Gertjan Postma - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Gertjan Postma
Crossroads Semantics, May 1, 2017
and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requi... more and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the KNAW public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain. • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the KNAW public portal. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
The rise and fall of the passive auxiliary weorðan (WERDEN) in the history of English is investig... more The rise and fall of the passive auxiliary weorðan (WERDEN) in the history of English is investigated. We provide a new structural analysis of why and in what languages the passive diathesis can / cannot use the copula BE as auxiliary. We will do so in a comparative perspective within Germanic and Romance. We provide 1. language internal structural variation in BE and WERDEN as passive auxiliaries in relation with Verb-Second, 2. cross-linguistic i.e. comparative data of this variation 3. diachronic data on Old English weorðan that ties the need of a separate passive auxiliary to the Verb second constraint. It turns out that Old English displays a temporary rise and fall of strict-V2 around 1000, as well as a rise and fall of weorðan, which developments can be related because they comply to Kroch's Constant Rate Hypothesis (CRH). Finally, we sketch the first contours of a grammatical model that umbrellas tense/aspect, V2, and the passive diathesis, which predicts this correlatio...
Item does not contain fulltextInternational Conference on Historical Linguistics XVIIIUniversité ... more Item does not contain fulltextInternational Conference on Historical Linguistics XVIIIUniversité de Quebec a Montreal, Canad
Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today
This paper investigates the decline of the passive auxiliary weorðan in the history of English. W... more This paper investigates the decline of the passive auxiliary weorðan in the history of English. We provide a new structural analysis of why and in what languages the passive diathesis can or cannot use the copula BE as an auxiliary. We will do so in a comparative perspective within Germanic and Romance. Our point of departure is not why weorðan WERDEN declines, but why the copular verb BE is incapable of functioning as a passive auxiliary in some languages, incidentally in some tenses, while it can be used in other languages/tenses. We provide 1. language internal structural variation in BE and WERDEN, 2. cross-linguistic i.e. comparative data of this variation, 3. diachronic data on Old English weorðan that ties the need of a separate passive auxiliary to the verb second (V2) constraint. It turns out that Old English displays a temporary rise and fall of strict-V2 around 1000, as well as a rise and fall of weorðan, and these developments can be related because they comply with Kroch's Constant Rate Hypothesis (CRH). Finally, we sketch the first contours of a grammatical model that umbrellas tense/aspect, V2, and the passive diathesis, which predicts this correlation. By modifying Giorgi's projection of the Reichenbachian event indexes S, E, and R onto the syntax, we show that the (in)equality of these indexes is not ruled by structural templates stored in the lexicon, but are dynamically ruled by the syntax. The interpretation of tense (past, present and perfect) makes use of indexical heads in the extended domain of VP. In V2 languages, the C head participates in the Reichenbachian calculus of tenses, while this is not the case in non-V2 languages. The (in)equality of the Reichenbachian indexes S, E, R are subject to the binding domains of the Binding Theory. The passive diathesis interacts with binding domains, because subject absorption lifts a domain border, and gives rise to the obviation of E and S. 2.1 Aspect sensitivity in Dutch (dialects) 2.1.1 Standard Dutch Standard Dutch is a language that has a specific passive auxiliary worden, the cognate of German werden. However, while German uses werden in all tenses and aspects, Dutch only uses werden in present (10b) and the simple past (11b). (10) a. Jan kust Marie present, active John kisses Mary 'John kisses Mary' b. Marie wordt door Jan gekust present, passive Mary WERDEN.pres by John kissed 'Mary is kissed/being kissed by John' (11) a. Jan kuste Marie past, active John kissed Mary 'John kissed/was kissing Mary' b. Marie werd door Jan gekust past, passive Mary WERDEN.past by John kissed 'Mary was (bing) kissed by John' In perfect tenses Dutch uses BE, as shown in (12a). This verb BE is a convolute of the perfect auxiliary and the passive auxiliary into one verbal form. Traditional grammarians have assumed that there is a deleted worden in these constructions, as this is the overt form in some (Northern) dialects (12b). (12) a. Marie is door Jan gekust perfect, passive (Standard) Mary AUX.perf.pass by John kissed 'Mary has been kissed by John' b. Marie is gisteren door Jan gekust geworden perfect, passive (dialectal) Mary AUX.perf yesterday by John kissed AUX.pass 'Mary was kissed by John yesterday' However, there is no need for this assumption of a deleted WERDEN, as all unaccusative verbs display the same property. (13) a. Marie gaat naar Amsterdam Mary goes to amsterdam b. Marie is naar Amsterdam gegaan perfect Mary AUX.pass.perf to Amsterdam gone Dutch shows auxiliary selection in perfect tenses, i.e. it uses HAVE with unergative verbs and BE with unaccusatives. So, the AUX in (13b) does not only encode perfect tense, but also passive argumental licensing: AUX.passive.perf. This has apparently be generalized in the standard language to agentive passive constructions. Notice that the Dutch AUX + ptc cannot only be used with a perfect tense reading but also with a past tense reading, i.e. it is a punctual past that is combinable with a past adverbials like gisteren 'yesterday', illustrated in (14a). The same is true for the passive past (14b). This implies that (14b) is not a static passive, as it would be combinable with present Petre_P_2014_Constructions_and_environments_OUP_Appendix_3_WAES_APPEND.xls Petre_P_2014_Constructions_and_environments_OUP_Appendix_3_GEWIERTH.xls These files are available at the CD-ROM that accompanies Petree's 2014 book.
Taal en Tongval
Possessor truncation in kinship terms in Dutch dialects In this study we report a hardly noticed,... more Possessor truncation in kinship terms in Dutch dialects In this study we report a hardly noticed, poorly studied, and non-understood property of kinship terms in many Dutch dialects: a distinct, more impoverished possessor inflection in kinship terms, which was coined “possessor truncation” in Goeman et al. (2008). After reporting dialect-geographical, diachronic, and morphological properties of possessor truncation, we give a morphosyntactic account inspired on determiner drop in kinship terms in Italian. Possessor truncation in Dutch and determiner drop in Italian can be unified under the assumption that kinship terms generate their referential role within in the sub-lexical domain, while ordinary nouns merge these argumental properties in the supra-lexical domain.
Language Science Press, Sep 23, 2021
This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ran... more This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating to convergence) the disciplinary scope is broad, and includes ethnography, qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, descriptive linguistics, contact linguistics, historical linguistics, and language acquisition. Case studies are drawn from Italo-Romance varieties in the Americas, Spanish-Nahuatl contact, Castellano Andino, Greko/Griko in Southern Italy, Yiddish in Anglophone communities, Frisian in the Netherlands, Wymysiöryś in Poland, Sorbian in Germany, and Pomeranian and Zeelandic Flemish in Brazil
Language contact and linguistic complexity-the rise of the reflexive pronoun zich in a fifteenth ... more Language contact and linguistic complexity-the rise of the reflexive pronoun zich in a fifteenth century Netherlands border dialect GERTJAN POSTMA La langue n'accepte des éléments de structure étrangers que quand ils correspondent à ses tendances de développement (Roman Jakobson ) en NEG schyth, so schel Sywert happens, so shall Sywert da the landen lands to to hem himself nemma take (Middle Frisian, ) 'that he goes into the monastery, but if that does not happen, then Sywert will take the lands to himself '. While Frisian continued to use the pronoun reflexively until the present day, cf. (.b), the situation has changed in the Dutch variants in the north, which started to use a separate reflexive form from the fifteenth century onwards. In present-day Dutch, the use of a reflexive pronoun is obligatory, cf. (.a). Southwestern dialects, such as Flemish still use the pronoun 'him' , while in other parts a new possessive pronoun z'n eigen has been used since the eighteenth century.
This article presents evidence that Sal-Frankish had a word for ‘500’, sunde, which corresponds t... more This article presents evidence that Sal-Frankish had a word for ‘500’, sunde, which corresponds to the Roman numeral D, being half of M ‘1000’. With this analysis, the Sal-Frankish numbers become transparent, even the two higher values of the so-called chunnas. The neologism sunde was a back formation from tusunde ‘thousand’, which was analysed as tu ‘two’ + sunde ‘500’. This back formation was possible in the contact language Sal-Frankish for both segmental reasons (ongoing occlusion of [θ] to [t]) and stress, but not in Old Low Franconian, Old Middle Franconian, Old Saxon or OHG.
