In this paper, I argue that the Germanic construction traditionally labeled Contrastive Leftdislocation1 (CLD) reduces to an interplay of movement and ellipsis in an underlyingly biclausal structure. The resulting analysis relies exclusively on independently motivated grammatical operations (A-movement in syntax and clausal ellipsis/deaccenting at PF), thereby achieving a reduction of construct...

We aim to demonstrate that agent-based models can be a useful tool for historical linguists, by modeling the historical development of verbal cluster word order in Germanic languages. Our results show that the current order in German may have developed due to increased use of subordinate clauses, while the English order is predicted to be influenced by the grammaticalization of the verb to have...

• geis quite slippery and has eluded really satisfactory description – let alone analysis – despite getting considerable attention since the 19th century. • I’m in the middle of a large-scale corpus study of the prefix, trying to get a proper handle on its syntax and semantics in order to develop a better theory. • Today I will present some intermediate results from the ongoing study and lay ou...

After the fall of Roman in uence in the British Isles at the beginning of the 5 Century A.D., two West Germanic tribes began pouring into Britain in increasing numbers. Originally recruited as mercenaries against the Picts in modernday Scotland, the Angles and Saxons stayed and eventually overwhelmed the Celts and other inhabitants of modern-day England and Wales who had invited them (Wikipedia...

Listeners usually adjust rapidly to unfamiliar regional and foreign accents in their native (L1) language. Non-native (L2) listeners, however, usually struggle when confronted with unfamiliar accents in their non-native language. The present study asks how native language background of L2 speakers influences lexical adjustments in a novel accent of German, in which several vowels were systemati...

Hubert Haider’ primary goal in his latest book is to establish a universal constraint on the branching structure of Language: there are only right branching structures and their mirror image—left branching ones—do not exist at all. Through this strong proposal, Haider seeks to shed light on what he considers a universal, inviolable aspect of the architecture of grammar, thus contributing to the...

In this paper we use the Reeks Nederlandse Dialectatlassen as a source for the reconstruction of a ‘proto-language’ of Dutch dialects. We used 360 dialects from locations in the Netherlands, the northern part of Belgium and French-Flanders. The density of dialect locations is about the same everywhere. For each dialect we reconstructed 85 words. For the reconstruction of vowels we used knowledg...