The Proto-Germanic shift *a*o and early Germanic linguistic contacts

Linguistic measures of pitch range in slavic and Germanic languages

Based on specific linguistic landmarks in the speech signal, this study investigates pitch level and pitch span differences in English, German, Bulgarian and Polish. The analysis is based on 22 speakers per language (11 males and 11 females). Linear mixed models were computed that include various linguistic measures of pitch level and span, revealing characteristic differences across languages ...

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...

New Technologies for Old Germanic. Resources and Research on Parallel Bibles in Older Continental Western Germanic

We provide an overview of on-going efforts to facilitate the study of older Germanic languages currently pursued at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. We describe created resources, such as a parallel corpus of Germanic Bibles and a morphosyntactically annotated corpus of Old High German (OHG) and Old Saxon, a lexicon of OHG in XML and a multilingual etymological database. We discuss NLP...

On the use of passives across Germanic

Introduction There has long been an intuition that the subject position is deeply relevant to information structural concerns cross-linguistically, particularly because they frequently appear at the left edge of a clause, which is thought to be associated with given/topical information (cf. Vallduvi 1992). This raises interesting questions about the role of the passive construction in the disco...

The Provenance of Provenance in Germanic Areas