In this paper, we provide an overview of the history and sociolinguistic setting of Germans and German in Namibia, which serves as a backdrop for our discussion of two grammatical innovations in Namibian German. German has been actively used in Namibia since the 1880s, having been brought to the country through colonization, and it remains linguistically vital today. Via a questionnaire study, we investigate the expanded use of two grammatical innovations in Namibian German, namely, i) linking elements and ii) gehen as a future auxiliary. We explore various factors that could have contributed to the emergence of these innovations in order to better understand the dynamics of German in multilingual Namibia.*

In this article, we report a large-scale corpus study aimed at tackling the (controversial) question to what extent the European national varieties of Dutch, that is, Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, exhibit morpho-syntactic differences. Instead of relying on a manual selection of cases of morphosyntactic variation, we first marshal large bilingual parallel corpora and machine translation software to identify semiautomatically, in an extensively data-driven fashion, loci of variation from various “corners” of Dutch grammar. We then gauge the distribution of con-structional alternatives in a nationally as well as stylistically stratified corpus for a representative selection of twenty alternation patterns. We find that natiolectal variation in the grammar of Dutch is far more prevalent than often assumed, especially in less edited text types, and that it shows up in inflection phenomena, lexically conditioned syntactic variation, and pure word order permutations. Another key finding is that many cases of synchronic probabilistic asymmetries reflect a diachronic difference between the two varieties: Netherlandic Dutch often tends to be ahead in cases of ongoing grammatical change, with Belgian Dutch holding on somewhat longer to obsolescent features of the grammar.*

In the now extinct Frisian dialect of the island of Wangerooge, the naming verb heit ‘to be called’ had partially grammaticalized into a copular verb ‘to be’ competing, to some extent, with the original copula wízze ‘to be’. In this paper, I discuss the development and the status of the copula heit in some detail and consider what it might tell one about the taxonomy of copular clauses (Higgins 1979). I show that the functional change from naming verb to copula initially occurred in identificational copular clauses. From there heit spread to classifi-cational and specificational copular clauses, but not to predicational ones. This development suggests a principled distinction between predicational copular clauses on the one hand and identificational copular clauses (conceived as comprising classifying, specifying, and equating ones) on the other. This does not imply, however, that heit is an identificational copula or that it selects an identificational small clause. I analyze copular heit used with an identificational small clause as a suppletive allomorph of wízze ‘to be’.*

This paper argues that German je-desto-sentences are regular verb-second structures. Unlike left-dislocation(-like) structures (such as wenn-dann-clauses or free relative clause constructions with case mis-match and resumption), je-desto-strings are normal, regular prefield structures. A proposal from the literature is developed further, accord-ing to which je-clauses, like relative clauses, belong structurally to the clausal constituent into which they are integrated. The head of these constituents remains in its canonical middle field position, whereas relative as well as je-clauses usually extrapose to the right. If the host constituent is moved to the prefield, the attributive clause is carried along with it, with the je-clause realized initially and the relative clause usually finally. However, relatives may also precede their head noun. Such an analysis highlights the common features of clause types that are otherwise treated as fundamentally distinct from one another, without denying the differences and postulating construction-specific verb-third realizations. In addition, various other realization options are discussed and dismissed as grammatical illusions.*

Progressive constructions in Germanic are usually studied as progressive constructions—that is, exclusively so. I characterize this as a top-down approach to aspect, which, I argue, harbors the risk of overlooking relevant language-specific structures that are similar in form and meaning. This paper, therefore, advocates taking a bottom-up approach. Based on a case study of the prepositional progressive in Dutch (aan het-progressive), I claim that this approach is of added empirical and theoretical value. Drawing on construction-based theories, the relevant patterns—dubbed situational constructions—are analyzed in terms of horizontal constructional links.*

What is the lexicon’s role in licensing the selection of phonologically-marked structures in Old English verse? Specifically, what is its role in the avoidance of certain nominal compounds in verse, even though the same compounds are used apparently freely in prose (Terasawa 1994)? Using a simulation of the Old English lexicon, we offer a statistical analysis of the poetic use of nominal compounds compared to the availability of relevant prosodic structures in the ambient language. In the process, we unify Terasawa’s separate constraints and demonstrate a new way of addressing the complex interplay between Old English prosody and the structure of Old English alliterative meter. Our results endorse Terasawa’s position: We find that the dispreference for nominal compounds of the XX-LX type is a general but noncategorical property of Old English. We attribute their highly restricted usage in verse to the demands of poetic diction and their incompatibility with the metrical templates that scops and scribes replicate. Additionally, while syllable weight factors into metrical organization, it does so less for stress placement, which remains morphologically grounded; this asymmetry in the ranking value of weight between poetry and prose is considered briefly in the context of the Old English monastic scribal training.

