This study is a cross-linguistic examination of the patterns of acquisition of twomember /s/-clusters. Data from six languages (English, Dutch, Norwegian, Croatian, Hebrew, and Polish) gathered from the productions of typically developing children and from children with phonological disorders are analyzed. Correct renditions in the productions showed correlation with the change of C2 from [-con...

The three mainland Scandinavian languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) are so closely related that the speakers mostly communicate in their own languages (semicommunication). Even though the three West Germanic languages Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans are also closely related, semicommunication is not usual between these languages. In the present investigation, results from intelligibility tes...

This paper presents an optimality theoretic approach to the transitive particle verb construction (PVC), also referred to in the literature e.g. as phrasal verbs or separable complex verbs. This construction occurs in most if not all of the Germanic languages and has been studied most intensely and controversially in the generative literature (cf. Dehé et al 2002 and Dehé 2002 for recent analys...

The correct choice of words has proven challenging for learners of a second language and errors of this kind form a separate category in error typology. This paper focuses on one known example of two verbs that are often confused by non-native speakers of Germanic languages, to make and to do. We conduct experiments using syntactic information and immediate context for Dutch and English. Our re...

Johannessen, Janne Bondi. 2016. Prescriptive infinitives in the modern North Germanic languages: An ancient phenomenon in child-directed speech. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 39(3), 231–276. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commerci...

We aim to demonstrate that agent-based models can be a useful tool for historical linguists, by modeling the historical development of verbal cluster word order in Germanic languages. Our results show that the current order in German may have developed due to increased use of subordinate clauses, while the English order is predicted to be influenced by the grammaticalization of the verb to have...

• geis quite slippery and has eluded really satisfactory description – let alone analysis – despite getting considerable attention since the 19th century. • I’m in the middle of a large-scale corpus study of the prefix, trying to get a proper handle on its syntax and semantics in order to develop a better theory. • Today I will present some intermediate results from the ongoing study and lay ou...