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)…

This study employs a relational database consisting of thousands of Old High German (OHG) nominal attestations to reconstruct noun class paradigms found primarily in the four OHG texts extensive enough to provide complete nominal paradigms: "Isidor", "Benediktinerregel", "Tatian" and Otfrid von Weissenburg's "Evangelienbuch". This study captures…

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…

Holmberg's Generalization (Holmberg 1986) was originally stated to describe the "object shift" phenomena found in the modern Scandinavian languages. This dissertation argues that object shift is merely a subcase of scrambling, a type of adjunction, and that Holmberg's Generalization is a subcase of a universal constraint, the "Generalized Holmberg…

A recent proposal that all rule generalization can be subsumed under the independently necessary mechanism of rule addition is tested empirically in three cases of purported rule generalization in the history of the High German dialects. The hypothesis is verified in each case. (CHK)

Two accounts of the variable use of inflection in adult second language (L2) acquisition are examined: The Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) and the Impaired Representation Hypothesis (IRH). These hypotheses make different predictions for adult L2 acquisition. Spontaneous production data from two adult learners of French and two adult…

Two articles are included in this issue. The first article, written in Danish, focuses on an incident that occurs in the fourth act of Henrik Ibsen's play "Peer Gynt." A theory is put forth on why this particular incident, which involves the misinterpretation of the name Peer Gynt by the German character Begriffenfeldt, takes place. The…

According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition…

A framework is presented for grammar instruction based on sociocultural theory and critical pedagogy. It is argued that restricting students' learning to the standard German of the monolingual, educated native speaker is both insufficient and inappropriate. It is proposed that grammar teaching and learning should support learners as developing…

This collection of working papers in syntax includes: "Null Objects in Mandarin Chinese" (Christie Block); "Toward a Linearization-Based Approach to Word Order Variation in Japanese" (Mike Calcagno); "A Lexical Approach to Inalienable Possession Constructions in Korean" (Chung, Chan); "Chinese NP Structure"…

This issue contains proceedings of a colloquium on linguistics at the University of Neuchatel: (1) "Propositions epistemologiques pour une etude du bilinguisme (Epistemological Propositions for a Study of Bilingualism)," by B. Py; (2) "Comment on di ca? Prolegomenes a une etude de la composante semantique du langage des migrants (How Do You Say…

This collection of articles on intercultural communication and pragmatics includes: "Peut-on traduire la publicite? L'exemple des annonces romandes et alemaniques" ("Does Advertising Translate? The Example of Romansch and German Ads") (Marc Bonhomme, Michael Rinn); "La construction de l'image de l'autre dans l'interaction.…

This is a study of linguistic variability among social levels in West Germany and of the problems associated with doing such an analysis. The data, ordered according to sex and social levels, were collected from young children retelling narratives heard on tapes. The report represents a comprehensive study of the children's syntactic performance…

Articles on diverse areas of linguistics include the following: "Correlative Constructions in Chinese" (Steve Harlow, Connie Cullen); "Xhosa Isinkalakahliso Again" (John Kelly); "Conversational Phonetics: Some Aspects of News Receipts in Everyday Talk" (John Local); "Parametric Interpretation in Yorktalk"…

Clark's 1987 Principle of Contrast seems inconsistent with the synonymy exhibited by inflectional affixes in languages with inflection classes. But if inflection class membership identifies the inflection class of the lexemes to which it attaches, then inflection affixation complies with this principle. Grammatical implications are suggested. (76…