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AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE General Editor E.F. KONRAD KOERNER (University of Ottawa) Series IV - CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY
Advisory Editorial Board Henning Andersen (Los Angeles); Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles) Thomas V. Gamkrelidze (Tbilisi); John E. Joseph (Hong Kong) Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin); Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.) E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Danny Steinberg (Tokyo)
Volume 137
Rosina Լ. Lippi-Green and Joseph . Salmons (eds) Germanic Linguistics: Syntactic and diachronic
GERMANIC LINGUISTICS SYNTACTIC AND DIACHRONIC
Edited by
ROSINAL. LIPPI-GREEN University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
JOSEPH SALMONS University of Wisconsin, Madison
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
CONTENTS Foreword Rosina L. Lippi-Green & Joseph . Salmons German Standard Pronouns and Non-Standard Pronominal Clitics: Typological corollaries Werner Abraham The Epistemic Use of German and English Modals Sarah M. B. Fagan Arguments for Two Verb-Second Clause Types in Germanic: A comparison of Yiddish and German John R. te Velde On the Syntax of Dutch er Isabella Barbier The Attributive Genitive in the History of German Ruth Lunt Lanouette The Verschärfung as Feature Spread Garry W. Davis & Gregory K. Iverson Germanic Class IV and V Preterits Mary Niepokuj Germanic in Early Roman Times Edgar C. Polome Toward a Phonological Description of / Palatalization in Central Yiddish Neil G. Jacobs Phonology, Orthography and the Umlaut Puzzle David L. Fertig Subject Index Language Index Authors Index
vii
1 15
35 65 85 103 121 137
149 169 185 187 189
FOREWORD In April of 1993, the University of Michigan hosted the fourth annual Michigan-Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable in Ann Arbor. The papers in this volume reflect not only the breadth of interests which were evident at the Roundtable, but at the same time the energy and enthusiasm that propelled four days of intense discussion. As linguists who work with every conceivable facet of Germanic languages we cast a wide net, but the Roundtable indicated once again that we have important intellectual concerns in common which move us beyond differing theoretical orientations and data sets. We all require a place where we can present our work to colleagues in an atmosphere which promotes discussion, and where we can hear current work in our own specialization and the broader field. We want to gain from those discussions the kind of constructive criticism which will make our work more effective and persuasive, as well as to have an opportunity to discuss the current work of others in the same spirit. The fourth Roundtable aimed to create such a forum and this volume presents some of the many notable products of those discussions. We have focused the present volume on two areas, syntactic and diachronic. In both spheres, the Roundtable offered particularly strong and rich sets of original papers. These papers almost all start from current theoretical discussions in syntax and diachronic linguistics and they address some of the most long-standing, classic problems in Germanic linguistics, from clitic placement and verb-second phenomena through the Verschärfung to the Twaddellian view of umlaut. Each contribution relies on careful sifting of data situated in the relevant comparative context, Germanic, Indo-European and cross-linguistic. This collection then seeks to exemplify some of the key recent directions of Germanic linguistics in North America. Already at the Roundtable, from what we have seen, each of these papers had begun to transform the thinking of specialists on relevant points. The Roundtable itself has undergone a series of profound transformations since 1993, evolving finally into a different forum. As a result, the University of Michigan hosted the First Germanic Linguistics: Annual Conference (GLAC) in April 1995, in conjunction with the Society for Germanic Philology. This new conference, now under the direct auspices of the Society, will move to a wider variety of universities across North America, and perhaps even beyond, in an effort to bring more colleagues into this annual collaborative effort and better represent Germanic linguistics and philology as a whole. The goal of GLAC, building directly on the
viii
primary goal of the Society, is to help form strong connections in a small professional field which depends on goodwill to survive. As the editors of this volume, we owe thanks to a number of people, most especially to Bob Kyes for his help in the early stages of preparation, to Konrad Koerner for his friendly and helpful management of the project, to the many anonymous readers who volunteered their time and insight so generously, to Jules D. Gliesche for help with indexing and finally to the authors themselves whose professionalism and patience were crucial to the successful completion of this project. Rosina L. Lippi-Green, Ann Arbor Joseph C. Salmons, Madison
GERMAN STANDARD PRONOUNS AND NON-STANDARD PRONOMINAL CLITICS TYPOLOGICAL COROLLARIES
WERNER ABRAHAM University of Groningen 1. Purpose This article pursues a two-fold goal. First, the most important results of previous work on pronominal clitics in the Germanic languages (and a few other, nonGermanic languages) will be summarized. I will then speculate on, and where possible, address with more empirical and technical accuracy typological questions, mainly of the following types: (a) What is the reason for the fact that pronominal clitics (henceforth CLs) cannot surface in their base-assigned places within the government domain of the verb, the Verbal Phrase (VP)? (b) What is behind the fact that the cliticized personal pronoun almost invariably obtains a very specific position (V-3, strictly) in the clause? What is the status of the exception to this generalization; i.e., what is behind the clitic position in non-V3 (such as in fourth position; see (4)(b) below)? (c) Is this relation between the original position under V-government and the clitic surface position syntactically or phonologically determined? (d) Are there distributional differences between full personal pronouns (Prons) and their clitic forms? And, if there are such differences, what are they precisely? While these four questions mirror a situation comparable to that in other languages (for example, Romance and Slavic), the linearity properties sketched here are specific to German and Dutch. While the normal order between NP-object cases is 'dative followed by accusative' (where these cases apply under verbal government), the order of these cases in co-referent CLs is reversed to 'accusative followed by dative'. It can be shown that none of the traditional semantic explanations can really account for this reverse order and that a syntactic explanation is achieved if one assumes that dative objects under 'ditransitive' verbal government are adjuncts to VPs, the inner-
2
WERNER ABRAHAM
most government domains. This runs counter to a number of recent assumptions, which take datives of ditransitives as a structural, and therefore a non-adjunctive, case. The order of the subsections follows this array of questions. The basic syntactic framework in which this is treated is that of UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR (Chomsky 1981, 1986). The three main results of a theoretical nature are: (e) CLs do not stay in their base positions in the clause. Rather, they undergo leftward movement (or, in other terms, they necessarily appear in a template to the left of their co-referent NP-counterpart outside of VP). More specifical ly, the place of CL is in functional projections (the Agreement Phrase, AgrP, of a sort to be further determined); (f) this VP-dislocated CL-position is triggered by the need to satisfy agreement features on one of the available Agr-nodes (within the Inflection Phrase, IP); and, more specifically for German, (g) the dative case within the 'ditransitive' template does not possess structural status; rather, it has that of an adjunct to VP. CLs, to be sure, are phonologically reduced morphemes. However, they distinguish themselves from mere rapid speech clitics in that their linear positions are heavily restricted. Although they require phonologically unreduced hosts, we will argue that neither the projection status of the hosting category nor its linear place are independent. In accordance with the theoretical claim under (f) above, this lexical morpheme will generally be found in only one syntactic position, i.e., in a seemingly right-adjoined position to the clause-second position. This is irrespective of whether this clause-second position (the structural head of COMP(lementizer)) is occupied by a conjunction, or by a finite verbal morpheme. 2. CLs in Romance and Slavic languages CLs are well-known and well-studied phenomena in French (Kayne 1989) and Italian (Rizzi 1990, Cardinaletti 1991). Unlike German and Dutch, however, Ro mance CLs undergo movement out of their basic positions in a very conspicuous way, in that they start from post-verbal positions and end up pre-verbally ('pro clisis'). See (l)(a)-(d).1
1 An asterisked CL/Pron means that either CL or Pron are not acceptable; notice that CLs and Prons are in distinct linear positions in French and Italian.
STANDARD PRONOUNS AND NON-STANDARD PRONOMINAL CLITICS
(1) (a) (b) (c) (d) (2) (a) (b) (c) (d)
*Marie ne connait que les Marie les connaît Marie ne connaît qu'e wc *Marie eux connaît *Maria cognosce ci Maria ci cognosce Maria cognosce noi *Maria noi cognosce
Clitics are also wide-spread in the Slavic languages, though not common to all of them. A notable exception is Russian, which has no pronominal clitics at all. Note that Bulgarian shows the same positional distribution as the two Romance languages in (1) and (2), but goes beyond these characteristics, in that it doubles upon the clitic pronominal representation (Dimitrova-Vulchanova & Hellan 1991), as in (3): (3) Clitic Doubling (a) Na menei ii jaj dadoxa knigataj "to me me it gave(-they) book-the" (b) Knigataj mui jaj dadoxa na Ivan¡ "book-the (to) him it gave(-they) to Ivan" Both the Romance and the Bulgarian basic serial orders are SVO. It will be investi gated whether in Standard German or its dialects pronouns and their clitic-reduced forms show any positional similarity with the patterns in the SVO languages above. Such comparison, naturally, will be made more difficult due to the fact that German serializes in accordance with a basic SOV order. If the generalization is correct that Romance and Bulgarian (and Slavic, in general) cliticize preverbally, then the following four main questions with respect to pronomi nal clitics in German can be asked: (i) Does German cliticize preverbally or postverbally? (ii) To which projection does the CL attach: XP (a maximal projection, i.e., Spec-status, like NP), or Xo (head status)? (iii) What is the nature of the category toward which pronominal clitics move in the case of final V-position in the subordinate clause? and (iv) What triggers the positional change between NPs and their clitic pro-forms? Are there also specific positions for pronominals in non-clitic form?