In this paper, we study the drop of the preverbal negative clitic ne/en using a sub-corpus of Dre... more In this paper, we study the drop of the preverbal negative clitic ne/en using a sub-corpus of Drenthe verdicts over the period 1399-1405. The earlier fi nding by Van der Horst & Van der Wal (1978) that clitic drop is delayed in embedded contexts is not confi rmed. Only when we make a distinction between lexical verbs and auxiliary verbs, the effect shows up in the case of lexical verbs. Clitic drop with auxiliary verbs, on the other hand, behaves in an opposite way: while neg-drop seems to be underway for auxiliaries in C and lexical verbs in clausefi nal position, ne/en is absent with lexical verbs in C-position and auxilary verbs in clause fi nal position. We argue that both effects are realisations of one process of morphological blocking. This is an absolute process. This process is similar in nature to the situation in English where the negator not/n’t only combines with not/n’t only combines with not/n’t auxiliaries. This is often attributed to verb position in English: auxili...
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018
This chapter is a theory-informed quantitative corpus study of infinitival fronting in a type of ... more This chapter is a theory-informed quantitative corpus study of infinitival fronting in a type of Infinitival V2 construction found in Old-Frisian and Middle-Dutch. The quantitative investigation evidences that infinitival fronting is the non-finite counterpart of the embedded subjunctive constructions. Formal I-language arguments are provided to demonstrate that the emergence of laten-support (the parallel of English do-support) and the decline of subjunctives are related to one parameter change in CP/TP. Before the fifteenth century, in Dutch, subjunctives and infinitives found in the relevant constructions move out of TP reaching C or Mod. In the second half of the fifteenth century, infinitives are being reanalysed as sitting in T. Hence, in infinitival fronting constructions, a separate verbal auxiliary form (laten) is created as a spellout of C. Although Laten-support is a transient phenomenon (‘failed change’), it has been the trigger of the reanalysis of auxiliaries as ordina...
Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2019
Strong adjectival endings These are the strong D-type endings-er/-es/-et present in D and copied ... more Strong adjectival endings These are the strong D-type endings-er/-es/-et present in D and copied to adjectives in Low German and High German (e.g. min liebet Kind 'my dear child') also present in Old High German, Gothic, and Old Norse. These strong endings are absent in Pomeranian, Dutch, Frisian, and the German dialects west to the Diepholzer Linie (see above). They are equally absent in Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon. Strong verbs Verbs that show ablaut and umlaut in the root over the paradigm. Subtractive morphology The (surface) deletion instead addition of phonological material upon morphological derivation/inflection. It is better described as non-exponence, rather than deletion. See: catalexis. Vowel mutation Vowel mutation, known as Umlaut in the German literature, is the anchoring of a floating ielement to the vowel of the (immediately preceeding) stressed syllable. Most of the time the floating i-element is attached by some morphological affixation, e.g. 2/3 present tense in strong verbs. Without the possibility of anchoring, the feature remains unexpressed. Weak verbs Verb that form their paradigms exclusively by suffixation. 8 Pl. guisa. Alternative forms are gääs [jɛ:s]-gääsa. Originally, it must have been *gaus-*gääs cf. Fri goes [uə]-gies [iə] ('goose-geese'). Guis-is the umlauted form of *gaus-. 9 "Die Periode der Kolonisation Hinterpommerns komt aber erst durch die Gründung (of the monastery) Belbucks in Gang. (...) Die Wahl friesischer Mönche trug dem Sumpfbezirk zwischen Treptow und Meer den Zuzug friesische Bauern" (Priewe & Teuchert 1927/1928:254). 10 This is mainly due to Luther's friend, the Pomeranian Johannes Bugenhagen, teacher at the Grammar School in Treptow and later teacher at the monastery Belbuc. For the Frisian base of the four premonstratensian monasteries in Pomerania, cf. chapter 10. 11 More precise data for 1932 can be obtained from GLFP.
Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, 2019
A well-known exception to Grimm’s Law, /kʷ/ > /f/ instead of /kʷ/ > /hʷ/, is taken as a sta... more A well-known exception to Grimm’s Law, /kʷ/ > /f/ instead of /kʷ/ > /hʷ/, is taken as a starting point and its reflexes in Middle Dutch and Sal-Frankic are discussed. As to the PIE root *leikʷ-, MD and MLG līf- in the compounds līfeigen ‘owned by the fief’, līftuht ‘feudal law’, and līfcōp ‘feudal transaction fee’ is identified as derived from this root under a regular sound change, which is coined Uhlenbeck’s Law. Uhlenbeck’s Law acts as a resolution of a pansyllabic constraint, not a constraint on roots. As to Sal-Frankic, the new etymology of SF leo- ‘related to the tenements’’, and by extention ‘agricultural’, sheds new light on the structure of the Lex Salica. It is argued that the tripartite manorial system of land tenure has reflexes in juridical terminology of this archaic legal document.
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2019
Competition of segmental material is inherent to all proposals of phonological template satisfact... more Competition of segmental material is inherent to all proposals of phonological template satisfaction. Segments are aligned with a prosodic template and compete for prosodic space. This vowel competition for space is well-known from the Semitic languages. In this paper, we argue that competition is also present in West-Germanic languages, albeit in disguised form. Basing ourselves on new Pomeranian data, we propose a competitive vocalic tier on which elements compete for prosodic slots besides the well-known vocalic tier that allows for element coalescence. An axiomatic model is developed that predicts alternations such as the [ɑi]-[ɪ] and [e]-[ɪ] root alternation (German treten – tritt ‘(he) step(s), Pomeranian gaita-git ‘(he) pour(s)’). The model allows us to solve three riddles in German morphology: 1. the “epenthesis conundrum”, i.e. the anti-correlation between OCP-driven schwa epenthesis between root and suffix in German (rett[ə]t/*rett versus *rät[ə]t/rät) and root alternation...
Crossroads Semantics, May 1, 2017
and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requi... more and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the KNAW public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain. • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the KNAW public portal. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
The rise and fall of the passive auxiliary weorðan (WERDEN) in the history of English is investig... more The rise and fall of the passive auxiliary weorðan (WERDEN) in the history of English is investigated. We provide a new structural analysis of why and in what languages the passive diathesis can / cannot use the copula BE as auxiliary. We will do so in a comparative perspective within Germanic and Romance. We provide 1. language internal structural variation in BE and WERDEN as passive auxiliaries in relation with Verb-Second, 2. cross-linguistic i.e. comparative data of this variation 3. diachronic data on Old English weorðan that ties the need of a separate passive auxiliary to the Verb second constraint. It turns out that Old English displays a temporary rise and fall of strict-V2 around 1000, as well as a rise and fall of weorðan, which developments can be related because they comply to Kroch's Constant Rate Hypothesis (CRH). Finally, we sketch the first contours of a grammatical model that umbrellas tense/aspect, V2, and the passive diathesis, which predicts this correlatio...