Middle Low German is generally considered to be a direct successor to Old Saxon. However, later dialects, including Middle Low German, differ from Old Saxon with respect to a number of features, which is unexpected under a direct succession relationship. To account for the presence of such features, some scholars attribute them to High German influence on Middle Low German (Wolff 1934, Stiles 1995, Stiles 2013). Others, however, hypothesize that written Old Saxon (which provides the basis for the comparison) was an artificial grapholect that reflected Old English and Franconian conventions rather than a genuine spoken language (Collitz 1901, Rooth 1973, Doane 1991:45–46). This paper further contributes to this discussion by examining the systems of degree adverbs in Old Saxon and Middle Low German. Based on data from different corpora, it is shown that the system in Old Saxon resembles the one in Old English, while the Middle Low German system is comparable to the systems in Middle High German and Early Middle Dutch. It is concluded that an explanation based solely on language contact is problematic, and that the grapholect hypothesis has more explanatory power.*

This article deals with the formal and functional development of aspectual adverbs from indefinite quantifiers in German. More specifically, it focuses on the functions of adverbs that prompted their development into different iterative markers. Through a corpus analysis of spoken language data, insights were gained into the semantic spectrum of the nonstandard adverb als ‘always’. This adverb can be classified as an iterative and, in certain contexts, as a habitual marker, which has undergone a similar development to the standard language adverb viel ‘much’. The article shows that lexical markers of iterativity and—to some extent—habituality may suggest new avenues for variation and change research. It traces the development of the habitual function of als and offers new perspectives for in-depth analyses of the evolution of lexical aspectuality marking.*

The paper presents a detailed corpus-based analysis of the German prospective stehen vor NP light verb construction. The starting point of the analysis is the claim that the construction is restricted to change-of-state nouns in the NP-internal position (Fleischhauer & Gamerschlag 2019, Fleischhauer et al. 2019). Based on corpus data, I demonstrate that although the construction shows a strong preference for such nouns, other semantic types of nouns (such as state nouns or process nouns) occur in the construction as well. I argue that process nouns in particular require contextual support to be licensed within the construction. In the paper, I present an analysis of the prospective light verb construction in terms of current relevance. This analysis accounts for the observed preference for change-of-state NP-internal nouns as well as for the need to provide contextual support for process nouns. The notion current relevance is frequently employed in the analysis of the perfect aspect; the current paper represents the first attempt to extend this notion to the prospective aspect.*

A comprehensive description of the combination of the finite auxiliary verbs wērden ‘become’/wēsen ‘be’ and a present participle in Middle Low German is still a strong desideratum. This study presents a corpus-based analysis of the aforementioned phenomenon with a special focus on its grammatical structure and its different meanings. In particular, it focuses on a wide range of temporal and aspectual meanings, depending on the auxiliary verb, its tense and mood. Moreover, the relationship between the semantics of the main verb and the meaning of the whole construction is investigated. Finally, the competition with alternative verbal complex constructions expressing the same meaning is also explored. The analysis is carried out on the basis of Middle Low German texts from different times, language areas, and genres.

This paper investigates the aspectual potential of posture verb pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus study of sitzen ‘sit’ and stehen ‘stand’, it is shown that despite a preference for activity verbs, verbs of all aspectual classes occur in the second conjunct. The posture verb imposes its durative meaning component on the second verb, thus making a progressive interpretation of the construction possible. Apart from this emergent aspectual function, German posture verb pseudo-coordination has a subjective function (conveying the speaker’s beliefs about the subject referent’s stance), and a discourse pragmatic function (information packaging).*