4
WERNER ABRAHAM
It will shown that each of these questions has a very distinct answer and that there is a generalization to be drawn across the Romance and Slavic languages, and German. The specifics of the German basic order of elements will force us, however, to show what kind of different basic positions are obtained by verbal arguments (valencies such as objects and the subject) of NP-status, of pronoun status, and of clitic status. It will be seen that each of these categorially distinct statuses has a very specific 'landing site' in the clausal structure: NP-objects are basically VP-internal, whereas pronouns have to 'move' out of VP into the IP or CP domain, and clitics have to cliticize (that is, 'hang on', because of their phonologically reduced morphology) to some host category within CP or IP. Before demonstrating this, let us briefly illustrate the kinds of clitics that exist in German and two of its dialects, Viennese ('Upper Bavarian') and the Alemannic dialect of the Montafon.2 3. Pronominal forms in Standard German and its dialects Standard German (SG) does not have pronominal CLs to the extent that German dialects have developed them. Where SG uses pro-NP forms, it uses full pronouns rather than clitics (perhaps with the exception of the neuter (e)s, certainly in colloquial speech). The reason for this is, no doubt, the pressure and authority of the written language and normative grammar that controls its form and structure. But even among German dialects, there are differences. Montafon Alemannic, for example, uses no full pronominal forms (Prons) at all, not even under word stress, whereas Viennese, a Bavarian city dialect also very distinct from SG, does.3 (4)
VIENNESE
(a) ea hot earn earn ge:m "er hat ihn ihm gegeben" (b) ea hot eam-an ge:m "er hat ihm-ihn gegeben" (c) ea hot-η earn ge:m "er hat-ihn ihm gegeben"
MONTAFONERISCH
-r hot-am-ma ge: "er hat ihn ihm gegeben" *-r hot in im ge: "er hat ihm-ihn gegeben"
Viennese (a) through (c) illustrates all three combinatory options for free (that is, uncliticized), unfocused Prons as well as CLs ( -n in (4)(c) as well as an in (4)(b)). On the other hand, the Alemannic dialect described here has no unreduced Prons at 2
The Montafon is located in Vorarlberg, Austria's western-most province, and borders on Switzerland; its language is a very conservative High Alemannic dialect. 3 In (4) hyphens mark CLs, i.e., reduced, phonologically and syntactically non-independent, morphemes. Focused Prons appear in caps.
STANDARD PRONOUNS AND NON-STANDARD PRONOMINAL CLITICS
5
all; in other words, it has only clitics, and focused Prons do not exist. Notice that Viennese (4)(b) places the clitic -an after the unreduced pronoun earn 'ihm' "to him (DAT)". Also note the order of the object cases in (4)(a). This is the mirror image of SG as in (5)4 DAT
(5) (a) Er hat dem Rotkäppchen den Korb überreicht (b) m Er hat den Korb dem Rotkäppchen überreicht
+ ACC ACC + DAT
m
(c) *Er hat ihm ihn überreicht
*DAT + ACC
(d) Er hat ihn ihm überreicht
ACC + DAT
Objects in CL or Pron-form thus show the inverse order of NP-objects. The standard account for this change of order is the following two category-based ordering hier archies (Hoberg 1981). (6)
(a) PRONOUN — ANIMATED NPS — NON-ANIMATED NPS (b) If Pron, then NOMINATIVE — ACCUSATIVE — DATIVE
It is not quite clear what the methodological status of (6) (a) and (b) really is, however. If taken to hold for German only, then these are non-explanatory general izations at best. In other words, such hierarchies make sense only when assumed to hold universally. But the order of cases in languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek does not motivate such hierarchies, specifically that in (6)(b). Moreover, examples such as in (7) with focused Prons disprove the general validity of the examples in (6), even for German. (7) daß die Mutter wollte
ja doch immer
IHR IHN
anv
ertrauen
DAT + ACC "that mother
MODAL PARTS
(to) her him
entrust wanted"
While the order ACC+DAT would also be possible, the order shown in (7) is marked, but fully acceptable. Compare again the examples in (5). We conclude that (6) (a) and (b) cannot be at the basis of what happens in (5) (a) through (d), and that another mechanism is responsible for the categorially distinct landing sites. Note, however, that clausal accent is at play also in this question. Furthermore, since modal particles such as ja doch immer in (7) have proven in the literature to be a reliable left boundary of VP (the place of object NPs as governees of the verb in its basic clause4
In (5), 'm'for "marked" indicates acceptibility only under contrastive accent.
6
WERNER ABRAHAM
final position; see Abraham 1993), pronouns under focus can obviously remain within VP just like the NPs that they represent. What has to be shown now is whether unfocused Prons can obtain the same positions as NPs and their Pron-proxies under focus. 4. Leftward movement of Prons and CLs The most convincing evidence for CLs and unfocused Prons obligatorily leaving VP to the left comes from the extraposition of embedded infinitivals like (8) and (9) (cf. Abraham & Wiegel 1993: 27). Be reminded that any material to the left of the modal particles is outside,any element to the right of them is inside the VP. (8) (a) (b) (c) (d) (9) (a) (b) (c) (d)
ob d'Marie denn [vp ihr'n Sohn aufs Gymnasium schicken wollt] *ob d'Marie denn [-s ihr'm Chef überlassen] wollt *daß d'Marie ja [-s ihr'm Chef sagen] hat wolb *daß d'Marie ja doch [-n im Gymnasium unterbringen] wollt ob d'Marie denn t¡ wollt [vp ihr'η Sohn aufs Gymnasium schicken]} *ob d'Marie denn ti wollt [-s ihr'm Chef überlassen]i *daß d'Marie ja ti hat wolln [-s ihr'm Chef sagen]i *daß d'Marie ja doch ti wollt [-n im Gymnasium unterbringen]i
Both (8) and (9) show that CLs cannot occur inside the VP. In (9), the verb in these subordinate structures is in clause-final position as is the case in (8). The infinitival clause (VP) has been extraposed to the right, which is a standard shift in nonstandard and colloquial. German (and in Dutch). Note that the trace is left in its original position. Again, the CL cannot be extraposed along with the rest of the VP. Identical behavior can be shown to hold for unfocused Prons. What this proves is that CLs and unstressed Prons require a certain position outside of VP, while NPs and focused Prons can remain inside of VP. What exactly is this position outside, and to the left, of VP? 5. The special structure of the German (and Dutch) 'middle field' Whatever insight was gained into the particular structure of the German clause in terms of topological fields5, the 'clausal bracket'6 (the domain between the two sentential brackets, V-second and V-final) has never been tackled successfully. An at tempt to answer the question 'Where do the debased (unstressed) Prons and their CL5 'Lehre der Stellungsfelder'; see Drach 1931, Boost 1955, Höhle 1982, Olsen 1982, Rehbein 1992; for a close comparison see Abraham 1992a. 6 Here 'clausal bracket' is defined as the finite verb in clause-second position and the (in-) finite verb in clause-final position.
STANDARD PRONOUNS AND NON-STANDARD PRONOMINAL CLITICS
7
forms move to?' must depart from a radically different point, one in which both further positional distinctions are made and in which categorial characteristics account for the type of attraction which causes the observed movement of the elements.7 To fill this gap let us assume the following clausal structure incorporating universal observations as well as a structural-positional distinction of functional and lexical categories and their three projection stages (Chomsky 1981,1986).8
(10)
Whether or not we assume that some projection of the inflective morphology accom panies all levels of V on its way up to (see Reuland & Kosmeijer 1989 for Dutch as well as Bayer 1990 for German and (13) (below) for such a representation) is in fact not relevant at this point — although, as far as we can see, it would allow different, distinct conclusions about the nature of licensing mechanisms that are involved. What we have achieved, however, is an evenly structured 'middle field', here in terms of the functional (that is, non-lexical) complex categories, IP and C°. It has been shown already that CLs as well as unstressed Prons have to occupy some position in either 7
Note that nothing crucial, at least so far, depends on the decision as to whether indeed 'movement' of elements from basic positions to derived ones takes place, or whether one would rather have to assume templates, or serial patterns ('Stellungsfelder'!), where such referentially corresponding categories as NPs, Prons and CLs would have to be placed. The crucial descriptive factor is that all of the referentially unambiguous, co-referential elements have to be coindexed to warrant coreferentiality, and that some non-arbitrary decision can be made as to which slot Prons (but not CLs, and vice versa) have to occupy. 8 In (10), sCL is used for subject clitic, oCL for object clitic. The V-projections appear fused with the inflection category all along from the deepest position; see Reuland & Kosmeijer 1988, Bayer 1990, and Abraham 1992b for a full-fledged motivation.
8
WERNER ABRAHAM
IP or C°. What remains to be shown is that s-CLs do 'land' to the left of o-CLs — something that is by far not as self-evident as it would be, for example, in English. After all, subject-NPs and object-NPs can shift positions all over. Unlike in English, there exists no 'subjacency' restriction between subjects and objects in German (at least beyond focus markedness). See, first, (11). (11) (a) daß-a-s tan hat
NOM+ACC
VIENNESE
*ACC+NOM
VIENNESE
"that he it done has" (b) *daß-s-a tan hat (c) weil sie es ihm gegeben hat
NOM+ACC+DAT
"because she it him given has" (d) *weil es sie ihm gegeben hat
*ACC+NOM+DAT
(e) *weil ihm sie es angetan hat
*DAT+NOM+ACC
(f) *daß es ihm sie gesagt hat
*ACC+DAT+NOM
The restriction valid for CLs in (1 l)(a) and (b) carries over to non-clitic Prons in SG: there is a clear ordering constraint with respect to the subject whether in CL or Pronform. Since we do not take such restrictions to be relative, but absolute, there must be a specific, independent reason for the fact that s-CL/Pron cannot show up in the positions illustrated in (1 l)(b)(d)(e) or (f). Among the factors accounting for this distinctive behavior we might have to consider factors that obtain some status within a theory around Thema and Rhema. Since Prons and CLs are clearly thematic there would be a seemingly satisfactory answer to the question why Prons and CLs have to move leftward, since this is where thematic elements usually go. Note, however, that this is in no way really satisfactory. This discourse-functional scenario leaves completely unexplained why Prons and CLs would not move into clause-topic positions, which are the best thematic positions to obtain in a sentence. This argument is therefore discarded as completely empirically untenable. We may further assume, along lines of a clause-structural reasoning that clitic movement is triggered by mechanisms under case government or agreement. Let us first consider mechanisms of case licensing. If case assignment, or case licensing, were to be responsible for the ordering restriction between sCL/Pron and oCL/ Pron, then we would expect that nominative, accusative and dative would occur only under specific licensing configurations which unambiguously motivate one of the above cases and not the other one. But such unambiguous configurations do not exist, as (12(a)and(b))show.
