The contributions in this volume present cutting-edge theoretical and structural analyses of issues surrounding German-language islands, or Sprachinseln, throughout the world focusing on (but not limited to) phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of these languages.
The contributions in this volume present cutting-edge theoretical and structural analyses of issues surrounding German-language islands, or Sprachinseln, throughout the world focusing on (but not limited to) phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of these languages.
Final laryngeal distinctions in the speech of two Eastern Wisconsin Germans provide insight into the German dialects spoken in Eastern Wisconsin, and how Wisconsin English has apparently begun to develop patterns of final fortition (Auslautverhärtung). The speech samples show that both speakers differ from standard German and each other, with regard to laryngeally neutral consonants. In Manitowoc county, some voicing is present on underlying /s/ consonants, while underlying /b,d,g/ consonants remain almost exclusively laryngeally neutral. The Ozaukee county speaker shows neutralization across /b,d,g,z/ consonants with predictable exceptions. Looking at Wisconsin German also helps to understand American English as spoken in Eastern Wisconsin. Thus, final laryngeal distinctions are important for obtaining a clear picture of speech patterns used by bilingual Germans in Eastern Wisconsin.
Mòcheno, a German variety spoken in Trentino (Italy), displays an interesting case of phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy in past participle formation. Past participle formation involves a variety of strategies, from absence of a prefix, to affrication, to prefixing a CV-prefix ga-. I propose that two allomorphs are involved in the process, a subsegment [?cont, ?voice] and a prefix ga- and that the distribution of the two allomorphs is regulated by a hierarchy of wellformedness constraints. This hierarchy in turn consists of two independent partial hierarchies, which are active in the grammar of the language in general, where they are responsible for morphoprosodic alignment at left stem edges and for the distribution of obstruents, respectively. This means that Mòcheno past participles give us evidence in favor of the hypothesis that allomorph selection can, and sometimes must, be interpreted in terms of optimization. By adopting an alternative analysis in terms of subcategorization of the allomorphs for a certain phonological context, the relationship between the distribution of past participle allomorphs and other pieces of the Mòcheno grammar would remain completely opaque.
In this paper, I describe the grammatical gender system of Plautdietsch as it relates to referent animacy. Plautdietsch (a settlement dialect of netherlandic Mennonites in the Americas), and more specifically Henderson Plautdietsch (the variety of Plautdietsch spoken in Henderson, Nebraska), has a mixed syntactic-semantic gender system that is structurally positioned between that of Standard Dutch and High German. It has a three-way masculine-feminine-neuter grammatical gender contrast across gender agreement targets, and exhibits DP-internal hybrid gender assignment (where a noun assigns one gender to one and another gender to another type of DP-internal gender agreement target). I explain that a geometry of hierarchically organized gender and animacy features is uniquely suited to explain the hybrid gender assignment we find in Plautdietsch, as well as explains a number of other phenomena we observe in gender systems (such as default gender and the flexible gender assignment of inanimate nouns).
This paper presents a novel sketch of a research program into the morpho-syntactic/semantic characteristics of intensifiers and reflexives in a moribund Sprachinsel language, Amana German. As demonstrated in this pilot study, Amana German has (apparently) undergone a shift in the syntactic distributional properties of its intensifier and reflexive inventory. As a result, Amana German in this regard more strongly resembles Dutch and modern English rather than German. Following Gast (2006), I interpret this as a shift involving the morpho-syntactic/semantic realization of recognizing two distributional types of transitive predicates; namely, typically 'other-directed' (e.g. [+Od]) and typically 'self-directed' predicates (e.g. [?Od]).
This paper offers new insights into on-going research on lexical borrowing in language contact situations by presenting a typology of lexical borrowings in Texas German (TxG), a critically endangered dialect that will go extinct within the next 30 years. We show that the lexicon of TxG has not undergone any dramatic changes over the past four decades and that the dialectal origins of words that were still apparent when Gilbert collected his data in the 1960s can still be found today. We also argue that TxG should be classified as "stage 2" in Thomason and Kaufman's (1988) 5-stage borrowing scale ("slightly more intense contact"), which is characterized by lexical borrowing and slight structural borrowing in combination with conjunctions and adverbial particles.
