Although a growing body of research has sought to understand the relationship between word order and information structure, previous information structure (IS) analyses of verb-subject order have produced conflicting results for Medieval French, which have subsequently led to conflicting claims about the importance of IS to its word order as well…

This study investigates children's identification of prosodic focus in Hungarian, a language in which syntactic focus-marking is mandatory. Assuming that regular syntactic focus-marking diminishes the disambiguating role of prosodic marking in acquisition, we expected that in sentences in which focus is only disambiguated by prosody, adult-like…

This study examines the production of third language (L3) German consonant clusters by 26 L1 Cantonese-L2 English bilinguals, with the aim of uncovering the possible cross-linguistic influences on L3 pronunciation. Learners' production of 17 onset and 21 coda German consonant clusters were auditorily analysed with respect to accuracy and error…

What almost all accounts of standardisation histories have in common is a focus on printed, formal or literary texts from writing elites. While Haugen identified the written form of a language as "a significant and probably crucial requirement for a standard language" (Haugen in Am Anthropol 68:922-935, 1966a; Haugen, in: Bright (ed)…

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is…

Scholars have long debated whether Old and Middle English (ME) are different diachronic stages of one language, or whether they are two closely related languages that have different historical roots. A general assumption is that Middle and Modern English descend from Old English (OE), similar to the way Middle and Modern German descend from Old…

This study investigates the role of probabilistic grammatical constraints on the dative alternation in English as a second language (ESL). It presents the results of an experiment in which the different factors that are influential in first language (L1) English are tested with advanced learners of English whose L1 is German. Second language (L2)…

In this field note we discuss findings from pilot research on a variety of heritage German spoken in the Northeastern Province of Misiones of Argentina. Based on sociolinguistic field interviews with 25 consultants possessing varying degrees of proficiency in the language, we show that this variant of heritage German does in fact occasionally…

This study investigated the predictions of two approaches to second language acquisition. According to the usage-based approach, learner knowledge results from the strengths and weaknesses of input-driven statistical learning. According to the learner-varieties approach, pragmatic communication principles and language-internal constraints play…

This study investigated how standard and substandard varieties of first language (L1) Dutch affect grammatical gender assignments to nouns in second language (L2) German. While German distinguishes between masculine, feminine, and neuter gender, the masculine--feminine distinction has nearly disappeared in Standard Dutch. Many substandard Belgian…

This article presents a study on the time course of the acquisition of comparison constructions. The order in which comparison constructions (comparatives, measure phrases, superlatives, degree questions, etc.) show up in English- and German-learning children's spontaneous speech is quite fixed. It is shown to be insufficiently determined by…

Previous research has demonstrated that adults are successful at visually tracking rigidly moving items, but experience great difficulties when tracking substance-like "pouring" items. Using a comparative approach, we investigated whether the presence/absence of the grammatical count-mass distinction influences adults and children's…

This study investigates "Prateritumschwund," one of the most salient developments in the Upper German dialect area during the Early Modern period. Drawing on a wide range of text types originating in Nuremberg and its surrounding areas from the 13th to the 17th centuries, this study tests various hypotheses put forward as alleged causes…

Final obstruent devoicing is attested in both Middle and Modern High German, and the modern rule is usually assumed to have been directly inherited from the medieval rule without any chronological break (Reichmann & Wegera 1993), despite the fact that the graphic representation of final devoicing ceased in the Early Modern period. However, an…

Situated within the framework of the systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday, 1994) and language-based theory of learning (Halliday, 1993), this article examines a shift toward a more objectified and "scientific" representation of reality in texts written by foreign language (FL) learners at various levels of acquisition. It argues that…