STANDARD PRONOUNS AND NON-STANDARD PRONOMINAL CLITICS
9
(12) (a) [ c daß es [IP [Spec die Mutter] [vpja doch [Vp so will]]]] (b) [ c daß [IP [spec die Mutter] [I es] [vp ja doch [Vp so will]]]] While German dialects will not permit (12)(b), it is not infrequent in SG. But it is not plausible that the accusative Pron es is licensed under the same conditions in (12)(a) and (12)(b). As Cardinaletti (1991) has rightly observed, this double position of the Pron accusative object forces us to assume a different explanatory scenario. Since the clausal structure in (10) has been extended to cover clitic doubling phenomena in West-Flemish (Haegeman 1993), it is not implausible to assume the following extended structure for German and its dialects.9
In Carinthian (Bavarian Austrian) German, doubling on subject pronominals is quite common, as seen in (14)(a). This is additional evidence that the agreement scenario is to be preferred.
9
In (13) notice that the fused categories of V and inflection are different from those in (10), since IP has undergone extraction into two Agr phrases.
10
WERNER ABRAHAM
(14)(a) gem-ma mia "go we-CL we-Pron" (b) *(mia) gem-ma ha:m "(we) go we-CL home" Whether C(OMP) or AgrS is the position into which sCL moves is not easy to decide. However, see the following additional, and independent, empirical evidence for the agreement scenario, which accounts for the need of subject-CLs to move up in the structural tree (the examples are taken in part from Bayer 1983/84: 233; further see Abraham 1992b). (15)(a) wenn-s-t pro kumms-t wenn-INFL (du) kommst "when you (SINGULAR) come (SINGULAR)"
(b) wenn-t-s pro kumm-t-s wenn-iNFL (ihr) kommt "when you (PLURAL) come (PLURAL)"
(c) Du soist song [an wöchn Schuach (daß]-st (du) wüst you shall say a which shoe that-2sG (you) want "You are to tell which shoe you want". Wenn and daß, respectively, are clearly complementizers (C(OMPS)) and as such would appear to serve as the required lexical morphemes hosting the phonologically dependent CLS. But we have to leave open whether or not the cliticizing force of the lexical -host reaches beyond the categorial border of AgrS-P. This is the option depicted in (12). Note the distinct categorization of Prons and CLS: (14)(b) shows clearly that the Pron mia "we" is in Spec,cp, whereas CLS, in accordance with the STRUCTURE PRESERVING PRINCIPLE, are heads. If CLs are agreement supporters, and
— as Wackernagel (1892) has claimed all along — CLs eventually can be absorbed by V as agreement features, then this assumption receives further support from the historical development of clitic pronouns to agreement features of person and number (i.e., exactly those features for which also the pronominals CLs inflect). Note that the decision for a licensing mechanism under agreement properties can also account for the position of CL such as in (4)(b), which is not to the immediate right of COMP. If we were to opt for a licensing mechanism under case assignment (which is open for AgrS, but not for the position to the immediate left of VP of the dative Pron, earn "(to) him"!), the occurrence of the CL (eam-)an would remain
STANDARD PRONOUNS AND NON-STANDARD PRONOMINAL CLITICS
11
unaccounted for; see, once again, (4)(b). This CL-position is a viable option also in SG. 6. Agreement as pronoun incorporation Taraldsen (1992) has pointed out that in Irish, agreement inflection and overt subjects are mutually exclusive. This suggests that the agreement element in that language corresponds to a subject pronoun incorporated into a functional head F (the landing site for V-movement) from the Spec-position of XP governed by F: (16)
...F[Xppro[x.X...
This is in line with Wackernagel's observation and generalization that (subject) pronouns are generally found in clause-second position (where they need not or iginate!) and from where they incorporate into the verb to create verbal inflection (Wackernagel 1892). Note, of course, that no such complementary distribution holds between agreement and overt subjects in languages like German, Dutch, and English. Obviously, such special distribution is constrained to VSO-languages (such as Irish, other Celtic languages, and Arabic). On the other hand, note that such an analysis as seen under (16) above is immediately available for pro-drop subject languages. It has indeed been argued (Taraldsen 1992) that agreement in SVO/SOV-languages can also be analyzed as incorporating subject pronouns, even in the presence of an overt (preverbal) subject, i.e., an overt subject co-occurring with agreement (see (17)).
NPi is the overt subject in an A-position above F; the incorporated pro is an exple tive, which will share inflective features with NP¡. Note, also, that such an analysis makes superfluous functional heads with the properties ascribed to AGR as seen in much recent work. See again (15) which supports this agreement scenario from a different angle. What (15) means on the basis of the assumptions in (16) and (17) is that the inflective features of the head (V-last) are spread to all members of the chain, i.e., up to COMP or AGRS, whatever the landing site of V-2. As has been suggested in the literature, COMP is the eventual end member of the V-chain in sov-languages. See (10) and (13) above (for this original assumption see Bayer & Kornfilt 1990 as well as Reuland & Kosmeijer 1988, who fuse V and I from V-last onwards).
12
WERNER ABRAHAM
7. The Puzzle of the Inversed Pronominal Objects Let us briefly come back to the puzzle of the inversion of dative and accusative once they have the status of Pron and CL. Compare again (5) and (6). We have claimed that the hierarchies in (6) cannot provide an answer to the question why this inversion takes place. However, if it is true, as we have indeed shown, that object Prons and CLs must leave the VP-domain, and if we further assume that the VP in German (and Dutch) is no different from that in English, i.e., that the dative is generated as a left adjunct to the canonic VP-layer, then the the puzzle finds a ready answer: what is inside the VP has to move leftward. The VP-adjunct, however, is not affected by this triggering effect. Note that when the object has to meet certain agreement characteristics as it does in object agreeing languages (among which e.g. Hungarian) the structural accusative — but not the lexical dative — is involved. 8.
Conclusion We can now answer the questions raised in the beginning where some CL-characteristics of Romance and Bulgarian were illustrated. German (and Dutch) CLs and Prons cannot remain in their original positions within VP because their very categorial nature associates them closely with agreement (already Wackernagel's insight). Thus, they have to move to obtain a position in the AgrP outside and above VP. Since CLs always need a lexical host to which to cliticize, cliticization of pronominals is a phonological process. At the same time, however, it is a syntactic process because CLs as well as Prons do not move just where phonological con ditions are met. Their movement is syntactically and categorially conditioned: CLs move into head positions, because they are heads originally, whereas Prons move from Spec-positions to Spec-positions. Prons do not need a phonological host for the very reason that their morphological force is not 'clitically weak'. But their (unhosted) landing position in AgrP associates them with the functional category of agreement anyway. This is also the reason why CLs in German, unlike their Romance counterparts, cliticize postverbally. Inflectional morphemes in German and Dutch generally attach to the right (unlike derivative morphemes, whose position relat ive to the stem is free). REFERENCES Abraham, Werner. 1992a. "Wortstellung im Deutschen". Deutsche Syntax: Aussichten und Ansichten ed. by Ludger Hoffmann, 484-522. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
STANDaRD PRONOUNS AND NON-STANDARD PRONOMINAL CLITICS
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-------. 1992b. "Word order and fused categories". Milwaukee Working Papers 6 (March 1992), 1-28. ---. 1994. Syntax des Deutschen im Sprachenvergleich: Grundlegung einer typologischen Grammatik des Deutschen. Tübingen: Gunther Narr. Anko Wiegel. 1993. "Reduktionsformen und Kasussynkretismus bei ---& deutschen und niederländischen Pronomina". Dialektsyntax ed. by Werner Abraham & Josef Bayer, 12-49. Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 5/1993. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Bayer, Josef. 1983/84. "COMP in Bavarian syntax". The Linguistic Review 3.209274. ---. 1990. Mixed Categories. Habilitationsschrift, University of Constance, Germany. ---& Jacqueline Kornfilt. 1990. "Restructuring effects in German". Parametric Variation in Germanic and Romance ed. by E. Engdahl, M. Meilor, M. Reape, & R. Cooper, 21-42. University of Edinburgh: Centre for Cognitive Science. Boost, Karl. 1955. Neue Untersuchungen zum Wesen und zur Struktur des deutschen Satzes. Berlin: Akademieverlag. Cardinaletti, Anna 1991. "Weak Pronouns in Germanic". University of Geneva: European Science Foundation. MS. Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris. ---. 1986. Barriers. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press. Dimitrova-Vulchanova, Maria & Lars Hellan 1991. "Clitics and the completedness parameter". Nordic Journal of Linguistics 14:1.1-39. Drach, Erich. 1931. Grundgedanken zur deutschen Satzlehre. Frankfurt a. M.: Diesterweg. [Reprinted Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963.] Haegeman, Liliane. 1993. "Some speculations on argument shift, clitics, and crossing in West-Flemish". Dialektsyntax ed. by Werner Abraham & Josef Bayer, 131-160. Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 5/1993. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Höhle, Tiiman. 1982. "Stellungsfelder und Satzstruktur". Pragmatik. ed. by Marga Reis, 329-340. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Hoberg, Ursula. 1981. Die Wortstellung der geschriebenen deutschen Gegenwartssprache: Untersuchungen zur Elementenfolge im einfachen Verbalsatz. München: Hueber. Kayne, Richard. 1989. "Null subjects and clitic climbing". Approaches to the Null Subject Parameter ed. by Osvaldo Jaeggli & Ken Safir, 239-261. Dordrecht: Reidel.
