This paper surveys the emergence of the category humanness in the 3rd person singular personal pronoun in Alemannic (southwest German) dialects. The first part shows that some Alemannic dialects have developed a human/nonhuman distinction in the 3rd person singular neuter personal pronoun: a marked form encoding the human direct object has emerged. The emergence of this form can be explained by the differential object marking hypothesis. The second part reports on a pilot study of the 3rd person singular personal pronoun in Sense Alemannic on the basis of new data. In this dialect, humanness is distinguished not only in the neuter but also in the masculine and feminine. Additionally, some instances are observed that violate the differential object marking principle. Thus, both principles (humanness marking and the differential object marking) form part of the grammar, but the latter one may be violated.*

The article describes the manifestation and distribution of 15 phonological variables in a rural heritage language community in South Dakota, USA. I discuss to what extent dialect convergence has occurred in this former Danish settlement. The data sample encompasses speakers born in Northwest Jutland in Denmark, as well as speakers born in South Dakota to parents who emigrated from Northwest Jutland. The analysis shows that dialectal convergence has not occurred to any significant degree, in spite of what may be expected; speakers born in South Dakota have significantly more dialectal features in their speech than the speakers born in Denmark. The analysis also reveals a sizeable degree of inter-speaker variation within both groups, as well as a considerable variation between the variables with respect to how likely they are to be realized dialectally versus nondialectally. The results are discussed in relation to theories of shared linguistic repertoire and individuation in small speech communities.*

The aim of the present study is to conduct a comprehensive corpus analysis of the constituent order of main declarative clauses with the interjection hwæt ‘what’ in the clause-initial position in Old English prose texts. On the basis of his analysis of Ælfric's Lives of Saints and Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, Walkden (2013) claims that such hwæt-clauses pattern with subordinate clauses with respect to their verb position. My study confirms Walkden's basic empirical findings that hwæt-clauses do not behave like typical main clauses as far as their constituent order is concerned. However, there are numerous differences between them and subordinate clauses introduced by hwæt, that is, free relatives and embedded questions. The analysis suggests that the conditions favoring the use of the V-final order in main hwæt-clauses resemble the ones identified for ordinary V-final main clauses in Bech 2012. What is more, the study shows that the functional differences between hwæt- and hwæt þa-clauses noted in Brinton 1996 are blurred in Old English prose because of a regular variation between hwæt þa-S and hwæt-S-þa patterns. The data also suggest that þa in hwæt þa-clauses should rather be analyzed as an independent clause element.

Using map task data, this paper investigates the intonation of polar questions in North American (heritage) Icelandic, and compares it to the intonation of polar questions in Icelandic as spoken in Iceland and in North American English as spoken in Manitoba, Canada. The results show that intonational features typical of Icelandic polar questions are present to a considerable extent in heritage Icelandic. Furthermore, intonational features typical of North American English polar questions can frequently be observed in heritage Icelandic, too. In addition, there is a tendency for intonational features typical of Icelandic polar questions to show up in North American English polar questions produced by speakers of heritage Icelandic more often than in North American English polar questions produced by speakers without Icelandic heritage. Focusing on intonation, the present study adds to the evidence for (bidirectional) prosodic interference between a heritage language (here moribund Icelandic) and the dominant language (here North American English).*

This study provides an empirical analysis of light verb constructions in Old Swedish. These constructions contain a semantically light verb, such as giva ‘give’ or göra ‘make’, that may be paired with an abstract nominal object, as in giva radh ‘give advice’ or giva hiälp ‘give help’. Using a corpus of nine Old Swedish texts written in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, I track the frequency of light verb constructions and analyze the range of transitive light verb + object pairings. I consider the effects of time, genre, and the type of modification to the nominal object in the quantitative analysis. The results contribute to ongoing discussions in crosslinguistic, diachronic research on the reasons for the increase in frequency of light verb constructions as well as the possibility that this construction exhibits characteristics of grammaticalization or lexicalization.

This paper analyzes the linguistic repertoires of Jews in the Low German-speaking areas in the first decades of the 20th century, as a contribution to historical sociolinguistics. Based on fieldwork questionnaires held in the archives of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ), it addresses the question of whether the Jewish minorities spoke a supralectal form of standard German or Koiné forms of dialects, relating this to issues of language shift from Western Yiddish. The study shows that many Jews living in northern Germany during the 1920s and 1930s still had access to a multilingual repertoire containing remnants of Western Yiddish; that a majority of the LCAAJ interviewees from this area emphasized their excellent command of standard German; and that their competence in Low German varied widely, from first language to no competence at all, depending on the region where they lived.*

Dutch partitive constructions of the type one of the (few) X who Y show a striking pattern of singular subject-verb agreement in their relative clause. This paper presents a corpus study showing that the prescriptively “incorrect” singular agreement pattern is in fact the dominant pattern in Dutch. In order to explain this, we argue that this type of partitive construction often has a specific function in context, namely, to point out that the subject is special or extraordinary, usually for the reason presented by the relative clause. We apply a usage-based approach to this construction within the framework of Construction Grammar, arguing that the prevalent implicature of the subject’s specialness has become a conventionalized part of the meaning of the construction. This analysis then can be used to explain the syntactic pattern of singular agreement within the relative clause. A similar albeit less pronounced pattern can be found in German.*

In this paper, we investigate gender assignment to recently borrowed English loanwords in Dutch, introducing several innovations to the field of gender assignment to anglicisms. For example, we use multiple mixed-effects logistic regression to determine which factors underlie gender assignment in Dutch. This model indicates that there is variation in the degree of homogeneity in the speech community (that is, agreement among respondents) concerning the gender assigned to an anglicism; therefore, we analyze the contexts in which homogeneity is the lowest. Our analysis reveals that the degree of consensus does not solely depend on how established an anglicism is. In contrast to what has been argued in previous studies, gender assignment to anglicisms in Dutch is not a categorical process: Gender variation increases when respondents are faced with a conflict between the default article de and some factor that favors its neuter counterpart, het.*

High Prussian, a variety of East Central German, has a segmentally opaque process of final devoicing: Only some forms with underlyingly voiced obstruents devoice at the end of a word. This phenomenon can also be observed in some morphological alternations where simplex forms show final devoicing but complex ones do not. This paper provides a metrical analysis of final devoicing and two related phenomena: spirantization, and an interaction of vowel length in high vowels and obstruent voicing. It is claimed that nondevoicing items contain disyllabic foot templates and that word-final consonants are then syllabified as onsets of empty-headed word-final syllables. The analysis demonstrates how evidence from West Germanic dialects can contribute to our understanding of the phonology of laryngeal features and to the role that metrical structure can play in shaping phonological alternations.*

This paper attempts to determine a more precise timeline for the onset of Open Syllable Lengthening in Dutch. We examined two late 14th-century Brabantic texts in the Manuscript Marshall 29 (1375 AD), Mellibeus and Saladijn, and compared these with an older Brabantic text Lutgart to ascertain when exactly Open Syllable Lengthening originated in (Brabantic) Middle Dutch. A combination of diachronic correspondences and a careful examination of the texts written in verse during the course of approximately 75 years has helped us to establish the synchronic systems of 13th- and 14th-century Middle Dutch, and, furthermore, has allowed us to determine the onset of prosodic changes such as Open Syllable Lengthening. Orthographic, rhythmic, and metrical evidence from the three texts suggests that the process was incomplete in the earliest period and was finalized in the late 14th century in Brabant, thereby refuting the standard assumption that the lengthening was completed before the onset of Middle Dutch in general.*