Previous investigations have reported a feminine tendency in the assignment of grammatical gender for English loanwords in Pennsylvania German as well as in other German Sprachinseln languages located in Anglophone areas (e.g. Reed 1942). This study investigates whether or not there is a feminine tendency in Pennsylvania German using a corpus based on the Comprehensive Pennsylvania German Dictionary. A statistical analysis reveals no evidence of a feminine tendency in Pennsylvania German. Monomorphemic English loanwords and monomorphemic native nouns in Pennsylvania German are significantly more likely to be assigned masculine gender than monomorphemic nouns in Standard German. Unlike Standard German, there is no significant difference in gender assignment in Pennsylvania German between monosyllabic and polysyllabic nouns for either the native lexicon or English loanwords.
This paper presents the major synchronic facts about verb clusters in modern Pennsylvania Dutch (Pennsylvania German) and indicates how they have developed historically. Although Pennsylvania Dutch is descended from primarily Palatine German dialects, the behavior of verb clusters in the modern language is distinct from what is found in European German dialects. Focusing on three- and four-verb clusters in subordinate clauses, it is observed that Pennsylvania Dutch observes a strict rule whereby a maximum of one lexical verb may occur within a clause; additional lexical verbs are located to the right of the clause periphery. The analysis presumes that non-lexical verbs in verb clusters, specifically the finite auxiliary hawwe 'have' and a non-finite modal, form a single syntactic unit.
In this paper I analyze the ongoing converging and diverging processes between Mennonite Low German (MLG) and Standard German in six Mennonite colonies in the Americas. The statistically detectable differences in the informants' behavior with regard to five linguistic phenomena and the comparison between all colonies and between different age-gender-subgroups in three of these colonies offer new and promising insights into the structural and sociolinguistic conditioning of converging and diverging.
This article is on Cimbrian German, an old enclave dialect in Upper Italy surrounded by Italo-Romance dialects. Next to clear traces of German clausal syntax, it shows Romance characteristics, which could be due to borrowing from the surrounding Italo-Romance majority dialects. Pertinent literature to date has assumed that the mix of structural properties of German and Italian are indeed due to the century-long isolation of the German island dialects and their relationship to the majority Italo-Romance dialects. The position presented in this paper focuses on the exclusive orality of Cimbrian and the specific structural changes oral-only variants are subject to as opposed to written, standard vernaculars. More generally, the methodological tenet is pursued that single changes subject to ambiguous interpretation need to be disambiguated by careful alignment with the major set of properties - i.e. a minority structures that are commonly found in Italo-Romance dialects may receive interpretations that are typical of oral-only German. The methodological null-hypothesis, then, is that change occurs under the narrowest accompanying structural conditions accessible within one and the same language rather than by borrowing from the social majority language.
Saying that a minority language proves to be quite a fascinating object of research when it comes to describing how it is affected by a stronger (standard) language is quite obvious. However, the way in which elements (both lexical and functional) borrowed from the stronger language infiltrate the weaker one is far less evident. Observing the Cimbrian CP, I will take into account both the complementizer ke (Italian loanword, competing with the earlier az) and other (CP-related) particles that I take to have undergone a process of reanalysis from a diachronic point of view, putting forward that the "expansion" of loanwords (especially functional ones) does not take place randomly. I also will show that synchronic data - especially when it comes to the so-called semi-speakers - can confirm this hypothesis. Key words. Complementation, minority language, cartography.
