Speyer (2008) finds an overall decline in the rate of topicalization in historical English, which we refer to pretheoretically as direct object fronting. He attributes it to two separate phenomena: 1) the early loss of unaccented pronominal and demonstrative fronting, and 2) a gradient decline in the use of accented, contrastive fronting due to prosodic well-formedness conditions imposed by the...

Listeners usually adjust rapidly to unfamiliar regional and foreign accents in their native (L1) language. Non-native (L2) listeners, however, usually struggle when confronted with unfamiliar accents in their non-native language. The present study asks how native language background of L2 speakers influences lexical adjustments in a novel accent of German, in which several vowels were systemati...

Hubert Haider’ primary goal in his latest book is to establish a universal constraint on the branching structure of Language: there are only right branching structures and their mirror image—left branching ones—do not exist at all. Through this strong proposal, Haider seeks to shed light on what he considers a universal, inviolable aspect of the architecture of grammar, thus contributing to the...

Noun incorporation in Frisian (Dyk 1997) is unusual because it shows certain restrictions that are not seen in other languages with noun incorporation, such as Mohawk and Chukchi. In addition, while others argue that noun incorporation is indeed possible in Germanic (see Booij 2009 for Dutch, Barrie and Spreng 2009 for German), Frisian is unusual even with respect to Germanic in allowing noun i...

Abstract The IE languages developed different strategies for the encoding of passive function. In some language branches, middle voice extended to function varying extents. addition, dedicated derivational formations arose in a number languages, such as Greek - ē-/-thē- aorist and Indo-Aryan ya- presents. Periphrastic involving verbal adjective or participle are also widely attested, played an ...

Using the picture-word interference paradigm, H. Schriefers and E. Teruel (2000) found that in German the grammatical gender of the distractor word affects the production of phrases composed of article+picture name: Latencies were longer for picture-word pairs of different genders. However, the effect was found only at positive stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; i.e., when pictures were present...

The phenomena of preposition stranding is very rare when examining various languages around the world. The most distinct class of languages that demonstrates this is that of the Germanic languages. Behavior within the Germanic languages varies from one language to the next. On the one end, Danish, as Herslund (1984:58) puts it, “...allows almost completely free stranding of prepositions.” Horns...

This paper gives an overview of the Danish data on argument placement in Nordic Word Order Database (NWD, Lundquist et al. 2019). The were collected from 28 speakers Copenhagen and Fredriksværk 2018. experimental task elicited subject object relative to adverbs particles (i.e., shift, shift particle shift), as well objects (long shift). results confirm that there is considerably less variabilit...

Abstract In many cases of apparent contact-induced change the contribution genealogical correlation in language sample and its interaction with processes such as matter pattern replication are difficult to specify. order get a better sense relevance shared ancestry, we quantify similarity since late Middle Ages Romance Germanic languages data from selected grammatical domain (expression reflexi...