The peripheral location of Scandinavian dialects with preaspiration supports the view that preaspiration was present in Common Scandinavian. Sound changes in Common Scandinavian and resulting morphophonemic alternations in the older Scandinavian languages exhibit the articulatory timing characteristic of preaspiration and sonorant devoicing and further bolster the argument that Common Scandinavian is the terminus ad quem for the origin of preaspiration. Dialectal and historical data also indicate that preaspiration is primarily, but not exclusively, a West Scandinavian phenomenon. Finally, it is argued that the reconstruction of preaspiration and sonorant devoicing for Common Scandinavian motivates the development of West Jutlandic stød and the distribution of Common Danish stød in West Jutlandic.

This article contains arguments for a revised classification of a number of so-called free datives in German. In particular, a distinction is drawn between an ergative dative of inaction construction and an agentive dative of affect. The construction grammar framework is employed to argue that the unique semantics of the dative of inaction (a potential agent fails to prevent an adversative, mutative event) are associated with the abstract syntactic form of the construction as a whole, not with its constituents. Because its semantics are constructional, i.e., not strictly predictable from the semantics of its constituents, the dative of inaction is considered a grammatical category distinct from the dative of affect, which has compositional semantics.

In this short paper, the author takes a closer look at Einar Haugen's (1906–1994) writings in as far as they touch upon the historiography of linguistics. After a sketch of his scholarly background and the role he played in the Linguistic Society of America generally and, more particularly, as a historian of linguistic thought from his well-known LSA presidential address of 1950 onwards, Haugen's treatment of the so-called First grammatical treatise comes under closer scrutiny. In particular, the author discusses two expressions in Haugen's 1950 edition of the text that seem to have given rise to much speculation, namely, the word grein and the (probably juridical) phrase skipta máli. It is argued that Haugen and others—notably Hreinn Benediktsson—are at best overinterpreting them by assigning modern structural phonologist meanings to the words, turning them into metalinguistic terms. It is maintained instead that the First Grammarian had made a practical argument in favor of the addition of four vowels not found in the five-vowel Roman alphabet necessitated by the facts of Old Icelandic, and that the text was basically a pedagogical treatise on orthographic requirements and not a precocious phonological discussion.

In this brief paper it is proposed that the problematic Gothic genitive plural suffix in -ē may derive from a grammaticalized deictic particle. Typological and specifically Indo-European evidence for the derivation of genitive markers from deictic particles is presented in support of this hypothesis.