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Olsen, Susan. 1982. "On the syntactic description of German: Topological fields vs. X'-theory". Festschrift fur Alfred Wollmann zum 60. Geburtstag. Sprachtheorie und angewandte Linguistik ed. by W. Weite, 29-45. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Rehbein, Jochen. 1992. "Wortstellungsparameter". Deutsche Syntax. Aussichten und Ansichten ed. by Ludger Hoffmann, 523-574. Berlin: W. de Gruyter. Reuland, Eric J. & Wim Kosmeijer. 1988. "Projecting inflected verbs". Groninger Arbeiten zur germanistischen Linguistik (GAGL) 29.88-113. Rizzi, Luigi. 1990. Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, Mass.: M.LT. Press. Taraldsen, Tarald. 1992. GLOW Abstract. University of Tilburg. Wackernagel, Jakob. 1892. "Über ein indogermanisches Stellungsgesetz". Indogermanische Forschungen 1.333-436.
THE EPISTEMIC USE OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH MODALS SARAHM.B.FAGAN University of Iowa 1.
Introduction Modal verbs in both German and English can have epistemic as well as nonepistemic meaning. Epistemic meaning involves the speaker's assumptions or judg ment of possibilities and often indicates the speaker's confidence (or lack of con fidence) in the factualness of the proposition expressed (Coates 1983:18).! The sentences in (1) provide examples of German müssen and English must used epistemically:2 (1) (a) Ziemlich abgegriffen ist das Blatt. Folglich muß es zu einem oft gelesenen Buch gehören. (Attested; Welke 1965:74) "The page is rather well-worn. It must therefore belong to a book that was read often." (b) His teeth were still chattering but his forehead, when I felt it, was hot and clammy. He said, 'I must have a temperature'. (Attested; Coates 1983:41) In both sentences, the epistemically used modals indicate the speaker's conclusions about certain circumstances. In (l)(a), for example, the speaker, observing that the page is well-worn, concludes (with a high degree of confidence) that the page belongs to a book that was read often. In the sentences in (2), the modals müssen and must are used non-epistemically, and express an obligation on the part of the subject rather than an inference on the part of the speaker. (2)(a), for example, states that the subject, Karl, is obliged to relate something accurately and truthfully.
1 Following Coates (1983, chapter 2), I use the term 'epistemic' to cover both epistemic and alethic modality in the strict logical sense. Alethic modality involves the necessary or contingent truth of propositions (see Lyons 1977, chapter 17). 2 Rather than provide the original source for the attested examples in this study, I simply provide the reference to the linguistic study in which they appear. I label the attested examples attested to distinguish them from those that have been constructed solely for the purposes of exemplification. Where translations for the examples are provided, I repeat them essentially unchanged.
16 (2)
SARAH M.B. FAGAN
(a) Du mußt es mir ganz genau und wahrhaftig erzählen, Karl. (Attested; Bech 1949:30) "You have to tell it to me accurately and truthfully, Karl." (b) 'You must play this ten times over,' Miss Jarrova would say, pointing with relentless fingers to a jumble of crotchets and quavers. (Attested; Coates 1983:34)
Non-epistemically used modals involve more than just the notion of obligation, however. The non-epistemically used modals in (3), for example, involve permis sion: (3) (a) Ich bat sie, sie nach Hause begleiten zu dürfen. (Attested; Bech 1949:18) "I asked her if I might accompany her home." (b) She requested permission to leave at three . . . . He said drily 'You may go at that hour if your work is done'. (Attested; Palmer 1990:71) In (3)(a), the speaker is reporting that he asked someone for permission to do some thing. In (3)(b), the speaker is giving someone permission to do something. Although the examples presented thus far clearly involve either epistemic or nonepistemic meaning, sentences with modals can be ambiguous between these two types of meaning, as the examples in (4) and (5) demonstrate. The sentence in (4), for example, can mean either that the facts lead one to conclude that Karl plays the piano or that he is obligated to play the piano. These two interpretations are expressed in the paraphrases in (4)(a) and (4)(b). (4) Karl muß Klavier spielen. (Öhlschläger 1989:36) (a) Im Hinblick darauf, was bekannt ist, muß Karl Klavier spielen. (b) Im Hinblick darauf, was seine Pflicht ist, muß Karl Klavier spielen. (5) He must understand that we mean business. (Attested; Coates 1983:16) (a) Surely he understands that we mean business. (b) It is essential that he understand that we mean business. In general, the context in which an utterance is placed can help to disambiguate it. The context can be extra-linguistic and involve known or observable facts. For example, if we see Karl leaving a music studio with piano music under his arm and someone says, Karl muß Klavier spielen, our observations will lead us to interpret the sentence epistemically. The context can also be linguistic. In (l)(a), for example,
THE EPISTEMIC USE OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH MODALS
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the word folglich "consequently" alerts the reader that the speaker is drawing a conclusion about a certain situation and that the modal müssen is to be interpreted epistemically. In (3)(b), the word permission leads the reader to anticipate a nonepistemic use of the modal may. A long list of studies of modals in German and English have dealt with the question of monosemy versus polysemy: Do modals have one basic meaning, or do they have different, discrete meanings? Kratzer (1976), for example, argues that the German modals können and müssen each have a basic kernel of meaning, and that the different interpretations of these modals are due to the context in which they are used. Öhlschläger (1989), on the other hand, argues that one cannot assume a single meaning for any of the modals in German. Scholars have also argued for monosemantic as well as polysemantic approaches to English modals. Joos (1964) and Ehrman (1966) argue for a monosemantic approach. Leech (1971) and Palmer (1990) argue for a polysemantic approach. It is not my intention here to add to this discussion. Regardless of whether German and English modals each have a basic meaning or whether they have several discrete meanings, the sentences in which they appear can be interpreted in different ways. In particular, they can be interpreted epistemically as well as non-epistemically. My intention is to investigate some of the linguistic factors that influence whether a given modal will be interpreted epistemically or non-epistemically, and to attempt to explain why these factors contribute to epistemic meaning. The main factor that I consider is the correlation between stative predicates and epistemic modality. I argue that stative predicates are compatible only with epistemic modality, and that although active predicates are compatible with epistemic as well as non-epistemic modality, they are avoided for the sake of avoiding ambiguity when an epistemic reading is intended. Thus, while epistemic modals place no semantic restric tions on their complements, practical considerations lead speakers to choose stative predicates, since only statives can be associated unambiguously with epistemic meaning. To simplify the discussion, I will compare the epistemic use of modals with one type of non-epistemic use, namely deontic use.3 Deontic modality involves the notions of obligation and permission. As pointed out above, the sentences in (2) and (3) provide examples of German and English modals that are used deontically. 3 Palmer (1990) also recognizes dynamic modality — which involves the notions of ability and volition — as one type of non-epistemic modality. However, as Palmer (1990:7) notes, "whereas both epistemic and deontic modality appear to relate to the speaker, dynamic modality is concerned with the ability and volition of the subject of the sentence, and is not, perhaps, strictly modality at all. . ." Coates (1983:21), on the other hand, argues that non-epistemic modality encompasses more than deontic modality, since modals like must and may cover a range of meanings, of which the notions of obligation and permission represent only the core.
18
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The German modals that will be the focus of this investigation are dürfen, können, mögen, and müssen, since each of these modals has an epistemic as well as a deontic use. Although the modals sollen and wollen are treated in many studies together with epistemic dürfen, können, mögen, and müssen in what is referred to as a 'subjective' use, these verbs are not included in this study. Subjective use, like epistemic use, involves inferences on the part of the speaker about observable and known facts. It also involves the speaker's degree of confidence in the factualness of a sentence's proposition. Subjective use involves more than just inferences and speaker confidence, however; it also involves claims made by individuals other than the speaker. The verb sollen is used by the speaker to indicate that other people claim (or claimed) something about the subject (see (6)(a)). The verb wollen is used to indicate that the subject him- or herself is claiming (or claimed) something (see (6)(b)). (6) (a) Einmal im Spaß, etwas angetrunken, soll der verschollene Stiller in einem Freundeskreis gesagt haben: 'Ich habe eine wunderbare Frau'. (Attested; Maxwell 1964:108) "Once, as a joke, somewhat tipsy, the missing Stiller is supposed to have said among a circle of friends: 'I have a wonderful wife.'" (b) Er wollte immer der Klügere sein. (Attested; Bech 1949:6) "He always claimed to be the more intelligent one." In addition to indicating that someone other than the speaker claims or claimed something, sollen and wollen in their subjective use can express the degree of confidence the speaker has in the factualness of the proposition of the sentence. According to Maxwell (1964:108), for example, when the speaker uses sollen, he "makes an effort to maintain his neutral attitude toward the content of his statement. However, by his very effort at neutrality, improbability or disbelief is implied, whether or not it is actually stated in the context". This secondary meaning that is associated with subjectively used sollen and wollen could allow one to treat these modals together with epistemic dürfen, können, mögen, and müssen, since they all indicate the degree to which the speaker believes the proposition of the sentence to be true. However, because the expression of speaker confidence associated with subjective sollen and wollen is, as Fullerton notes (1984:99-100), "secondary, implicit and, in fact, only an optional interpretation", I will not include the verbs sollen and wollen in my discussion of epistemic modals. In addition, this use of sollen and wollen has no parallel in English.