The aim of the work is to provide some detailed insight into the mechanisms that regulate movement to the left periphery on the empirical basis of an up to now rather poorly investigated German variety, i.e. Cimbrian. We first show that Cimbrian still possesses the V2 property in the sense that the inflected verb moves to the left periphery of the clause. Five empirical arguments are discussed in favor of this hypothesis concerning the existence of a prefield-expletive of the German 'es' type, the order of clitics, of negation, of separable prefixes and of the particle da with respect to the inflected verb. We propose that V3 instances, which apparently violate the V2 linear restriction, are to be analyzed as involving Topics located higher than the C projection where the inflected verb moves. We also show that wh-elements are to be split into two classes, which are moved to two different specifiers in the layered left periphery of the clause. This split is a function of the internal structure of the wh-items, which can contain or not a lexical restrictor, which is in turn related to two different interpretations (i.e. de dicto and de re) of the wh-item itself. Key words:?left periphery; Cimbrian; wh-items; verb second; Topics
The present contribution reconstructs the development of the personal object pronouns of Cimbrian, a German dialect spoken in Northern Italy which evolved many centuries in close contact with northern Italy's Romance dialects. With reference to their functional status and their clausal position we discover that Cimbrian's object pronouns started from a German model and have over time become closer to a Romance one. In the older Cimbrian texts, these elements are clearly recognizable as full phrases (XP), occupying the traditional Wackernagelposition; in modern writings they behave as heads (X0) and appear only in an 'adverbal' position, i.e. enclitic to the finite verb, similarly to the syntax of Romance object pronouns. The fact that they cannot be realized as proclitic to the finite verb - like the Romance ones - shows however that the original Germanic syntax limits the influence of that Romance. Attempting to explain this phenomenon, this current study suggests revisiting the structure of the Wackernagelposition.
Samples of Pennsylvania German (PG) are compared with samples of Standard German (SG) and Palatinate (PL) dialects. Analyses of the frequency of the occurrence of extraposition show that all dialect groups differ significantly from each other. PG has the highest rate of extraposition. However, the PL group also has a higher extraposition rate than SG. Concerning adverbials, speakers of PG extrapose significantly more elements than the two comparison samples. SG and PL are not different from each other in this respect. A high frequency of event-related adverb placement that corresponds to an English surface order (‘mirror order’) and a low frequency of the order corresponding to unmarked German in PG is presented. This frequency distribution is not found in the comparison samples. Crucially, the mirror orders do occur, abeit rarely, in PL. It is argued that PG is displaying frequency changes in which previously marked variants corresponding to English surface structure rise in frequency which is possibly facilitated by pre-existing tendencies in PL.
The development from an allative preposition to a purposive marker to an infinitival marker is a common one cross-linguistically. In this paper, we look in some detail at this change in Pennsylvania German. We demonstrate that fer has completed this change in that it now occurs in a full range of complements. It has gone paired with a loss of the original infinitival marker zu. Functionally, the element has undergone a drastic change and given the loss of zu, one might expect that there would be equally far-reaching structural changes. The standard account of this type of change is one of reanalysis, but in this paper, we argue that the change is likely not to have involved reanalysis. Key words: Allative; grammaticalization; infinitival marker; Lexical-Functional Grammar; Pennsylvania German; purposive; reanalysis
Using conversation analysis, this study examines the relationship between word choice and turn construction. In Siebenbürger Sächsisch, a Romanian settlement variety of German, certain adverbs possess functional variants that exhibit position-sensitivity with respect to their placement in turns in interaction. This study investigates the lexical items ientz(t)/'now' and ientzter/'now'. In interaction, speakers use these variants as resources to mark the status of a turn constructional unit or turn as complete or incomplete. Moreover, the use of ientz(t) and ientzter is sensitive to the placement within the larger sequence: Turn-final ientzter is tied to the management of topics in interaction, specifically to promoting a new action trajectory. This study outlines an intersection of turn construction, topic development, and word choice and expands the body of comparative work in conversation analysis.
This article seeks to clarify the role that English-origin pragmatic discourse markers play in the speech of Texas German (TxG). The data in this study reveal that these elements function to lighten the cognitive load of the speaker by pragmatically indicating that the speaker is processing the upcoming utterance. This observation may be taken to indicate that for many TxG speakers English is (or has become) the pragmatically dominant language, however it does not rule out that these discourse markers are lexical items found in a unified mixed-code system.
