und einige Probleme der altgermanischen Phonologie

by Martin Kümmel

In: I. Wischer, M. Fritz (Hrsgg.), Historisch-Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und Germanische Sprachen. Akten der 4. Neuland-Tagung der Historisch-Vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft, Potsdam, 22.-23. Juni 2001, (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft, 113), Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck, Abteilung Sprachwissenschaft 2004, 105-117.

Ungeklärtes *u neben Liquida in germanischen Nomina

by Martin Kümmel

In: A. Hyllested, A. R. Jør¬gen¬sen, J. H. Larsson & Th. Olander (Hrsgg.), Per Aspera ad Asteriscos. Studia Indogermanica in honorem Jens Elmegård Rasmussen sexagenarii Idibus Martiis anno MMMIV, (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft, 112), Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck, Abteilung Sprachwissenschaft 2004, 291-303.

Temporalität und Aspektualität in der neueren germanistischen Forschung

by Martin Kümmel

Rezen¬sionsaufsatz zu W. Abraham, Th. Janssen (Hrsgg.), Tempus – Aspekt – Modus. Die lexikalischen und grammatischen Formen in den germanischen Sprachen, Tübingen 1989, und M. Herweg, Zeitaspekte: Die Bedeutung von Tempus, Aspekt und temporalen Konjunktionen, Wiesbaden 1990. Philologia Fenno-Ugrica 7 (2001/2002), 35-45.

Two case studies of contact induced morphological change in Germanic (Tartu 04.05.2012)

by Corinna Scheungraber

Handout (The Graduate Conference on Areal Linguistics, Grammar and Contacts Tartu, Estonia 04-06 May 2012)

Case studies of contact-induced morphological change in Germanic
Corinna Scheungraber, University of Viennamore Case studies of contact-induced morphological change in Germanic
Corinna Scheungraber, University of Vienna
Most research on language contact is limited to phonology and syntax (Schrijver forthc.), whereas its effects on morphology have been neglected by most scholars. However, some studies on language contact (Weinreich 1953, Thomason/Kaufman 1988, Heine/Kuteva 2005, Gardani 2008) have emphasized that it did affect the domain of morphology as well. I will present two case studies of contact-induced morphological change in the Germanic (Gmc.) languages to demonstrate both the explanatory power and problems of contact-induced explanations.
One of the most debated problems of historical English studies is the rise of the 3rd sg s-ending in the English verb. It can be traced back to Old English, more specifically to the Northumbrian ending  as,  es. This ending stands in contradiction to what is usually reconstructed and expected in a Gmc. language in the 3rd person sg, i.e. a dental ending. As will be shown, the s-ending has been analogically transferred from the 2nd sg-ending of the Northumbrian verb on the model of Old Norse, where the 2nd and 3rd sg endings had the same form.
The second case study is concerned with the reduction of the PIE verbal tense/aspect system to a simple non-past/past opposition in Proto-Gmc. In PIE, there was a complex tense/aspect-system, including different categories like aorist, perfect, present. In Proto-Gmc. however, only two tenses are left and aspect has completely disappeared. Traditional approaches have posited internal language change as the force behind these changes, whereas alternative hypotheses have proposed external influence, i.e. language contact. Thus, the Gmc. verbal system is characterized by diachronic processes that are often observed in language contact situations, specifically in situations of second language acquisition (Thomason/Kaufman 1988: 74-75; van Coetsem 2000: 182; Mailhammer 2007: 197). However, it is unlikely, both on linguistic and archaeological grounds, that the language that influenced Gmc. was Punic (Mailhammer 2010; Vennemann 1998 and elsewhere). It is much more likely that Germanic was influenced by Baltic-Finnic languages, which belong to a language family with a simple two-tense system.