THE EPISTEMIC USE OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH MODALS
19
The modal verbs in English that will be included in this study are can,may, and must. All three modals can have epistemic as well as deontic meaning. I will also discuss the 'semi-modal' be bound to, which complements epistemic must (see Palmer 1990; see also the discussion in section 3.2.2). 2. Stative Verbs One factor that appears to be associated with epistemic meaning in both German and English modals is the notion of stativity. Fullerton (1977), for example, claims that German modals that appear with present infinitives are not naturally given an epistemic reading unless the infinitive is semantically stative. Brünner & Redder (1983:60) claim that an epistemic (inferential) reading is more likely with stative verbs than with non-statives. To determine the accuracy of these claims, let us analyze the attested examples of epistemically used modals in the following corpusbased studies: Welke (1965) {dürfen, können); Allard (1975) {mögen); Laetz (1969) {müssen). Except for the verb mögen, it does appear that the epistemic interpretation of modals is associated with present infinitives that are stative. The sentences in (7) contain a representative sample of the verbs in Laetz's (1969) study that appear with epistemic müssen, all of which denote states: (7) (a) Hinter ihnen stand Elisabeth, und der Herr neben ihr mußte, wenn nicht alles täuschte, Professor Mertens sein, der Chirurg, Annas Mann. (Attested; Laetz 1969:5). "Elisabeth was standing behind them and it seemed that the gentleman next to her had to be Professor Mertens, the surgeon, Anna's husband." (b) Die Anhöhe hatte eine leichte Senke, und hinter der Senke mußten die Amerikaner liegen. (Attested; Laetz 1969:75) "The hill had a slight valley, and the Americans had to be lying behind the valley." (c) Es müßte etwas vorliegen, eine Unsicherheit auf der Gegenseite, beharrte er. (Attested; Laetz 1969:78) "There had to be something, an uncertainty on the other side, he insisted." (d) Man sah noch sehr viel Schmutz und Unrat, dachte darüber nach, was wohl in diesen Haaren für ein Leben herrschen müsse. (Attested; Laetz 1969:78) "One still saw much dirt and filth and one considered what kind of activity must go on in this long hair."
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SARAH . FAGAN
(e) Sie stutzten an dieser Stelle und sträubten sich, bevor sie sich zu dem kleinen Schritt entschlossen, der für ihr Gefuhl etwas Maßloses haben mußte. (Attested; Laetz 1969:156) "They hesitated at this point and struggled before they decided to make the small step which had to mean enormous implications in their minds." The epistemic use of mögen, on the other hand, appears to be equally compatible with statives and non-statives, as the examples in (8) and (9) demonstrate. The sentences in (8) contain stative infinitives (sein "be", einleuchten "be clear", klingen "sound"); those in (9) contain non-statives (entscheiden "decide", beschleichen "overcome", ändern "change"). (8) (a) Inzwischen mag der britischen Regierung schon die theoretische Erwägung Lord Chalfonts für jenen Eventualfall peinlich genug sein. (Attested; Allard 1975:69) "In the meantime Lord Chalfont's theoretical consideration for that eventual case may be painful enough for the British Government." (b) Daß die politische Welt in 'oben' und 'unten' geteilt ist, mag manchem unpolitischen christlichen Staatsbürger nicht einleuchten. (Attested; Allard 1975:71) "The fact that the political world is divided into 'above' and 'below' may not be clear to many an unpolitical, Christian citizen." (c) Es mochte widerspruchsvoll klingen; sie hätte ebensogut auch sagen können, daß die Welt dort süßer sei, vielleicht auch leidvoller. (Attested; Allard 1975:73) "Quite possibly it sounded contradictory; she could have just as well also said that the world was sweeter there, perhaps also more full of grief." (9) (a) Wir entscheiden uns für das Letztere - andere mögen anders entscheiden. (Attested; Allard 1975:69) "We are deciding for the latter - others may possibly decide otherwise." (b) Manchen Bürger mag ein Gefühl der Angst beschleichen, wenn er erkennen muß, daß immer mehr Planung notwendig wird und daß nach immer schwerer durchschaubaren Methoden gearbeitet wird. (Attested; Allard 1975:70) "It is possible that a feeling of fear may overcome many a citizen, if he must recognize that ever more planning is becoming necessary and that that proceeds according to methods ever more difficult to see through."
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(c) Gott mag ändern, was nicht gut an diesen ist. (Attested; Allard 1975:71) "God may change what is not good in this." We will return to the verb mögen below. The situation in English generally parallels that of German. Coates (1983) observes that the epistemic use of the English modals can't/'could, may, and must is typically associated with stative predicates. For example, 88 percent of the sentences in her corpus with epistemic must (Coates 1983:44) and 95 percent of sentences with epistemic may (Coates 1983:137) occur with a stative predicate. In general, then, in both German and English, there appears to be a correlation between epistemic meaning and stativity. 2.1 Duration Why should stativity be associated with epistemic meaning? In a discussion of stativity, Fullerton (1977:74) notes that "statives are always durative and denote a state or condition over which the subject has no control". It could thus be that the notion of duration that is associated with stativity plays a crucial role here. Two additional facts about epistemic modals in German and English would appear to suggest this. First, Coates's (1983) study reveals that the epistemic use of English modals is typically associated with the progressive. The epistemically used modals in (10), for example, appear with the progressive: (10) (a) You must be running your brain in neutral. (Attested; Coates 1983:44) (b) They may be reading something by Shakespeare. (Attested; Coates 1983:137) Second, in both German and English, modals can receive an epistemic reading with non-statives if a habitual action is described. Although the sentences in (11) can be understood deontically (he is obliged to travel by train), they also have a habitual and therefore epistemic reading (it is surely the case that he travels by train). (11) (a) Er muß mit dem Zug fahren. (b) He must travel by train. What do the progressive and habituais have to do with durativity? In English, progressive verb forms are used, among other things, to signal duration (Quirk et al. 1985:198). As Comrie notes (1976:27-28), habituais "describe a situation which is
22
SARAH Μ.B. FAGAN
characteristic of an extended period of time" and are therefore closely tied to the notion of durativity, which involves the idea that a "given situation lasts for a certain period of time" (Comrie 1976:41). However, even if we can establish that the correlation between epistemic modality and stativity involves the notion of duration, we are still left with the problem of determining why duration should play a role in epistemic meaning. In addition, another fact suggests that the crucial factor here may not be duration after all. As Palmer (1990:54) points out, an epistemic interpretation of modals can be forced when a progressive form does not have a sense of duration. The modal in (12)(a), for example, which appears with the non-stative present infinitive come, is interpreted deontically (he is obliged to come tomorrow).4 When a progressive form of come is used and does not have a sense of duration, the modal is interpreted epistemically, as in (12)(b). The sentence in (12)(b) means something like "it is surely the case that he will come tomorrow". (12) (a) He must come tomorrow. (Palmer 1990:54) (b) He must be coming tomorrow. (Palmer 1990:54) Given the evidence provided by the examples in (12), it does not appear to be possible to link the notion of duration with epistemic meaning in all cases. Although I will argue in section 3 that duration does play an important role in epistemic meaning, I think there is another notion that can better explain the correlation between stativity and epistemic modals, namely, the semantic notion of control. However, the explanation will be somewhat indirect, since the notion of control will be used to explain the correlation between non-stative predicates and deontic modals rather than the correlation between stative predicates and epistemic modals.
2.2 Control Recall that in addition to being durative, stative verbs refer to a state or condition over which the subject has no control (Fullerton 1977:74). In their discussion of the meanings of modal verbs, Quirk et al. (1985:219-221) make use of the notion of control. They make a distinction between what they term 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic' modality. What is important about their classification is that intrinsic modality, which is essentially equivalent to deontic modality (it includes the notions of permission,
4
Although an epistemic reading of (12)(a) is possible, it would be unlikely that the sentence would be interpreted in this way (Palmer 1990:54).
THE EPISTEMIC USE OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH MODALS
23
obligation, and volition) involves "some kind of intrinsic human control over events" (Quirk et al. 1985:219)5 What is also important is that deontic modality in German and English appears to be associated with non-stative predicates. That is, in both languages, there appears to be a lack of a correlation betv/een deontic modals and stative predicates. 6 The deontically used modals dürfen, können, mögen, and müssen in the corpus-based studies of Welke (1965), Allard (1975) and Laetz (1969), for example, appear to be associated exclusively with non-stative predicates. Coates (1983:88, 246) documents a similar correlation between deontic can, may, and must and non-stative predicates in English. Let us consider briefly the German data. Welke does not actually provide attested examples of deontically used können, that is, können meaning "be allowed to". However, the few examples he does provide, which are listed in (13), contain only non-'statives (Welke 1965:47): (13) (a) Herr Ober, kann ich zahlen? "Waiter, can I pay?" (b) Kann ich die Tür ein wenig offen lassen? "Can I leave the door open a bit?" (c) Kann ich das Fenster schließen? "Can I close the window?" The examples in (14), from Laetz's (1969) analysis of the modal müssen, provide an idea of the range and type of predicates that appear with deontically used modals. (14) (a) Dieses Frühstück freilich mußte Tony, abgesehen von den Sonntagen, ohne Gesellschaft einnehmen, da die Großeltern lange nach Beginn der Schulzeit herunterzukommen pflegten. (Attested; Laetz 1969:32) "This breakfast, to be sure, Tony had to eat without company, except on Sundays, because her grandparents had the habit of coming down long after the beginning of classes." (b) Er ging langsam die Treppen hinauf, Schritt für Schritt, als müsse er die Stufen zählen. (Attested; Laetz 1969:39) "He went slowly up the stairs, step by step, as if he had to count the steps."
