The advent of a new millennium marks the completion of our transition from the semiannual American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures to the quarterly Journal of Germanic Linguistics, the first number of which you have before you. Since I assumed the position of Chair of the Editorial Committee just over a year ago, I have been very fortunate to have worked with an exceptionally committed group of colleagues on the Editorial Committee, as well as the reconstituted and expanded Advisory Board. I am happy to report that our efforts have been successful, and the outlook for the future of the JGL is a bright one. I would like to share some of my thoughts on our experiences of the past year and give a sense of where we are headed.

In German, complex wh-interrogatives can optionally be formed by inserting the 3rd person neuter w h-pronoun was in the matrix [Spec, CP] position instead of long-distance wh-raising. It is generally assumed that “expletive” was serves as a placeholder for a contentful wh-expression lower down in the sentence that substitutes for it at the level of semantic interpretation. It can be shown, however, that the putative wh-expletive was in German is actually a CP-proform basegenerated in matrix object position, and that it is not subject to expletive replacement at LF. As an alternative to previous accounts, I propose a complex predicate analysis of the German was … w construction according to which was is a [thetas]-marked object pronoun capable of licensing a predicative CP in V-complement position. This analysis is consistent with Rothstein's (1995) claim that true object expletives do not exist.*

An influential rule proposed by Alistair Campbell assigns stress to the subordinate root in lexicalized compounds such as compound proper names if and only if the subordinate root stands in word-medial position, with an unstressed syllable following. A medial nonroot syllable receives stress by the same rule if it is long. Apparent exceptions are attributed to analogy or to a late rule of stress reduction. In this paper I argue that the exceptions have been misunderstood due to uncritical reliance on the metrical theory of Eduard Sievers. As it turns out, no late rule of stress reduction is required, and the reduction rule for synchronic roots does not distinguish word-medial position from wordfinal position. Such a distinction figures only in stress rules for nonroot syllables.*

This publication, which is part of the series Studien zur deutschen Sprache, is a valuable contribution to sociolinguistic research on speakers of Colonial German dialects,particularly speakers of German from Russia.

In this book, Eggers weighs in on debates over the nature and origins of Yiddish from the perspectives of general contact linguistics and German and Slavic historical linguistics and philology. The book attempts much, and indeed makes contributions. At the same time, however, there are numerous and pervasive shortcomings and mistakes which seriously undermine any book which undertakes the tasks that this one sets for itself.

The book is divided into three major sections with some excursuses. The first section is on runic inscriptions as a source for early Norse, the second is on syllable division and i-umlaut in Germanic, and the third is on the earliest distinctions among Germanic languages.

This volume brings together a collection of twelve papers originating from a workshop entitled “Phonology and Morphology of the Germanic Languages,” which the editors organized at the Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, in August 1997. It is divided into three sections: phonology, prosodic morphology, and morphology. A variety of languages and topics are treated, ranging from Icelandic vowel length and Scandinavian accent to Old English, Dutch, and German nominal inflection. There is some treatment of earlier stages of languages and historical topics do come up, but the emphasis is decidedly synchronic. Almost all the papers adopt a constraint-based approach, and a number are developed within the framework of optimality theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993). A brief overview of each of the papers follows.

Stefan Müller has written an extensive study of a large range of German constructions from the perspective of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG). For a theoretical work, it is notable for its scale, for its extensive use of current material from corpora, and for its welcome attention to the descriptive literature. Furthermore, the analyses can be tested on Müller's prolog implementation of HPSG, which runs at http://www.dfki.de/~stefan/. This is a very extensive fragment of German, involving thousands of words of different classes, raising and control verbs, passives, verb particle constructions, the “third“ construction, modal flip (Oberfeldumstellung), several sorts of relative clauses, extraposition, complex fronting, semifree word order in the Mittelfeld, scope ambiguities, and more. It is unusual to find this all in a single implementation, and the work is unique in being made available on the web. Müller's web page also contains errata for this book and examples.