Item does not contain fulltextInternational Conference on Historical Linguistics XVIIIUniversité ... more Item does not contain fulltextInternational Conference on Historical Linguistics XVIIIUniversité de Quebec a Montreal, Canad
Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today
This paper investigates the decline of the passive auxiliary weorðan in the history of English. W... more This paper investigates the decline of the passive auxiliary weorðan in the history of English. We provide a new structural analysis of why and in what languages the passive diathesis can or cannot use the copula BE as an auxiliary. We will do so in a comparative perspective within Germanic and Romance. Our point of departure is not why weorðan WERDEN declines, but why the copular verb BE is incapable of functioning as a passive auxiliary in some languages, incidentally in some tenses, while it can be used in other languages/tenses. We provide 1. language internal structural variation in BE and WERDEN, 2. cross-linguistic i.e. comparative data of this variation, 3. diachronic data on Old English weorðan that ties the need of a separate passive auxiliary to the verb second (V2) constraint. It turns out that Old English displays a temporary rise and fall of strict-V2 around 1000, as well as a rise and fall of weorðan, and these developments can be related because they comply with Kroch's Constant Rate Hypothesis (CRH). Finally, we sketch the first contours of a grammatical model that umbrellas tense/aspect, V2, and the passive diathesis, which predicts this correlation. By modifying Giorgi's projection of the Reichenbachian event indexes S, E, and R onto the syntax, we show that the (in)equality of these indexes is not ruled by structural templates stored in the lexicon, but are dynamically ruled by the syntax. The interpretation of tense (past, present and perfect) makes use of indexical heads in the extended domain of VP. In V2 languages, the C head participates in the Reichenbachian calculus of tenses, while this is not the case in non-V2 languages. The (in)equality of the Reichenbachian indexes S, E, R are subject to the binding domains of the Binding Theory. The passive diathesis interacts with binding domains, because subject absorption lifts a domain border, and gives rise to the obviation of E and S. 2.1 Aspect sensitivity in Dutch (dialects) 2.1.1 Standard Dutch Standard Dutch is a language that has a specific passive auxiliary worden, the cognate of German werden. However, while German uses werden in all tenses and aspects, Dutch only uses werden in present (10b) and the simple past (11b). (10) a. Jan kust Marie present, active John kisses Mary 'John kisses Mary' b. Marie wordt door Jan gekust present, passive Mary WERDEN.pres by John kissed 'Mary is kissed/being kissed by John' (11) a. Jan kuste Marie past, active John kissed Mary 'John kissed/was kissing Mary' b. Marie werd door Jan gekust past, passive Mary WERDEN.past by John kissed 'Mary was (bing) kissed by John' In perfect tenses Dutch uses BE, as shown in (12a). This verb BE is a convolute of the perfect auxiliary and the passive auxiliary into one verbal form. Traditional grammarians have assumed that there is a deleted worden in these constructions, as this is the overt form in some (Northern) dialects (12b). (12) a. Marie is door Jan gekust perfect, passive (Standard) Mary AUX.perf.pass by John kissed 'Mary has been kissed by John' b. Marie is gisteren door Jan gekust geworden perfect, passive (dialectal) Mary AUX.perf yesterday by John kissed AUX.pass 'Mary was kissed by John yesterday' However, there is no need for this assumption of a deleted WERDEN, as all unaccusative verbs display the same property. (13) a. Marie gaat naar Amsterdam Mary goes to amsterdam b. Marie is naar Amsterdam gegaan perfect Mary AUX.pass.perf to Amsterdam gone Dutch shows auxiliary selection in perfect tenses, i.e. it uses HAVE with unergative verbs and BE with unaccusatives. So, the AUX in (13b) does not only encode perfect tense, but also passive argumental licensing: AUX.passive.perf. This has apparently be generalized in the standard language to agentive passive constructions. Notice that the Dutch AUX + ptc cannot only be used with a perfect tense reading but also with a past tense reading, i.e. it is a punctual past that is combinable with a past adverbials like gisteren 'yesterday', illustrated in (14a). The same is true for the passive past (14b). This implies that (14b) is not a static passive, as it would be combinable with present Petre_P_2014_Constructions_and_environments_OUP_Appendix_3_WAES_APPEND.xls Petre_P_2014_Constructions_and_environments_OUP_Appendix_3_GEWIERTH.xls These files are available at the CD-ROM that accompanies Petree's 2014 book.
Taal en Tongval
Possessor truncation in kinship terms in Dutch dialects In this study we report a hardly noticed,... more Possessor truncation in kinship terms in Dutch dialects In this study we report a hardly noticed, poorly studied, and non-understood property of kinship terms in many Dutch dialects: a distinct, more impoverished possessor inflection in kinship terms, which was coined “possessor truncation” in Goeman et al. (2008). After reporting dialect-geographical, diachronic, and morphological properties of possessor truncation, we give a morphosyntactic account inspired on determiner drop in kinship terms in Italian. Possessor truncation in Dutch and determiner drop in Italian can be unified under the assumption that kinship terms generate their referential role within in the sub-lexical domain, while ordinary nouns merge these argumental properties in the supra-lexical domain.