5 Extrinsic modality includes epistemic modality as well as the modality that involves, for example, the notion of ability. See footnote 3 for a discussion of the appropriateness of treating the notion of ability as a component of modality. 6 Keep in mind that this discussion concerns only present infinitives.
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SARAH Μ.B. FAGAN
(c) Die Gefechte im Hürtgenwald, wo sie wochenlang um jedes Dorf hatten kämpfen müssen, saßen ihnen noch in den Knochen. (Attested; Laetz 1969:45) "The skirmishes in the Hürtgenwald, where they had had to fight for weeks for each village, still had an effect on them." (d) Da bin ich wirklich ärgerlich gewesen und hab ganz schnell weggehen müssen. (Attested; Laetz 1969:45) "Then I was really angry and I had to leave very quickly." (e) Habe es englisch, deutsch, italienisch und noch einmal englisch singen müssen. (Attested; Laetz 1969:48) "Had to sing it in English, German, Italian, and again in English." The verbs in (14), einnehmen "eat", zählen "count", kämpfen "fight", weggehen "leave", and singen "sing", are all clearly non-stative. There are a few cases of deontic müssen in Laetz's study that appear with the verb sein, but these are not examples of stative sein. The lexical items that appear with sein and/or the context in which it is uttered give it a non-stative interpretation. (15) (a) 'Du mußt netter zu deinem Vater sein', (Attested; Laetz 1969:97) "'You must be more kind to your father.'" (b) 'Wir haben nur diese Nacht, Helene,' sagte er, 'morgen früh um sechs muß ich schon wieder in der Kaserne sein'. (Attested; Laetz 1969:98) "'We only have this night, Helene,' he said, 'tomorrow morning at six I must be back at the barracks.'" (c) Die Unterlegenheit des Sohnes, seine physische Insuffizienz, muß zu gleicher Zeit seine Stärke sein. (Attested; Laetz 1969:113) "The inferiority of the son, his physical insufficiency, must at the same time become his strength". In (15)(a), for example, the phrase netter sein "be nicer" can be paraphrased as sich netter benehmen "behave more nicely, act more nicely", which is clearly not stative. In (15)(b), when the speaker utters the sentence Morgen früh um sechs muß ich schon wieder in der Kaserne sein, he means that he has to get back to the barracks by six o'clock. Again, we have a non-stative use of sein. As Laetz (1969:113-114) points out, the statement in (15)(c) is made by an author planning a drama. According to Laetz, the author's plan could be paraphrased as Ich habe mich entschlossen, die Unterlegenheit des Sohnes als seine Stärke darzustellen "I have decided to portray
THE EPISTEMIC USE OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH MODALS
25
the inferiority of the son as his strength". In the context in which this sentence is uttered, then, sein is not interpreted statively. The lack of correlation between deontic modals and stative predicates in German and English is something that we can explain using the semantic notion of control. Recall that deontic modality includes the notions of permission, obligation, and volition, which, as Quirk et al. (1985:219) note, "involve some kind of intrinsic human control over events". Stative predicates, on the other hand "denote a state or condition over which the subject has no control" (Fullerton 1977:74). The explana tion I propose here to account for the fact that deontic modals typically do not appear with stative predicates is the following: Deontic modals do not appear with stative predicates because it simply is not possible to give permission to someone or to obligate someone to do something over which he or she has no control. Three pieces of additional information support this explanation. The first piece of information is provided by control verbs. Control verbs are verbs like persuade, force, and command, which have infinitive complements with PRO subjects that are coreferential with (controlled by) a matrix NP: He persuaded mei [PROi to go on vacation]. Control verbs are incompatible with stative predicates. As the examples in (16) demonstrate, the control verb force cannot appear with the complement be short, which is stative, but is perfectly acceptable with the non-stative sit down: (16) He forced her to {?be short/sit down}. In general, control predicates require complements that describe controllable actions.7 Because deontic modals behave like control predicates in that they also require nonstative complements, this suggests that the semantic notion of control plays the same sort of role in deontic meaning that it does with the class of control predicates. A second piece of evidence for the importance of control involves agentive predicates. Coates's study shows that deontic must and can (permission can) appear the vast majority of the time with agentive predicates:8 91 percent of her examples of must and 100 percent of her examples of can appear with agentive verbs (Coates 1983:37, 88).9 Agentive verbs are verbs with subjects that potentially have control over the action denoted by the verb. Thus, the fact that deontic modality is associated with agentive predicates suggests that the notion of control is indeed the crucial factor here. 7
My thanks to Wayne Harbert (personal communication) for bringing the control facts to my attention. 8 Coates (1983) does not provide statistical information about permission may. 9 One hundred percent of the examples of permission can that appear in active sentences occur with agentive verbs. If passive as well as active sentences are taken into account, 83 percent of the examples appear with agentive predicates (Coates 1983:88).
26
SARAH . FAGAN
Non-agentive, non-stative verbs provide a third piece of evidence in support of this conclusion. If we take a verb like recognize,which is not agentive (the subject does not have control over the action denoted by the verb) and which is also nonstative (it is punctual and therefore does not involve duration) and put it in a sentence with a modal verb, the reading that we get is epistemic, as shown in (17). The sentence in (17) means "it is possible that he will recognize the man"; not "he has permission to recognize the man".10 (17) He may recognize the man. This tells us that the lack of control, which is associated with the lack of agentivity of these verbs, rules out the deontic reading. We cannot get a deontic reading because of the absence of control of the subject over the verbal action. The absence of stativity or duration does not rule out an epistemic reading, however. That is, neither stativity nor durativity appear to be a necessary condition for epistemic modality, since an epistemic reading is possible even without a stative or durative predicate. To sum up briefly, stative predicates denote a state or condition over which the subject has no control. Deontic modals typically do not appear with stative predicates because it is not possible to give permission to someone or to obligate someone to do something over which he or she has no control. Control predicates, which behave like deontic modals with respect to stative complements, provide evidence for the importance of the semantic notion of control and deontic meaning. The fact that deontic modals in English, for example, typically appear with agentive predicates, predicates whose subjects potentially have control over the verbal action, also supports the hypothesis that control is the crucial factor, Likewise, evidence from non-agentive, non-stative verbs like recognize indicates that control is a necessary condition for deontic meaning. Stativity or duration, on the other hand, do not appear to be necessary conditions for epistemic meaning. 2.3 Avoidance of Ambiguity Nevertheless, epistemic modality is typically associated with stative predicates in both German and English. Why should this be? I think that although stativity is not a necessary condition for epistemic meaning, it is typically associated with epistemic meaning because this allows one to avoid ambiguity. Deontic modality is necessarily associated with non-stative predicates. Although epistemic modals could also cooccur with non-statives, they typically do not, because this could lead to ambiguity between 10 We cannot consider here the interpretation of recognize that means "acknowledge" or "accept", since this use of recognize is agentive.
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27
a deontic and an epistemic reading. That is, there are no actual semantic requirements that epistemic modals place on their complements, but speakers typically use stative infinitives with these modals to signal that they intend an epistemic interpretation. Some facts about the modal verb systems in German and English support my claim that the avoidance of ambiguity lies behind the correlation between epistemic modality and stative predicates. Let us first consider the modal verb mögen in German. 2.3.1 German mögen Recall that the epistemic use of mögen is associated with non-statives as well as statives (see the examples in (8) and (9) above). This characteristic of mögen actually provides further evidence that stative predicates are not required for epistemic meaning. However, it would also appear to provide counterevidence to the claim that epistemic modality is associated with stative predicates as a way of avoiding ambiguity. With the modal verb mögen, though, in comparison to a modal like müssen, for example, it is not necessary to use a stative predicate to avoid ambiguity, because another factor prevents this, namely, the syntax. The syntax of permission mögen is typically very different from that of possibility mögen, that is, of epistemic mögen. The great majority of sentences with permission mögen appear to be either verb-first sentences or verb-second sentences beginning with the words dann "then" or so "so". For example, eight of the thirteen sentences that Allard provides with permission mögen are verb-first sentences (see (18)); three are verb-second sentences beginning with dann or so (see (19)).11 (18) (a) Nun wohnt er bei uns, - mag er bleiben, wie lange er will! (Attested; Allard 1975:90) "Now he lives with us - let him stay as long as he wants." (b) Mochten sie doch rollen und brausen, weinen und jauchzen . . . (Attested; Allard 1975:91) "Let them roll and rage, cry and exalt..." (c) Was hatte meine Trommel mit dem Blute Polens gemeinsam! Mochten sie ihre Akten und Löschblätter mit dem Saft färben! Mochten sie doch das Blau aus ihren Tintenfässern stürzen und mit Rot nachfüllen! Mochten sie doch ihre Taschentücher, weißen
11 The examples in (18) and (19) contain Allard's translations. Note that the verb can could be used in place of let as a gloss for mögen in each of these translations. For example, (18)(a) could be translated as "he can stay as long as we wants" as well as "let him stay as long as he wants."
