The operation and suspension of resolution in Old English meter, generalized as Kaluza's Law, is shown to be based on mora counting; -VC(C), -VV(C), and -VCV count as bimoric, while -VCVC(C) and -VCVV(C) are trimoric. The maximum moric value of a syllable is two. The proposed mora-based analysis leads to an improved account of a number of phonological processes in pre- and Early Old English.

The Swedish dialectal words nårot ‘worn-out’ and narg ‘a piece of wornout cloth’ have not been etymologically treated so far. I here connect them with a family of Balto-Finnic words, likewise still lacking an etymology: Finn. naarmu ˜ narvas (<*narwa−), Est. näru (<*narwo-) and narvas ˜ narmas, etc. In these Balto-Finnic words, the -v- has in most attested forms undergone a sound substitution to -m-, known to have taken place in some Germanic loan words in Balto-Finnic. I propose that the above dialectal Swedish words can be explained as old wō/wa–stems, related to West Germanic words like Ger. Narbe, OE nearwian ‘to constrain’, etc. Thus, it appears that Finn, narvas-, naarmu, Est. näru, etc. are Proto-Germanic loan words in Balto-Finnic, and that the words later died out in the Germanic languages, only to be retrievable through dialectal Norwegian and North Swedish data and reconstructable through comparison with the Balto-Finnic loan words.

In this paper it is proposed that Germanic locative adverbs in *-on- bear an etymological relationship to Hittite ablatives in -anza and therefore yield additional evidence for the archaic nature of the Germanic dialect group.

A significant aspect of the changes in Martin Luther's style over the years can be characterized linguistically in terms of clause linkage. In order to analyze such diachronies incisively, we need a framework which can deal with the shifting and overlapping iconicities of morphology, syntax, lexicon, and discourse. Lehmann's (1988) clause linkage typology construct provides such a systematic framework. With it we are able to characterize rigorously the varying clause linkage strategies in two versions of Luther's Romans. Categorization of some 60 sentence pairs from these corpora yields incontrovertible evidence favoring change toward semanto-syntactic compression, and it suggests a typological shift toward more compressed structures. In turn, Lehmann's typological framework is further strengthened by its application to the ENHG Luther data.