The contributions in this volume present cutting-edge theoretical and structural analyses of issues surrounding German-language islands, or Sprachinseln, throughout the world focusing on (but not limited to) phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of these languages.
Final laryngeal distinctions in the speech of two Eastern Wisconsin Germans provide insight into the German dialects spoken in Eastern Wisconsin, and how Wisconsin English has apparently begun to develop patterns of final fortition (Auslautverhärtung). The speech samples show that both speakers differ from standard German and each other, with regard to laryngeally neutral consonants. In Manitowoc county, some voicing is present on underlying /s/ consonants, while underlying /b,d,g/ consonants remain almost exclusively laryngeally neutral. The Ozaukee county speaker shows neutralization across /b,d,g,z/ consonants with predictable exceptions. Looking at Wisconsin German also helps to understand American English as spoken in Eastern Wisconsin. Thus, final laryngeal distinctions are important for obtaining a clear picture of speech patterns used by bilingual Germans in Eastern Wisconsin.
Mòcheno, a German variety spoken in Trentino (Italy), displays an interesting case of phonologically conditioned suppletive allomorphy in past participle formation. Past participle formation involves a variety of strategies, from absence of a prefix, to affrication, to prefixing a CV-prefix ga-. I propose that two allomorphs are involved in the process, a subsegment [?cont, ?voice] and a prefix ga- and that the distribution of the two allomorphs is regulated by a hierarchy of wellformedness constraints. This hierarchy in turn consists of two independent partial hierarchies, which are active in the grammar of the language in general, where they are responsible for morphoprosodic alignment at left stem edges and for the distribution of obstruents, respectively. This means that Mòcheno past participles give us evidence in favor of the hypothesis that allomorph selection can, and sometimes must, be interpreted in terms of optimization. By adopting an alternative analysis in terms of subcategorization of the allomorphs for a certain phonological context, the relationship between the distribution of past participle allomorphs and other pieces of the Mòcheno grammar would remain completely opaque.
In this paper, I describe the grammatical gender system of Plautdietsch as it relates to referent animacy. Plautdietsch (a settlement dialect of netherlandic Mennonites in the Americas), and more specifically Henderson Plautdietsch (the variety of Plautdietsch spoken in Henderson, Nebraska), has a mixed syntactic-semantic gender system that is structurally positioned between that of Standard Dutch and High German. It has a three-way masculine-feminine-neuter grammatical gender contrast across gender agreement targets, and exhibits DP-internal hybrid gender assignment (where a noun assigns one gender to one and another gender to another type of DP-internal gender agreement target). I explain that a geometry of hierarchically organized gender and animacy features is uniquely suited to explain the hybrid gender assignment we find in Plautdietsch, as well as explains a number of other phenomena we observe in gender systems (such as default gender and the flexible gender assignment of inanimate nouns).
This paper presents a novel sketch of a research program into the morpho-syntactic/semantic characteristics of intensifiers and reflexives in a moribund Sprachinsel language, Amana German. As demonstrated in this pilot study, Amana German has (apparently) undergone a shift in the syntactic distributional properties of its intensifier and reflexive inventory. As a result, Amana German in this regard more strongly resembles Dutch and modern English rather than German. Following Gast (2006), I interpret this as a shift involving the morpho-syntactic/semantic realization of recognizing two distributional types of transitive predicates; namely, typically 'other-directed' (e.g. [+Od]) and typically 'self-directed' predicates (e.g. [?Od]).
This paper offers new insights into on-going research on lexical borrowing in language contact situations by presenting a typology of lexical borrowings in Texas German (TxG), a critically endangered dialect that will go extinct within the next 30 years. We show that the lexicon of TxG has not undergone any dramatic changes over the past four decades and that the dialectal origins of words that were still apparent when Gilbert collected his data in the 1960s can still be found today. We also argue that TxG should be classified as "stage 2" in Thomason and Kaufman's (1988) 5-stage borrowing scale ("slightly more intense contact"), which is characterized by lexical borrowing and slight structural borrowing in combination with conjunctions and adverbial particles.