References:
van Coetsem, Frans. 2000. A General and Unified Theory of the Transmission Process in Language Contact.
Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter.
Gardani, Francesco. 2008. Borrowing of inflectional morphemes in language contact, Wien: Lange.
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania. 2005. Language Contact and Grammatical Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mailhammer, Robert. 2007. The Germanic Strong Verbs. Foundations and Development of a new System [Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 183]. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Mailhammer, Robert. 2010. Die etymologische Forschung und Lehre auf dem Gebiet des Germanischen. Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia 15, 37-65.
Schrijver, Peter. forthcoming. Language Contact and the Origin of Europe's Languages. Routledge Chapman & Hall.
Thomason, Sarah Grey & Kaufman, Terrence. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact, 6th. edition [Reprint]. The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
Vennemann, Theo. 1998. Germania Semitica: +plōg/+pleg-, +furh-/+farh-, +folk/+flokk, +felh-/+folg. Deutsche Grammatik – Thema in Variationen: Festschrift für Hans-Werner-Eroms zum 60. Geburtstag. Donhauser, Karin & Eichinger, Ludwig M. (eds.), 245–261.

Psycholinguistic evidence for the underspecification of morphosyntactic features.

by Sonja Eisenbeiss

Authors: Penke, Martina, Janssen, Ulrike & Eisenbeiss, Sonja; published in 'Brain and Language' 90, 423-433

This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature... more This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature specifications of these elements. In two sentence-matching experiments German speakers had to decide whether sentence pairs involving inflected adjectives or determiners were identical or not. In both experiments, there was a delay when an inflected form contained positive feature specifications for grammatical features that did not match the feature specifications of the grammatical context in which it
appeared. No delay, however, occurred when an incorrectly inflected form had mismatching negative specifications, whereas its positively specified features matched the respective positive features of the context. This result provides evidence for a different status of positively and negatively specified morphosyntactic features. It supports the idea of radical underspecification according to which only positive feature specifications are part of the representations of morphologically complex forms or affixes, whereas negative
feature specifications are assigned on the basis of paradigmatic contrasts.

The Etymology of Old English *docga

by Piotr Gąsiorowski

Indogermanische Forschungen 111 (2006), 275-284.

This article explores the origin of English dog (OE *docga), generally regarded as a word of unknown origin. It is... more This article explores the origin of English dog (OE *docga), generally regarded as a word of unknown origin. It is argued, on the basis of its morphology, that the word is a hypocoristic derivative of <dox>, an Old English colour adjective. The article suggests that the relation between OE <frox> and <frocga> ‘frog’ is not an isolated irregularity but an example of a derivational process represented also by <dox : *docga> and possibly by other such pairs in Old English (e.g. <fox: *fogga>).

http://hdl.handle.net/10593/2479

The Germanic reflexes of PIE *-sr- in the context of Verner’s Law

by Piotr Gąsiorowski

Preprint (proceedings of the Sound of Indo-European Conference in Copenhagen, 2009, published 2012).

The paper reconsiders the fate of medial *-sr- in Germanic, especially in the context of Verner's Law. It is argued... more The paper reconsiders the fate of medial *-sr- in Germanic, especially in the context of Verner's Law. It is argued that the epenthesis of *-t- took place later than the voicing of *-s- by Verner's Law and did not apply to the Vernerian variant *-zr-. Instead, I propose that the pre-rhotic *z was lost, resulting, when possible, in a compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. Several novel etymologies are offered to support this proposal, and some of its ramifications are explored, including the derivation of the word for 'spring' in Latin and Germanic and the structure of the Germanic words for the four cardinal points.

http://hdl.handle.net/10593/1990

‘Ok dulða ek þann inn alsvinna jötun’: Some Linguistic and Metrical Aspects of Óðinn’s Win over Vafþrúðnir (Saga-Book, vol. 35, 2011, pp. 39-72)

by Ilya Sverdlov

Review of "Language сontact in times of globalization", Eds. C. Hasselblatt, P. Houtzagers, R. van Pareren

by Mikhail Zhivlov

In: Вопросы языкознания, 2012/2: 125-128 (in Russian).

Gotische Grammatik - Enlargement III

by Roland Schuhmann

Enlargement II of the Gothic Grammar that will appear in the new KISS-series. Thorough comments are most welcome (commenters will of course be named in the preface) ...