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SARAH . FAGAN
gestärkten Hemden zur gutpolnischen Hälfte röten (Attested; Allard 1975:92) "What had my drum in common with the blood of Poland. Let them dye their documents and blotting papers with the fluid! Let them hurl the blue from their inkpots and refill them with red! Let them make red their handkerchiefs, their white, starched shirts up to the good Polish half!" (19)(a) Aber das ändert nichts. Das ändert nichts an meinen Entschlüssen. Dann mag er die Groschen behalten — es gibt höhere Dinge im Leben! (Attested; Allard 1975:90) "But that changes nothing. That changes nothing in respect to my resolves. Let him keep the money - there are higher things in life!" (b) 'Das ist ein Weltproblem, und wenn die Deutschen wieder ihre Dummheiten daraus ziehen, dann mögen sie das tun'. (Attested; Allard 1975:91) "That's a world problem, and, if the Germans draw their stupidities from it, then let them do it.'" (c) So mag sie also hingehen mit diesem Herrn Hall, mit ihm schlafen, mit ihm Kinder haben und selig werden. (Attested; Allard 1975:91) "So let her go with this Mr. Hall, let her sleep with him, let her have children with him and become happy with him." Because permission mögen, that is, deontic mögen, is marked syntactically, it is not necessary for epistemic mögen to be limited to stative predicates in order to avoid ambiguity. The syntax disambiguates a sentence with mögen, therefore the semantics of the verb is not required to do so. One does not have to limit epistemic mögen to clauses with stative predicates in order to avoid ambiguity because that function has been taken over by the syntax. If the restriction of epistemic modals to stative predicates has the function of disambiguating, we would expect this restriction to be lifted just in case something else took over this function. This is exactly what we appear to have with the verb mögen.12 2.3.2 English must and be bound to
12 Because dürfen is used epistemically only in the subjunctive, one would expect that subjunctive morphology would distinguish between epistemic and deontic meaning and that non-statives would therefore appear as frequently with epistemic dürfen as statives. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any corpus-based studies that are as extensive for dürfen as, for example, Laetz's (1969) study is for müssen or Allard's (1975) study for mögen. It is therefore virtually impossible to discuss frequency. Welke (1965:107), for example, provides only four examples of epistemic dürfen with a present infinitive, one of which is non-stative. Bech (1949:20) provides only two examples of epistemic dürfen with a present infinitive; both verbs are stative.
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The English modal must and the semi-modal be bound to provide additional evidence that the avoidance of ambiguity is a driving force behind the use of certain semantic classes in the complements of epistemic modals. Palmer (1990:53) notes that most of the examples of epistemic must in his corpus (the Survey of English Usage from University College London) involve states or activity in the present: (20)(a) The odds must be slightly with them in these tight, tense situations. (Attested; Palmer 1990:53) (b) You must find it quite a change being back in London. (Attested; Palmer 1990:53) (c) She is a bridesmaid and she must be all excitement at the moment. (Attested; Palmer 1990:53) (d) You must be running your brain in neutral. (Attested; Palmer 1990:53) Palmer also points out that there are no examples in his corpus with epistemic must that refer to states or activities in the future. He argues that must rarely occurs with future time reference because it would be interpreted deontically and thus potentially be misunderstood. A sentence like (21), for example, with future time reference, would be interpreted in terms of obligation (he is obligated to come tomorrow): (21) He must come tomorrow (Palmer 1990:54) Palmer argues that there are two ways in which this potential ambiguity can be avoided. First, a progressive verb form can be used, even though it does not signal duration, as in (22): (22) He must be coming tomorrow. (Palmer 1990:54) As noted above, this would appear to suggest that duration may not play a role in epistemic meaning. Second, the semi-modal be bound to can be used in place of mus,,as in (23): (23) He's bound to come tomorrow. According to Palmer (1990:55), be bound to has an epistemic sense in most of its occurrences. Consider the attested examples of be bound to in (24):
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(24) (a) It's bound to come out though, I think. . . . It's received such rave notices that somebody's bound to put it on. (Attested; Palmer 1990:55) (b) Self exploration and exploration in a small group at that level of complex ity and so on is bound, it seems to me, to generate special languages. (Attested; Palmer 1990:55) Palmer notes that the verb that appears with be bound to is, in most cases, a verb of action. Again, the evidence from be bound to suggests that stativity is not a necessary requirement for epistemic meaning. However, what is most important here is that be bound to appears to have the function of avoiding ambiguity. It allows one to use verbs of action and to refer to the future when expressing the epistemic notion of certainty without running the risk of ambiguity. Because be bound to is primarily epistemic in meaning, the devices that speakers use to disambiguate saliently ambiguous modals (stative predicates, the progressive) are not needed. 2.3.3 Summary There are no semantic requirements that epistemic modals place on their comple ments; these can be stative or non-stative. However, speakers typically use stative infinitives to signal epistemic meaning. Stative infinitives cannot occur as the complement of a deontic modal and therefore can only be associated with epistemic meaning. By using a stative infinitive as the complement of a modal, speakers can avoid the ambiguity between an epistemic and a deontic interpretation that a nonstative would bring about. With the German modal mögen, a stative predicate is not required to signal unambiguous epistemic meaning because the syntax serves this function. With the English modal must, ambiguity is avoided when referring to a future action by making use of a completely different verb, the semi-modal be bound to.13 3. The Progressive In English, the progressive is a factor that — in addition to stativity — appears to be associated with epistemic meaning. In section 2.1,I suggested that this could provide evidence that the notion of duration plays a crucial role in the epistemic use of modals. The notion of duration is important and will help explain the correlation between the progressive and epistemic modality, although, as we have seen, duration is not necessary, in all cases, for epistemic meaning. It is, however, necessary when
13 The avoidance of ambiguity plays a role in other aspects of the grammar; it is not limited to the modals. In German, for example, subjunctive II forms are used in indirect discourse in place of subjunctive I forms when these are identical to indicative forms.
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making epistemic judgments that refer to the present. For example, Palmer (1990:52) points out that there are no sentences with epistemic may in his corpus where there is reference to a single non-progressive present action, and he argues that no such sentences can be invented. He explains this (Palmer 1990:52) by pointing out that: we rarely report single actions in the present time, and we therefore are equally unlikely to comment on their possibility. In non-modal forms there are exceptions to this. The football commentator, for instance, uses the simple present to report events in progress — "and now Jones passes the ball" . . . But in such circumstances the events are immediately observable and epistemic judgments about them are inappropriate.
In making epistemic judgments about the present, then, the progressive is used to convey the notion of duration if the verb itself, that is, the infinitive, does not. The progressive is also used when making epistemic judgments about the future, as the example in (22) above demonstrates. As discussed above, this use of the progressive does not typically involve the notion of duration. According to Palmer (1990:57), the progressive is used in cases like this to indicate epistemic meaning, that is, to avoid the possibility of ambiguity. The progressive is not necessary for indicating epistemic judgments about the future, as the examples with epistemic may in (25) demonstrate. (25) (a) I may go up at the end of August. (Attested; Palmer 1990:52) (b) On the other hand he may say 'My dear fellow, of course we understand this problem and we would arrange it this way'. (Attested; Palmer 1990:52) However, it is used as one means of avoiding ambiguity between an epistemic and deontic interpretation. Again, we have an example of the avoidance of ambiguity motivating the association of a particular syntactic feature with epistemic meaning. 4. Past Infinitive A final factor to be considered here that plays a role in epistemic meaning is the correlation between past infinitives (perfect infinitives) and epistemic modals. In both German and English, past infinitives are typically associated with epistemic meaning, as the examples in (26) and (27) illustrate. (26) (a) Aber ich muß sie (die Katze) doch getroffen haben, denn sie hat geschrien, nur ein einziges Mal, aber so wie ein Kind. (Attested; Laetz 1969:73)
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"But it must be that I did hit the cat because it cried out, just once, but just like a little child." (b) Er mag sie auf irgendeine Weise überrumpelt haben. (Attested; Allard 1975:76) "In some way or another he may have taken her by surprise." (c) Das ließ wiederum den Schluß zu, daß der Täter Handschuhe getragen haben konnte. (Attested; Welke 1965:63) "On the other hand, that left the conclusion that the perpetrator could have worn gloves." (27) (a) You must have thought about that. (Attested; Coates 1983:45) (b) I may have put it there out of the way. (Attested; Coates 1983: 137) (c) You can't have just given up painting completely. (Attested; Coates 1983:101) Palmer provides an explanation for this correlation by pointing out why deontic modality cannot be associated with past meaning. (The past infinitives in the examples in (26) and (27) all express past meaning.) Palmer argues (1990:45) that deontic modality cannot be associated with a proposition in the past "because one cannot (in the present) permit or oblige someone to do something in the past". It is not the case, however, as some studies have claimed (Reinwein 1977; Fullerton 1984), that past infinitives are associated exclusively with epistemic modality, since past infinitives are not used exclusively to express past meaning. Laetz (1969) provides a number of examples where deontic müssen appears with a past infinitive. Some of his examples are provided in (28): (28) (a) Der Bewerber muß in diesen Sparten, zu denen die Kraftfahrt versicherung nicht zählt, bereits eine leitende Position ausgeübt haben. (Attested; Laetz 1969:12) "The applicant must already have held a leading position in these fields, which do not include car insurance." (b) Bewerber ohne große Staatsprüfung müssen neben der Diplom hauptprüfung eine mindestens 5 jährige . . . Tätigkeit im öffentlichen Dienst nachweisen und mindestens das 35. Lebensjahr vollendet haben. (Attested; Laetz 1969:12) "Applicants without the general state examination must, in addition to the certifying examination, have proof of . . . experience in public service of at least five years, and must have reached at least the age of 35."
