This paper discusses the problem of gender agreement in Dutch, arising from the loss of gender markers and resulting in different gender values for nouns and pronouns. On the basis of corpus data from spontaneous speech, the study shows that Dutch pronominal gender is undergoing a functional reinterpretation according to the degree of individuation of the referent. In addition to the antecedent's lexical gender, this conceptual property governs the agreement behavior of personal, possessive, and relative pronouns. Special attention is given to the competition between semantic and syntactic gender agreement and to parallel phenomena in other Germanic languages.Many thanks to Geert Booij, Grev Corbett, Edith Moravcsik, Monika Schmid, Hans Olav Enger, Caroline Sandström, Pieter van Reenen, Frans Hinskens, Florian Haas, and two anonymous referees for comments on versions of this article, to Andrew Spencer for discussion, and to my colleagues at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for additional data. The usual disclaimers apply.

We examine the role of contrast in the local licensing of scrambling in on-line language comprehension in German using event-related brain potentials (ERP). Although contrastive readings give rise to a higher acceptability of scrambled word orders, they do not lead to an attenuation of the processing difficulties observed at the position of the scrambled object itself. Thus, similar to previous findings on givenness, contrast leads to global but not local licensing of scrambled structures, a finding that speaks against an immediate interaction of all relevant information types. The pattern is reversed when the scrambled object induces a corrective focus reading. Here scrambling does not give rise to increased local processing cost, but global acceptability decreases. These findings suggest that corrective focus can override local syntactic requirements on the basis of its extraordinarily high communicative saliency.

While there is general agreement about many aspects of Gothic syllable structure, a number of important issues remain controversial. This paper offers an Optimality Theory analysis, with a focus on the syllabification of intervocalic consonants and consonant clusters. It is argued that Gothic syllabification generally results from the interaction of constraints requiring that syllables have onsets, that syllables may not have complex codas, or codas in general, and regulating the relationship between the input and the output. A family of constraints banning various types of complex onsets is also proposed. With this analysis of Gothic syllabification in hand, a new analysis of Sievers' Law, one of the classic problems of Gothic phonology, is developed. From this perspective, Sievers' Law is contingent on syllable structure and falls out from the interaction of the proposed constraints on syllable structure. It is also argued that the correct underlying representation of the segment affected by Sievers' Law is an archiphoneme, as this enables a better account of the Sievers' Law alternations, their morphological sensitivity, and the exceptions to Sievers' Law. Although alternative analyses are possible, the analysis presented here sidesteps some of the problems they face and is more philologically rigorous.This paper is a substantially revised version of a portion of my doctoral dissertation (Pierce 2002). For their assistance in the preparation of this revised version, I thank James Cathey, San Duanmu, Benjamin Fortson, Robert Kyes, Tomas Riad, Martti Sloan, and Bruce Spencer. I am especially grateful to the two anonymous JGL referees, who provided a number of helpful comments that caused me to rethink much of the analysis, and to Robert Murray for his assistance in his role as editor.

This paper provides evidence that nominative arguments in German and Icelandic not only can be analyzed as remaining in the VP overtly, but that in some constructions these arguments remain internal to VP at all levels of representation, including LF. The paper reviews a variety of recent proposals for Case licensing and argues that only the Agree model (Chomsky 2000) provides for a unified account. Specifically, it is argued that languages such as German lack any syntactic or phonological requirement that SpecTP be filled (that is, the EPP is not universal). In addition, empirical arguments are provided against theories invoking Case transmission and null expletives. Although German lacks the EPP, arguments are also provided that German does have TP and related functional projections.I would like to thank Elena Anagnostopoulou, Jonathan Bobaljik, Željko Bošković, Christine Czinglar, Kleanthes Grohmann, Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson, Winnie Lechner, Friedrich Neubarth, David Pesetsky, Martin Prinzhorn, Norvin Richards, Uli Sauerland, Arnim von Stechow, Hubert Truckenbrodt, Martina Wiltschko, Leo Bobaljik Wurmbrand, Kazuko Yatsushiro, and two reviewers for discussions and comments on various parts of this paper. I am also grateful for the feedback from the audiences at WCCFL 20, PLC 25, NELS 33, Österreichische Linguistiktagung (Innsbruck), GLOW 24 and 26, CUNY, Harvard, Tübingen, and McGill, and to the University of Connecticut students attending my Spring 2006 seminar.

The present paper addresses the issue of spoken features in older and younger runic inscriptions, particularly in the Blekinge group of the seventh century. Despite the general expectation of “high” style, it is argued that runic inscriptions represent a continuum of different styles and registers. The present analysis corroborates the claim that runic writing receives no special status among alphabetic writing systems, and that runic texts constitute no exception to the general rule of textual variation. A strong case is provided by the Bekinge curse formula of Stentoften and Björketorp, whose affinity with oral speech is signalled by a series of stylistic and linguistic features.A related lecture entitled “Der Problemkreis der Übergangsinschriften im Lichte neuerer Forschungsbeiträge” was held at the Academy of Science in Oslo on September 4, 2004. In addition to the audience at this presentation and two anonymous JGL reviewers, I owe thanks to Heinrich Beck, Klaus Düwel, Henrik Williams, James E. Knirk, Jan Terje Faarlund, Wolfgang Dressler, and Paul Kerswill for valuable input. The usual disclaimers apply.

Recent studies, by us and others, have argued that the Second Consonant Shift began medially after stressed short vowels, triggered by a segmental interpretation of aspiration in interaction with Germanic syllable weight requirements. The most striking empirical support came from the dialect of Wermelskirchen, where shift of fortis stops is attested only following short vowels. But is Wermelskirchen an isolated dialect or part of a general pattern? We review selected dialect data supporting this new account of the shift and show the Wermelskirchen evidence to be cut from a broader regional fabric that is marked also by biases in place of articulation among stops and, to some extent, their following vowels. We take these data to reflect the archaic nature of the modern distributions, concluding that the apparent idiosyncrasies obscure an original, fundamental regularity whose structural motivations come into clearer focus under the principles of Evolutionary Phonology.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 11th Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC-11), University of California–Davis, in April 2005. In addition to members of that audience and two readers for this journal, we have had the privilege of valuable discussions on this topic and comments on earlier drafts from the following colleagues, none of whom necessarily agrees with all of our points: Juliette Blevins, Markus Denkler, David Fertig, Patrick Honeybone, Robert B. Howell, Thomas Klein, Mark Louden, Jürgen Macha, Monica Macaulay, Klaus J. Mattheier, Donka Minkova, Richard Page, and Laura Smith. We also thank Garry Davis for sharing a copy of the handout from his 2003 presentation with us.