Les noms prédicatifs sont-ils solubles dans la théorie de Jean-Marie Zemb ?

by Laurent Gautier

Published in : Déconstruction-Reconstruction. Autour de la pensée de Jean-Marie Zemb, Martine Dalmas & Thierry Gallèpe (Ed.) (2011) 83-98

Les analyses de la phrase sous la forme de structures prédicat-argument(s) semblent, ces derniers temps, connaître un... more Les analyses de la phrase sous la forme de structures prédicat-argument(s) semblent, ces derniers temps, connaître un regain d'intérêt non seulement dans les grammaires descriptives et explicatives mais aussi dans la recherche théorique où elles ont donné lieu à de vifs débats autour de la notion même de prédication et du rapport entre cette dernière et certaines classes de mots, en premier lieu le verbe et le nom. Dans le sillage de ce débat, il peut paraître opportun de revenir sur la place qu'occupe cette notion de prédication dans l'édifice conceptuel construit par Jean-Marie Zemb en s'interrogeant tout spécialement sur les liens potentiels pouvant exister entre deux modèles théoriques permettant, entre autres, de déconstruire, pour les mieux reconstruire, les classifications traditionnelles découpant, à la suite des Anciens, le lexique d'une langue en classes de mots ou parties du discours. Cette problématique générale sera abordée ici à travers le prisme de la comparaison entre noms prédicatifs, tels que ceux-ci ont été définis dans la théorie des classes d'objets , et noms en position rhématique chez Zemb.

Liberman and Levickij: Towards comparative etymological lexicography of English and Germanic

by Marek Stachowski

A comparative review of: (1) Liberman A.: An analytic dictionary of English etymology. An introduction, 2008; (2) Liberman A.: A bibliography of English etymology, 2010; (3) Levickij V. V. : Ètimologičeskij slovar' germanskix jazykov, 2010.

Notes on German loan words in an areal Carpathian context

by Marek Stachowski

German Irrwisch '1. will-o'-the-wisp; 2. scamp, scallywag, imp' and Polish urwis 'scamp, scallywag, imp'

by Marek Stachowski

Beschränkungen für die scheinbar mehrfache Vorfeldbesetzung im Deutschen [Restrictions on Multiple Frontings in German]

by Stefan Müller

Ste­fan Müller, Felix Bild­hauer, and Philip­pa Cook To appear in Colette Cortès (Ed), Satzeröffnung. Formen, Funtionen, Strategien, Eurogermanistik Nr. 31, Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, pages 113–128.

This paper briefly sketches the syntactic analysis of apparently multiple frontings (MF), which was explained in more... more This paper briefly sketches the syntactic analysis of apparently multiple frontings (MF), which was explained in more detail in Müller, 2005. Although the syntax of this phenomenon is rather clear, the specific information structural constraints on such frontings were unknown due to the lack of data of this rare phenomenon. We put together large database containing examples of MFs and the context they appear in. Exploring the data we could find three patterns of MFs, which are discussed in the paper.

The database is accessible via a corpus query interface at http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/Resources/MVB/.

Apart from this we present the results of a corpus study that compares multiple frontings with the fronting of a VP. The evalutaion of the data showed that item-specific information plays a role, which supports grammar models that allow for item-specific effects.

German: A Grammatical Sketch

by Stefan Müller

To Ap­pear 2013 in Artemis Alex­i­adou and Tibor Kiss (Eds): Syn­tax. An In­ter­na­tion­al Hand­book, Handbücher zur Sprach-​ und Kom­mu­nika­tion­swis­senschaft, Berlin: Mou­ton de Gruyter Ver­lag.

This paper pro­vides an overview of the most im­por­tant gram­mat­i­cal prop­er­ties of Ger­man. A large part of the... more This paper pro­vides an overview of the most im­por­tant gram­mat­i­cal prop­er­ties of Ger­man. A large part of the paper is con­cerend with the basic clause types of Ger­man. I start with the Topo­log­i­cal Fields Model, which is very use­ful as a de­scrip­tive tool, but – as will be shown – not suf­fi­cient for a thor­ough ac­count of Ger­man clausal struc­ture. I there­fore ex­plain ad­di­tion­al the­o­ret­i­cal as­sump­tions that were made in order to as­sign struc­ture to the ob­serv­able lin­ear se­quences. After a sketch of an anal­y­sis of the basic sen­tence pat­terns in the Sec­tions 2–5, I give an ac­count of pas­sive, case as­sign­ment, and sub­ject-​verb agree­ment in Sec­tion 6.

