Studies in Germanic Linguistics
This series aims to provide a unified home for the highest quality monographs and edited scholarly volumes of empirically grounded research on Germanic languages past and present. The series welcomes formal, functional, and quantitative studies in any established subfield of linguistic inquiry (e.g., syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition).
Contributions that engage two or more Germanic languages in their studies are particularly desirable. In addition to an empirical focus on Germanic, volumes in this series should also contribute to theories of language structure, language use, language change, language acquisition, and language processing.
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A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages
More LessFulk’s Comparative Grammar offers an overview of and bibliographical guide to the study of the phonology and the inflectional morphology of the earliest Germanic languages, with particular attention to Gothic, Old Norse / Icelandic, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German, along with some attention to the more sparsely attested languages. The sounds and inflections of the oldest Germanic languages are compared, with a view to reconstructing the forms they took in Proto-Germanic and comparing those reconstructed forms with what is known of the Indo-European protolanguage. Students will find the book an informative introduction and a bibliographically instructive point of departure for intensive research in the numerous issues that remain profoundly contested in early Germanic language history.
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Dating the Old Norse Poetic Edda
More LessThis book offers new dating of the poems of the Old Norse Poetic Edda , perhaps our best sources about the mythology and legends of the Viking Age. This study compares the anonymous Eddic poems to dated skaldic poems with respect to five phenomena that develop diachronically in early Old Norse: the expletive particle of, types of negation, word order, types of relative clause, and metrical criteria. After examining these dating features individually, the three most reliable criteria—the particle of, negation, and relative clause type—are combined into a multifactorial analysis using a Naïve Bayes Classifier. The classifier assigns a date to each Eddic poem, and these proposed dates have interesting implications for our understanding of these texts as sources for the medieval history, mythology, linguistics, and literature of the Germanic peoples. This book will have broad interdisciplinary interest, not just to historical linguists and philologists but also to scholars of Norse history, literature, and mythology.
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The Development of Aspirated Fricatives in Gothic
More LessThis book presents three major hypotheses concerning the development of fricatives in Gothic. First, Gothic introduced aspiration or a phonological feature [spread glottis] to the fricative system. Second, this acquisition of aspirated fricatives should be explained as a contact-induced change. Specifically, a Gothic/Greek bilingual community may be held responsible for initiating and diffusing the contact change. Third, I claim that this contact-driven featural enrichment prompted an array of radical restructurings of fricatives in their phonological and morphological organizations in Gothic, notably the occurrence of Final Devoicing in contrast to the nonoccurrence of medial voicing, the elimination of Verner’s Law effects in strong verbs, the operation of Thurneysen’s Law, and the apparently irregular split of PGmc. */fl-/ to Go. /fl-/ and /þl-/. Thus, privileged by a Lower Danube community largely composed of Greek/Gothic bilinguals, this cluster of mid-fourth-century innovations came to define the phonological and morphological identities of Biblical Gothic.
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The Ditransitive Alternation in Present-Day German
More LessThe ditransitive (or “dative”) alternation is a much-studied phenomenon in contemporary linguistics. This monograph is the first to address the alternation in present-day written German from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. As well as providing a corpus-based analysis of extensively annotated data and detailed statistical information, the book also contributes to the theory of language by developing an alternative framework to existing investigations of the alternation. It is shown that the alternation can be accounted for in a comprehensive way by adopting a three-layer approach to meaning and sense based on the work of E. Coseriu and S. Levinson. In this approach, a construction’s language-specific encoded meaning is distinguished both from its conventional (“normal”) uses and its discourse-specific interpretations in particular contexts. The monograph is likely to attract attention from researchers in the fields of German and English linguistics, general and contrastive linguistics as well as linguistic theory.
