... word order differences between languages are semantically unimportant ... features of the merged objects also matter , that is , they must agree in a ... share some of their outer shell or ' edge ' electrons ( ' agreement ... Aus dem Inhalt: Werner Abraham und Gert Webelhuth Words of dedication for Hartmut Czepluch Werner Abraham Introduction John H. McWhorter What happened to English? Halldór Ármann Sigurdsson Agree and Agreement - Evidence from Germanic Jóhanna Barddal The semantics of the impersonal construction in Icelandic, German and Faroese: beyond thematic roles Cedric Boeckx und Kleanthes K. Grohmann Left dislocation in Germanic Jac C. Conradie Verb sequence and placement: Afrikaans and Dutch compared Hartmut Czepluch ((Sterbezeichen)) Reflections on the form and function of passives in English and German Molly Diesing The upper functional domain in Yiddish Bridget Drinka Präteritumschwund: evidence for areal difussion Werner Abraham The European demise of the simple past and the emergence of the perip

... languages that happen to share the features: verb-final word order, postpositions, prenominal genitives, then the cooccurrence of these features is not evidence for genetic relatedness. Many earlier attempts at establishing wide-ranging ... Based on Bernard Comrie's The World's Major Languages, this is a key guide to one of the major language families. The areas covered include Germanic languages, English, and Romance languages.

This paper analyses the variation we find in the realization of finite clausal complements in the position of prepositional objects in a set of Germanic languages. The Germanic languages differ with respect to whether prepositions can directly select a clause (North Germanic) or not and instead need a prepositional proform (Continental West Germanic). Within the Continental West Germanic languages, we find further differences with respect to the constituent structures. We propose that German strong vs. weak prepositional proforms (e.g. drauf vs. darauf) differ with respect to their syntax, whi

Abstract In Germanic languages, conversion is seen as a change in category (i.e., syntactic category, word class, part of speech) without (overt) affixation. Conversion is attested in all Germanic languages. The definition of conversion as transposition or as derivation with a so-called zero-affix, which is responsible for the word-class change, depends on the language-specific part-of-speech system as well as, as often argued, the direction of conversion. Different types of conversion (e.g., from adjective to noun) are attested in Germanic languages, which differ especially semantically from each other. Although minor conversion types are attested, the main conversion types in Germanic languages are verb-to-noun conversion (deverbal nouns), adjective-to-noun conversion (deadjectival nouns), and noun-to-verb conversion (denominal verbs). Due to the characteristics of word-class change, conversion displays many parallels to derivational processes such as the directionality of category change and the preservation of lexical and grammatical properties of the underlying stem such as argument structure. Some, however, have argued that conversion does not exist as a specific rule and is only a symptom of lexical relisting. Another question is whether two such words are related by a conversion process that is still productive or are lexically listed relics of a now unproductive process. Furthermore, the direction of conversion of present-day Germanic, for example, the identification

In the present-day Germanic languages, free relatives (FRs) share formal properties with indirect question in that both constructions are introduced by w-pronouns. However, at least in German (and historical stages of a larger set of languages, including English), there is an additional pattern which involves the use of d-pronouns such as German der/die/das ‘that.masc./fem./neut.’, which typically introduce headed relative clauses. Focusing on presentday German, this paper shows that d-FRs are set apart from w-FRs by a number of properties including syntactic distribution in the matrix clause,