[Review of] Hans-Peter Naumann (ed.), Alemannien und der Norden

by Kendra Willson

Willson, Kendra. 2008. [Review of] Review of Hans-Peter Naumann (ed.), Alemannien und der Norden.  North-West European Language Evolution 53 (May 2008): 67-82

On Predication

by Stefan Müller

2009 in Ste­fan Müller (Ed): Pro­ceed­ings of the 16th In­ter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence on Head-​Driv­en Phrase Struc­ture Gram­mar, Uni­ver­si­ty of Göttin­gen, Ger­many, Stan­ford: CSLI Pub­li­ca­tions, pages 213–233.

This paper discusses copula constructions in English, German, and Danish and argues that a uniform analysis of all... more This paper discusses copula constructions in English, German, and Danish and argues that a uniform analysis of all copula constructions is inappropriate. I provide evidence from German that there should be a raising variant of the copula in addition to an identificational copula. A unary schema is provided that maps referential NPs that can be used as arguments onto predicational NPs. Data from Danish shows that predicational NPs can be subjects in specificational structures. An account for such specificational structures is provided and the different behaviour of predicational and specificational structures with regard to question tags is explained. A similar contrast can be found in German left dislocation structures, which follows from the assumptions made in this paper.

A modified treatment of complex predicate formation allows for a reduction of selectional features (that is abolishing of XCOMP or VCOMP) and for a uniform treatment of predicational phrases in copula constructions and resultative secondary predicates. This yields an account for constituent order variants that remained unexplained by earlier analyses.

Zur Analyse der deutschen Satzstruktur

by Stefan Müller

This ar­ti­cle ap­peared 2005 in Lin­guis­tis­che Berichte, 201, pages 3–39.

This ar­ti­cle deals with the anal­y­sis of the Ger­man clause struc­ture. The fol­low­ing as­pects are dis­cussed:more This ar­ti­cle deals with the anal­y­sis of the Ger­man clause struc­ture. The fol­low­ing as­pects are dis­cussed:

Verb last vs. verb ini­tial sen­tences,
fronting of con­stituents in verb sec­ond sen­tences,
ver­bal com­plex­es and In­com­plete Cat­e­go­ry Fronting.

The anal­y­sis pre­sent­ed here is the only HPSG anal­y­sis that ex­plains the con­stituent order facts and that is com­pat­i­ble with the anal­y­sis of mul­ti­ple con­stituents in­front of the fi­nite verb that is sug­gest­ed in Müller, 2005.

The anal­y­sis is part of an im­ple­ment­ed frag­ment of Ger­man.

Zur Analyse der scheinbar mehrfachen Vorfeldbesetzung

by Stefan Müller

This ar­ti­cle ap­peared in 2005 in Lin­guis­tis­chen Berichte 203, pages 297–330.

In this paper I show that in Ger­man mul­ti­ple con­stituents can be front­ed al­though Ger­man is usu­al­ly... more In this paper I show that in Ger­man mul­ti­ple con­stituents can be front­ed al­though Ger­man is usu­al­ly re­gard­ed a verb sec­ond lan­guage. I de­vel­op an HPSG anal­y­sis that treats the front­ed con­stituents as one unit that is re­lat­ed to a verb in the main sen­tence.

Since the anal­y­sis is rather com­plex hav­ing a look at the slides may help, since parts of the anal­y­sis are su­pressed or high­light­ed in the pre­sen­ta­tion, which makes things more read­able.

The anal­y­sis is part of an im­ple­ment­ed Frag­ment of Ger­man (Gram­mar for Chap­ter 15). This gram­mar is also part of the Gram­mix CD Rom.