Human impersonal pronouns in West Germanic

Cladistic Methodology and West Germanic

For about a century and a half now one of the usual tasks of historical linguistics has been reconstructing the prehistory of linguistic communities. (That is, of course, the side of reconstruction that non-linguists are interested in.) A perennial question is what sort of model of linguistic diversification best fits the data. This paper will explore that question in the light of data supporti...

Linearization of Verb Clusters in West Germanic

Verb Clusters in Continental West Germanic Dialects

The Continental West Germanic Languages include the standard varieties of Dutch, Frisian, and High German, as well as a large number of non-standard varieties, the more familiar of which are the dialects spoken in Belgium and the South of the Netherlands (Flemish, Brabantish, Limburgian), Northern Germany (Low German), the Rhine Valley (Luxemburgish), South-Eastern Germany and Austria (e.g. Bav...

Clausal architecture and subject positions: impersonal constructions in the Germanic languages

1 Verb - third in early West Germanic : a comparative perspective

In this paper I develop an analysis of the alternation between verb-third (V3) and verb-second (V2) in the older West Germanic languages in terms of information-structural considerations. I present the situation in Old English and Old High German as well as new data from Old Saxon, proposing on the basis of this data that there were (at least) two possible left-peripheral targets for verb-movem...