Language Science Press, Sep 23, 2021
This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ran... more This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating to convergence) the disciplinary scope is broad, and includes ethnography, qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, descriptive linguistics, contact linguistics, historical linguistics, and language acquisition. Case studies are drawn from Italo-Romance varieties in the Americas, Spanish-Nahuatl contact, Castellano Andino, Greko/Griko in Southern Italy, Yiddish in Anglophone communities, Frisian in the Netherlands, Wymysiöryś in Poland, Sorbian in Germany, and Pomeranian and Zeelandic Flemish in Brazil
Language contact and linguistic complexity-the rise of the reflexive pronoun zich in a fifteenth ... more Language contact and linguistic complexity-the rise of the reflexive pronoun zich in a fifteenth century Netherlands border dialect GERTJAN POSTMA La langue n'accepte des éléments de structure étrangers que quand ils correspondent à ses tendances de développement (Roman Jakobson ) en NEG schyth, so schel Sywert happens, so shall Sywert da the landen lands to to hem himself nemma take (Middle Frisian, ) 'that he goes into the monastery, but if that does not happen, then Sywert will take the lands to himself '. While Frisian continued to use the pronoun reflexively until the present day, cf. (.b), the situation has changed in the Dutch variants in the north, which started to use a separate reflexive form from the fifteenth century onwards. In present-day Dutch, the use of a reflexive pronoun is obligatory, cf. (.a). Southwestern dialects, such as Flemish still use the pronoun 'him' , while in other parts a new possessive pronoun z'n eigen has been used since the eighteenth century.
This article presents evidence that Sal-Frankish had a word for ‘500’, sunde, which corresponds t... more This article presents evidence that Sal-Frankish had a word for ‘500’, sunde, which corresponds to the Roman numeral D, being half of M ‘1000’. With this analysis, the Sal-Frankish numbers become transparent, even the two higher values of the so-called chunnas. The neologism sunde was a back formation from tusunde ‘thousand’, which was analysed as tu ‘two’ + sunde ‘500’. This back formation was possible in the contact language Sal-Frankish for both segmental reasons (ongoing occlusion of [θ] to [t]) and stress, but not in Old Low Franconian, Old Middle Franconian, Old Saxon or OHG.
In this paper, we study the drop of the preverbal negative clitic ne/en using a sub-corpus of Dre... more In this paper, we study the drop of the preverbal negative clitic ne/en using a sub-corpus of Drenthe verdicts over the period 1399-1405. The earlier fi nding by Van der Horst & Van der Wal (1978) that clitic drop is delayed in embedded contexts is not confi rmed. Only when we make a distinction between lexical verbs and auxiliary verbs, the effect shows up in the case of lexical verbs. Clitic drop with auxiliary verbs, on the other hand, behaves in an opposite way: while neg-drop seems to be underway for auxiliaries in C and lexical verbs in clausefi nal position, ne/en is absent with lexical verbs in C-position and auxilary verbs in clause fi nal position. We argue that both effects are realisations of one process of morphological blocking. This is an absolute process. This process is similar in nature to the situation in English where the negator not/n’t only combines with not/n’t only combines with not/n’t auxiliaries. This is often attributed to verb position in English: auxili...
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018
This chapter is a theory-informed quantitative corpus study of infinitival fronting in a type of ... more This chapter is a theory-informed quantitative corpus study of infinitival fronting in a type of Infinitival V2 construction found in Old-Frisian and Middle-Dutch. The quantitative investigation evidences that infinitival fronting is the non-finite counterpart of the embedded subjunctive constructions. Formal I-language arguments are provided to demonstrate that the emergence of laten-support (the parallel of English do-support) and the decline of subjunctives are related to one parameter change in CP/TP. Before the fifteenth century, in Dutch, subjunctives and infinitives found in the relevant constructions move out of TP reaching C or Mod. In the second half of the fifteenth century, infinitives are being reanalysed as sitting in T. Hence, in infinitival fronting constructions, a separate verbal auxiliary form (laten) is created as a spellout of C. Although Laten-support is a transient phenomenon (‘failed change’), it has been the trigger of the reanalysis of auxiliaries as ordina...
Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2019
Strong adjectival endings These are the strong D-type endings-er/-es/-et present in D and copied ... more Strong adjectival endings These are the strong D-type endings-er/-es/-et present in D and copied to adjectives in Low German and High German (e.g. min liebet Kind 'my dear child') also present in Old High German, Gothic, and Old Norse. These strong endings are absent in Pomeranian, Dutch, Frisian, and the German dialects west to the Diepholzer Linie (see above). They are equally absent in Old English, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon. Strong verbs Verbs that show ablaut and umlaut in the root over the paradigm. Subtractive morphology The (surface) deletion instead addition of phonological material upon morphological derivation/inflection. It is better described as non-exponence, rather than deletion. See: catalexis. Vowel mutation Vowel mutation, known as Umlaut in the German literature, is the anchoring of a floating ielement to the vowel of the (immediately preceeding) stressed syllable. Most of the time the floating i-element is attached by some morphological affixation, e.g. 2/3 present tense in strong verbs. Without the possibility of anchoring, the feature remains unexpressed. Weak verbs Verb that form their paradigms exclusively by suffixation. 8 Pl. guisa. Alternative forms are gääs [jɛ:s]-gääsa. Originally, it must have been *gaus-*gääs cf. Fri goes [uə]-gies [iə] ('goose-geese'). Guis-is the umlauted form of *gaus-. 9 "Die Periode der Kolonisation Hinterpommerns komt aber erst durch die Gründung (of the monastery) Belbucks in Gang. (...) Die Wahl friesischer Mönche trug dem Sumpfbezirk zwischen Treptow und Meer den Zuzug friesische Bauern" (Priewe & Teuchert 1927/1928:254). 10 This is mainly due to Luther's friend, the Pomeranian Johannes Bugenhagen, teacher at the Grammar School in Treptow and later teacher at the monastery Belbuc. For the Frisian base of the four premonstratensian monasteries in Pomerania, cf. chapter 10. 11 More precise data for 1932 can be obtained from GLFP.
Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik, 2019
A well-known exception to Grimm’s Law, /kʷ/ > /f/ instead of /kʷ/ > /hʷ/, is taken as a sta... more A well-known exception to Grimm’s Law, /kʷ/ > /f/ instead of /kʷ/ > /hʷ/, is taken as a starting point and its reflexes in Middle Dutch and Sal-Frankic are discussed. As to the PIE root *leikʷ-, MD and MLG līf- in the compounds līfeigen ‘owned by the fief’, līftuht ‘feudal law’, and līfcōp ‘feudal transaction fee’ is identified as derived from this root under a regular sound change, which is coined Uhlenbeck’s Law. Uhlenbeck’s Law acts as a resolution of a pansyllabic constraint, not a constraint on roots. As to Sal-Frankic, the new etymology of SF leo- ‘related to the tenements’’, and by extention ‘agricultural’, sheds new light on the structure of the Lex Salica. It is argued that the tripartite manorial system of land tenure has reflexes in juridical terminology of this archaic legal document.
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 2019
Competition of segmental material is inherent to all proposals of phonological template satisfact... more Competition of segmental material is inherent to all proposals of phonological template satisfaction. Segments are aligned with a prosodic template and compete for prosodic space. This vowel competition for space is well-known from the Semitic languages. In this paper, we argue that competition is also present in West-Germanic languages, albeit in disguised form. Basing ourselves on new Pomeranian data, we propose a competitive vocalic tier on which elements compete for prosodic slots besides the well-known vocalic tier that allows for element coalescence. An axiomatic model is developed that predicts alternations such as the [ɑi]-[ɪ] and [e]-[ɪ] root alternation (German treten – tritt ‘(he) step(s), Pomeranian gaita-git ‘(he) pour(s)’). The model allows us to solve three riddles in German morphology: 1. the “epenthesis conundrum”, i.e. the anti-correlation between OCP-driven schwa epenthesis between root and suffix in German (rett[ə]t/*rett versus *rät[ə]t/rät) and root alternation...