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Ditransitives in Germanic Languages
More LessThis volume brings together twelve empirical studies on ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages and their varieties, past and present. Specifically, the volume includes contributions on a wide variety of Germanic languages, including English, Dutch, and German, but also Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, as well as lesser-studied ones such as Faroese. While the first part of the volume focuses on diachronic aspects, the second part showcases a variety of synchronic aspects relating to ditransitive patterns. Methodologically, the volume covers both experimental and corpus-based studies. Questions addressed by the papers in the volume are, among others, issues like the cross-linguistic pervasiveness and cognitive reality of factors involved in the choice between different ditransitive constructions, or differences and similarities in the diachronic development of ditransitives. The volume’s broad scope and comparative perspective offers comprehensive insights into well-known phenomena and furthers our understanding of variation across languages of the same family.
This e-book is made available as Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license.
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Investigating West Germanic Languages
More LessThis volume celebrates Robert B. Howell's wide-ranging contribution as a scholar, mentor, collaborator, and colleague in the field of Germanic linguistics. In addition to investigating present-day or past varieties of Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Flemish, German, and Pennsylvania Dutch, each of the thirteen contributions in this volume explores one or more of the topics found in Howell’s work: (1) Linguistic structure and change (Page, Sundquist, Fagan, De Vaan); (2) Migration, contact, and change (Fertig, Louden, Roberge); (3) Vernacular sources and change (Auer & Gordon, Hendriks, Van der Wal); (4) Historical sociolinguistics: past, present, and future (Van Bree, Crombez, Vandenbussche & Vosters, Lauersdorf & Salmons).
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Norwegian Discourse Ellipsis
More LessThis book develops a grammar model which accounts for discourse ellipses in spoken Norwegian. This is a previously unexplored area, which has also been sparsely investigated internationally. The model takes an exoskeletal view, where lexical items are inserted late and where syntactic structure is generated independently of lexical items. Two major questions are addressed. Firstly, is there active syntactic structure in the ellipsis site? Secondly, how are discourse ellipses licensed? It is argued that both structural and semantic restrictions are required to account for the empirical patterns.
Discourse ellipses can be seen as a contextual adaptation. Ellipsis is only possible in certain contexts. The existence of ellipsis may lead to the impression that syntax is partly destroyed. However, the analysis shows that narrow syntax is not affected. The underlying structure stays intact, as the licensing restrictions concern only phonological realization. Hence, the grammar of discourse ellipses is best characterized as an interface phenomenon.
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Norwegian Verb Particles
More LessThis book aims to explain the syntax and semantics of Norwegian verb particles. While particles have been claimed to be distributed optionally to the left (as LPrt) or right (as RPrt) of an associated DP in the linguistic literature, the dialectologically oriented literature has shown for a long time that many Norwegian particles are preferred as LPrt (corresponding to English ‘throw out the dog’). While spatial particles can appear in both positions, non-spatial particles primarily appear as LPrt. A complex predicate analysis is adopted for non-spatial particles, and a small clause analysis for spatial particles. It is argued that a non-spatial LPrt construction triggers an atelic reading, and the RPrt counterpart identifies a result state.
The book combines traditional dialectology with modern linguistic theories and includes much Norwegian data that has not been shed theoretical light on before: simplex and complex spatial and non-spatial constructions, phrasal particles, ground promotion, and unaccusatives. Several earlier theoretical accounts of Norwegian particles are reviewed in a separate chapter.
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Syntactic Variation in Insular Scandinavian
More LessThis book presents the latest research on the syntax of the “Insular Scandinavian” languages (Faroese and Icelandic), with contributions from thirteen experts, and a significant introductory chapter by the four editors. The topics covered include some that have figured extensively in recent literature on Scandinavian syntax and its implications for syntactic theory: case, agreement, embedded clause word order, stylistic fronting, and the nature of “expletive” constructions. The volume is conceived around the topic of variation, both within and between the two languages studied—as well as more generally—and stands out for the wealth of new empirical detail from both Faroese and Icelandic, relating to each of the topics and theoretical issues discussed. Each chapter is written in a way to make it accessible to a wide audience within linguistics; the book will be essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in the syntax of the Germanic languages.
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