Previous investigations have reported a feminine tendency in the assignment of grammatical gender for English loanwords in Pennsylvania German as well as in other German Sprachinseln languages located in Anglophone areas (e.g. Reed 1942). This study investigates whether or not there is a feminine tendency in Pennsylvania German using a corpus based on the Comprehensive Pennsylvania German Dictionary. A statistical analysis reveals no evidence of a feminine tendency in Pennsylvania German. Monomorphemic English loanwords and monomorphemic native nouns in Pennsylvania German are significantly more likely to be assigned masculine gender than monomorphemic nouns in Standard German. Unlike Standard German, there is no significant difference in gender assignment in Pennsylvania German between monosyllabic and polysyllabic nouns for either the native lexicon or English loanwords.
This paper presents the major synchronic facts about verb clusters in modern Pennsylvania Dutch (Pennsylvania German) and indicates how they have developed historically. Although Pennsylvania Dutch is descended from primarily Palatine German dialects, the behavior of verb clusters in the modern language is distinct from what is found in European German dialects. Focusing on three- and four-verb clusters in subordinate clauses, it is observed that Pennsylvania Dutch observes a strict rule whereby a maximum of one lexical verb may occur within a clause; additional lexical verbs are located to the right of the clause periphery. The analysis presumes that non-lexical verbs in verb clusters, specifically the finite auxiliary hawwe 'have' and a non-finite modal, form a single syntactic unit.
In this paper I analyze the ongoing converging and diverging processes between Mennonite Low German (MLG) and Standard German in six Mennonite colonies in the Americas. The statistically detectable differences in the informants' behavior with regard to five linguistic phenomena and the comparison between all colonies and between different age-gender-subgroups in three of these colonies offer new and promising insights into the structural and sociolinguistic conditioning of converging and diverging.
This article is on Cimbrian German, an old enclave dialect in Upper Italy surrounded by Italo-Romance dialects. Next to clear traces of German clausal syntax, it shows Romance characteristics, which could be due to borrowing from the surrounding Italo-Romance majority dialects. Pertinent literature to date has assumed that the mix of structural properties of German and Italian are indeed due to the century-long isolation of the German island dialects and their relationship to the majority Italo-Romance dialects. The position presented in this paper focuses on the exclusive orality of Cimbrian and the specific structural changes oral-only variants are subject to as opposed to written, standard vernaculars. More generally, the methodological tenet is pursued that single changes subject to ambiguous interpretation need to be disambiguated by careful alignment with the major set of properties - i.e. a minority structures that are commonly found in Italo-Romance dialects may receive interpretations that are typical of oral-only German. The methodological null-hypothesis, then, is that change occurs under the narrowest accompanying structural conditions accessible within one and the same language rather than by borrowing from the social majority language.
Saying that a minority language proves to be quite a fascinating object of research when it comes to describing how it is affected by a stronger (standard) language is quite obvious. However, the way in which elements (both lexical and functional) borrowed from the stronger language infiltrate the weaker one is far less evident. Observing the Cimbrian CP, I will take into account both the complementizer ke (Italian loanword, competing with the earlier az) and other (CP-related) particles that I take to have undergone a process of reanalysis from a diachronic point of view, putting forward that the "expansion" of loanwords (especially functional ones) does not take place randomly. I also will show that synchronic data - especially when it comes to the so-called semi-speakers - can confirm this hypothesis. Key words. Complementation, minority language, cartography.
