In this paper we present a synchronic lexical analysis of numeral expressions in the three major modern West Germanic languages, Dutch, English and German. We present an account which makes use of default inheritance, deening the similarities between the languages as default values which may be overridden for individual languages. We discuss how our account, which covers the syntax, morphology ...

This paper makes three claims. The first is that, although Albanian is a negative concord language similar to Modern Greek (Giannakidou 1993 & 1997), it interestingly exhibits two series of n-words like English and Germanic languages. This provides a set of novel data for the study of n-words, especially because one class of these n-words comprises of weak (Zwarts 1995) NPIs while the other one...

In Germanic languages, compound words are very common and very productive. There are compound words which are bound and lexicalized and loose their semantic content when split (e.g. albatross or jordgubbe). This category will be referred to as opaque compounds. The opposite of the opaque compounds are the productive compounds, whose parts keep their semantic value when separated (Bjarnadóttir 2...

Abstract As is well-known, the Alps are a zone of long-standing, intensive contact and multilingualism among Germanic, Romance Slavic languages varieties. In this introductory paper, some reflections presented on viability Sprachbund hypothesis to encompass occurring phenomena convergence observed throughout whole area.

This study addressed the debate on the primacy of syllable vs. segment (i.e., phoneme) as a functional unit of phonological encoding in syllabic languages by investigating both behavioral and neural responses of Dutch-Cantonese (DC) bilinguals in a color-object picture naming task. Specifically, we investigated whether DC bilinguals exhibit the phonemic processing strategy, evident in monolingu...

It is often suggested that if all sound change were due to optimizations of functional principles (minimization of articulatory effort, minimization of perceptual confusion), then sound systems should have increasingly improved during the course of history, probably to the point that they should by now have reached a stable optimum. Since the facts show, however, that sound systems tend never t...

The British and Dutch share a long naval-, war- and medical history, in good times as well as bad. Their language has a common Germanic origin, but the English people may use special ways to express values or opinions, from which the sometimes paradoxical meaning is not always clear to the other party. Particularly with the Dutch, renowned for their directness, this may cause confusion. We prov...

This paper presents an optimality theoretic approach to the transitive particle verb construction (PVC), also referred to in the literature e.g. as phrasal verbs or separable complex verbs. This construction occurs in most if not all of the Germanic languages and has been studied most intensely and controversially in the generative literature (cf. Dehé et al 2002 and Dehé 2002 for recent analys...

The correct choice of words has proven challenging for learners of a second language and errors of this kind form a separate category in error typology. This paper focuses on one known example of two verbs that are often confused by non-native speakers of Germanic languages, to make and to do. We conduct experiments using syntactic information and immediate context for Dutch and English. Our re...

Johannessen, Janne Bondi. 2016. Prescriptive infinitives in the modern North Germanic languages: An ancient phenomenon in child-directed speech. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 39(3), 231–276. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commerci...