This article examines how and why auxiliaries combine into complex verb constructions in Old West Germanic. It integrates findings from prior corpus studies on Old Dutch and Old English with original corpus research on Old Saxon, Old High German, and Early Middle High German up to 1150. The combined results indicate that all Old West Germanic varieties combine only two auxiliaries, with the finite auxiliary always being a modal. These finite modals could have scope over a wide range of potential auxiliaries, including passive, perfect, modal, aspectual, and causative auxiliaries, as well as perception verbs. The range of auxiliary combinations is shown to expand progressively over time and across regions. The article reveals that the combinatorial potential of auxiliaries relates to their degree of grammaticalization and the availability of a nonfinite verb form. This relationship is argued to be bidirectional: (a) the ongoing grammaticalization of auxiliaries creates and expands their combinatorial potential, while (b) the combination of auxiliaries into complex verb constructions in turn stimulates the emergence of auxiliaries as a category of their own. This implies that the combination of auxiliaries is not only a symptom of their grammaticalization but also a catalyst for further change.*

Three Germanic verbs with the meanings ‘to know’, ‘to teach’, and ‘to learn’ can all be traced back to the same PIE root *lei̯s- ‘to follow a track’. While evidence for all three verbs is recoverable from Gothic, only two verbal derivates passed down into the West Germanic languages, and none survived into North Germanic (although there was later reborrowing from Old English). This article charts these developments as well as subsequent ones, including the emergence of new verbs that came to express these key concepts in West and North Germanic up to present times. This etymological trail is guided by insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which seeks to understand how more familiar concrete concepts (e.g. ‘to follow a track’, ‘to grasp’, ‘to see’) capture more abstract ones like ‘to know’, ‘to teach’, and ‘to learn’ in language. The main findings are: (i) that the original system “stative ∼ causative ∼ present” reconstructible for Proto-Germanic on the PIE root *lei̯s- is best continued today in German, whereas English already refashioned it early on in its history. North Germanic does not directly continue any verbal formation on that root, whereas Gothic displays a “perfect” system; (ii) formations on PIE *ǵneh3- ‘to recognize’ and *u̯ei̯d- ‘to see’ are of common Indo-European heritage, whereas those on *lei̯s-, also found in nominal formations in Italic, may have arisen polygenetically in the two branches, as also possibly those on PIE *teng-. Finally, (iii) only one conceptual metaphor among those found can be said to be of common Indo-European descent, namely to know is to recognize/have recognized.*

This article unifies two adjectival phenomena of Germanic languages: the double definiteness of Norwegian, Swedish, and Faroese, and the attributive-only inflection of West Germanic adjectives. I argue that the functional head Agr(eement) is responsible for both. Since Agr can perform only one of these two functions in a given language (the second definiteness marker of Scandinavian and the attributive inflection of West Germanic), these two phenomena are in complementary distribution.*

This study investigates the shared versus autonomous representation of grammatical gender in the mental lexicon of Polish–Danish bilinguals. Polish has three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), while Danish distinguishes between two (common, neuter), making their gender systems not only asymmetric but also dissimilar. Using a timed gender decision task, we tested 37 late unbalanced Polish–Danish bilinguals across varying proficiency levels and compared them to a baseline group of 38 Polish–German bilinguals, whose gender systems are symmetric and similar. The results suggested no effect of the Polish gender system on Danish, even for neuter gender, which is present in both languages. In contrast, Polish–German bilinguals showed clear lexical gender congruency effects influenced by their proficiency in German. For masculine and feminine nouns, Polish influenced gender assignment more strongly at lower German proficiency, while for neuter nouns, congruency effects only appeared at higher proficiency levels. Additionally, both groups struggled with neuter-gender assignment. These findings suggest that in the bilingual mental lexicon, asymmetric and dissimilar gender systems are represented autonomously. The results from Polish–German bilinguals are attributed to the underuse of neuter gender, potentially masking gender congruency effects for neuter nouns, and are further discussed in relation to the Parasitic Model of Vocabulary Acquisition.*