The aim of the work is to provide some detailed insight into the mechanisms that regulate movement to the left periphery on the empirical basis of an up to now rather poorly investigated German variety, i.e. Cimbrian. We first show that Cimbrian still possesses the V2 property in the sense that the inflected verb moves to the left periphery of the clause. Five empirical arguments are discussed in favor of this hypothesis concerning the existence of a prefield-expletive of the German 'es' type, the order of clitics, of negation, of separable prefixes and of the particle da with respect to the inflected verb. We propose that V3 instances, which apparently violate the V2 linear restriction, are to be analyzed as involving Topics located higher than the C projection where the inflected verb moves. We also show that wh-elements are to be split into two classes, which are moved to two different specifiers in the layered left periphery of the clause. This split is a function of the internal structure of the wh-items, which can contain or not a lexical restrictor, which is in turn related to two different interpretations (i.e. de dicto and de re) of the wh-item itself. Key words:?left periphery; Cimbrian; wh-items; verb second; Topics
The present contribution reconstructs the development of the personal object pronouns of Cimbrian, a German dialect spoken in Northern Italy which evolved many centuries in close contact with northern Italy's Romance dialects. With reference to their functional status and their clausal position we discover that Cimbrian's object pronouns started from a German model and have over time become closer to a Romance one. In the older Cimbrian texts, these elements are clearly recognizable as full phrases (XP), occupying the traditional Wackernagelposition; in modern writings they behave as heads (X0) and appear only in an 'adverbal' position, i.e. enclitic to the finite verb, similarly to the syntax of Romance object pronouns. The fact that they cannot be realized as proclitic to the finite verb - like the Romance ones - shows however that the original Germanic syntax limits the influence of that Romance. Attempting to explain this phenomenon, this current study suggests revisiting the structure of the Wackernagelposition.
Samples of Pennsylvania German (PG) are compared with samples of Standard German (SG) and Palatinate (PL) dialects. Analyses of the frequency of the occurrence of extraposition show that all dialect groups differ significantly from each other. PG has the highest rate of extraposition. However, the PL group also has a higher extraposition rate than SG. Concerning adverbials, speakers of PG extrapose significantly more elements than the two comparison samples. SG and PL are not different from each other in this respect. A high frequency of event-related adverb placement that corresponds to an English surface order (‘mirror order’) and a low frequency of the order corresponding to unmarked German in PG is presented. This frequency distribution is not found in the comparison samples. Crucially, the mirror orders do occur, abeit rarely, in PL. It is argued that PG is displaying frequency changes in which previously marked variants corresponding to English surface structure rise in frequency which is possibly facilitated by pre-existing tendencies in PL.
The development from an allative preposition to a purposive marker to an infinitival marker is a common one cross-linguistically. In this paper, we look in some detail at this change in Pennsylvania German. We demonstrate that fer has completed this change in that it now occurs in a full range of complements. It has gone paired with a loss of the original infinitival marker zu. Functionally, the element has undergone a drastic change and given the loss of zu, one might expect that there would be equally far-reaching structural changes. The standard account of this type of change is one of reanalysis, but in this paper, we argue that the change is likely not to have involved reanalysis. Key words: Allative; grammaticalization; infinitival marker; Lexical-Functional Grammar; Pennsylvania German; purposive; reanalysis
Using conversation analysis, this study examines the relationship between word choice and turn construction. In Siebenbürger Sächsisch, a Romanian settlement variety of German, certain adverbs possess functional variants that exhibit position-sensitivity with respect to their placement in turns in interaction. This study investigates the lexical items ientz(t)/'now' and ientzter/'now'. In interaction, speakers use these variants as resources to mark the status of a turn constructional unit or turn as complete or incomplete. Moreover, the use of ientz(t) and ientzter is sensitive to the placement within the larger sequence: Turn-final ientzter is tied to the management of topics in interaction, specifically to promoting a new action trajectory. This study outlines an intersection of turn construction, topic development, and word choice and expands the body of comparative work in conversation analysis.
This article seeks to clarify the role that English-origin pragmatic discourse markers play in the speech of Texas German (TxG). The data in this study reveal that these elements function to lighten the cognitive load of the speaker by pragmatically indicating that the speaker is processing the upcoming utterance. This observation may be taken to indicate that for many TxG speakers English is (or has become) the pragmatically dominant language, however it does not rule out that these discourse markers are lexical items found in a unified mixed-code system.