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(c) Spätestens um elf Uhr muß sich die gesamtdeutsche Regierung gebildet haben. (Attested; Laetz 1969:12) "A government for all of Germany must have been formed by eleven o'clock at the latest." In discussing the example in (28)(c), Laetz notes (1969:13) that a past event is not involved. "The infinitive muß sich gebildet haben is past only in reference to the future point 'um elf Uhr,' and the muß expresses an urgent present necessity; in other words, it is a future perfect". Thus, although past infinitives are most often associated with epistemic meaning, a deontic interpretation cannot be ruled out unless the past infinitive expresses past meaning. The correlation between past infinitives and epistemic modals can therefore only be the result of the relatively high degree of frequency with which speakers use past infinitives to express past meaning. 5. Conclusion I have looked at some of the linguistic factors that play a role in determining whether a given modal in German and English will be interpreted epistemically or non-epistemically, and I have attempted to explain why these factors contribute to epistemic meaning. The main focus of the discussion has been on the correlation between stative predicates and the epistemic interpretation of modals. I have argued that although stativity is not necessary for epistemic meaning, it is associated with epistemic meaning because this association allows one to avoid ambiguity. I have provided evidence from several sources (the German modal mögen and the English modals must and be bound to) to support this. Stativity is free to be associated with epistemic modality in a non-ambiguous way because it cannot be associated with deontic modality. Deontic modals do not appear with stative predicates because it is not possible to give permission to someone or to obligate someone to do something over which he or she has no control. The fact that deontic modality is associated with agentive predicates supports the claim that the semantic notion of control plays a crucial role in deontic meaning. REFERENCES Allard, Francis X. 1975. A Structural and Semantic Analysis of the German Modal "mögen". Bern: Herbert Lang. Bech, Gunnar. 1949. "Das semantische System der deutschen Modalverba". Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Copenhague 4.3-46.
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Brünner, Gisela & Angelika Redder. 1983. Studien zur Verwendung der Modal verben. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Buscha, Joachim, Gertraud Heinrich & Irene Zoch. 1989. Modalverben. 7th ed. Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie. Coates, Jennifer. 1983. The Semantics of the Modal Auxiliaries. London & Canberra: Croom Helm. Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ehrman, Madeline Elizabeth. 1966. The Meanings of the Modals in Present-Day American English. The Hague: Mouton. Fullerton, G. Lee. 1977. "On Teaching the Subjective Use of Modal Auxiliaries". Die Unterrichtspraxis 10:2.73-78. ---. 1984. "Subjective Modals, Assessment Adverbs and Source Phrases in German". Studies in Descriptive German Grammar ed. by J. Alan Pfeffer, 97114. Heidelberg: Julius Groos. Joos, Martin. 1964. The English Verb: Form and meanings. Madison & Milwau kee: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. Kratzer, Angelika. 1976. "Was 'können' und 'müssen' bedeuten können müssen". Linguistische Berichte 42.1-28. Laetz, Hans Gottlieb. 1969. Analysis of the Syntactical and Semantic Usages of müssen in Contemporary German. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford Univ. Leech, Geoffrey N. 1971. Meaning and the English Verb. London: Longman. Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maxwell, Harry J. 1964. The Syntactical and Semantic Usages of sollen in Contemporary German. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford Univ. Öhlschläger, Günther. 1989. Zur Syntax und Semantik der Modalverben des Deutschen. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Palmer, Frank R. 1990. Modality and the English Modals. 2nd ed. London & New York: Longman. (1st ed., 1979.) Reinwein, Joachim. 1977. Modalverb-Syntax. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London & New York: Longman. Welke, Klaus. 1965. Untersuchungen zum System der Modalverben in der deut schen Sprache der Gegenwart. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
ARGUMENTS FOR TWO VERB-SECOND CLAUSE TYPES IN GERMANIC A COMPARISON OF YIDDISH AND GERMAN
JOHN R. TE VELDE Oklahoma State University 0. Introduction A current discussion among syntacticians who deal with Germanic languages concerns the structure of verb-second (V2) clauses: whether all should be derived by verb movement to the head position of the complementizer phrase (CP), as illustrated in (l)(a), or whether in those with initial subjects, the verb moves to the head of the inflection phrase (IP), to the left of VP, as in (l)(b): 0 ) (a) [CP den nj [C kennei ] [Ip ich noch gar nicht tj t i ] the man know I still at all not "That man I still don't know at all." (b) [Ip der Mann [Iwohnt\ ] [vp gerade gegenüber ti ]] the man lives directly opposite "The man lives directly across the street." Schwartz & Vikner (1989) and Vikner & Schwartz (1992) have presented arguments to support the assumptions behind (l)(a), referred to here as the 'standard theory' proposed by Koster (1975) for Dutch and by Thiersch (1978) for German. Soon thereafter came an opposing viewpoint in Travis (1984), refined and updated in Travis (1991). Recently Zwart (1991a), (1991b), (1993) and Abraham (1993b), from a historical perspective have presented some additional empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives in favor of this other viewpoint. Since the arguments on neither side seem to be conclusive at this point, I wish to present some further
* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Fourth Annual Michigan-Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable (April, 1993). Thanks go to those in attendance for their comments, in particular Wayne Harbert and Werner Abraham. Thanks also to David Braun for his judgments on Yiddish and other comments. I am also indebted to the reviewer, Professor Michel DeGraff, for pointing out inconsistencies and other errors as well as for providing insights and alternate view points. Remaining deficiencies are to be put to my account of course. Funding for research was provided by the College of Arts and Sciences, Oklahoma State University.
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analysis and perspectives in support of the alternative to the standard theory, using a comparison of German and Yiddish syntax. We begin with a review of the basic assumptions of the standard theory underly ing V2. The most crucial one is the generalization that verb movement in Germanic is always V-to-C, that is, from the underlying verb position (in VP) to the comp lementizer (C) position in CP. In embedded clauses, it was reasoned, V2 does not show up because a complementizer fills the position. One of Zwart's key questions in critique of this theory is: why does an element always occur before the finite verb, in the standard theory the Spec,CP position? The answer to this question will help us to sort out the differences between the elements which precede the finite verb and to account for the fact that subject-initial main clauses are fundamentally different from topic-initial clauses, both syntactically and pragmatically. We will see that actually two finite verb positions to the left of VP are needed to define V2, as Zwart argues. To approach this central point systematically, we will look in the first section at some relevant facts of Yiddish syntax which distinguish it from German and which we believe can be used to support the alternate theory. They have been presented and discussed frequently (Heycock & Santorini 1992, Vikner & Schwarz 1992, Diesing 1988 and 1990, den Besten & Moed-van Walraven 1986, et al.). In the second section we will consider some questions of V2 in Yiddish which have bearing on the third section where a possible theory for Yiddish V2, and potentially for all of Germanic, will be presented. In the fourth section we will conclude with some final thoughts on how this theory fits into a broad picture of sentence types in Germanic. 1. Yiddish Syntax 1.1 Properties relevant to V2. There are five properties of Yiddish syntax that will concern us initially. 1. Yiddish, as an SVO language, lacks the main clause/subordinate clause asymmetry evident in German in respect to V2: in both main and embedded declarative clauses the finite verb occupies a second position — compare (2)(a) and (2)(b); interrogatives require, just as in German, either verb-first (V1) or V2 as seen in (2)(c) and (2)(d), respectively. 2. The finite verb apparently does not need to move further than the I (of IP) position (medial in Yiddish) for V2 effects to occur. This is evident from (2)(e) where the wh-word does not count as the first element in an indirect wh-question. In other words, we see V2 effects without verb movement to of CP. Verb movement to occurs for instance in matrix wh-questions, as seen in (2)(d). 3. Noun phrase (NP) topicalization can occur in both main and embedded clauses, illustrated in (2)(f) and (2)(g) respectively, the latter example not found in German.
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Furthermore, the landing site for topicalization is distinct from the landing site for wh-fronting. A topicalized NP appears to occupy SpecJP — which must therefore be an A'-position — while a wh-word moves to Spec,CP, presumably.1 Cons equently, the finite verb does not move to in cases of topicalization (see (2)(g)) but does in wh-questions (see (2)(h)-(i)), and with topicalization the subject appears to remain in its underlying position within the VP. 4. Yiddish allows extraction from embedded wh-questions and from relative clauses even when the subject in that clause is not topicalized, that is, in Spec IP.2 This can be seen in (2)(h) and (2)(i), where in the latter — which has no equivalent in German — we see the topicalized NP di bikher. This fact supports the assumption in three that the landing site for topicalization is distinct from the landing site for whfronting in main clauses, given the fronting of the verb in wh-questions, but not in cases of topicalization, a point I will'defend further below. 5. We notice in a comparison of (2)(i) and (2)(j) that in embedded wh-questions the subject must occur in Spec,IP if the verb has been fronted to what one assumes is the position. When the verb does not front in embedded wh-questions, the subject, in contrast to the German subject for instance, does not need to occur in Spec,IP, but some element must, as seen in (2)(k), (2)(1) and (2)(m).3 (2) (a) [jp Ikh shik [vp avek dos bukh]} (vs.: *Haynt ikh shik ...) I send away the book. today I send... "I am sending the book away." "Today I am sending..." (b) [IP Avrom gloybt [cp az [IP Max shikt avek dos bukh ]]] Avrom believes that Max sends away the book. "Avrom believes that Max is sending the book away." (c) [cp Hot [IP er gezen Maxn?]] has he seen Max (ACC.) "Has he seen Max?" (d) [Cp Vuhin geyt [IP ir?]] where (DIRECTION) go you? "Where are you going?" 1 Diesing (1988: 130-132) argues that in main clauses the wh-element moves to SpecJP, while in embedded clauses it moves to Spec,CP. I will argue below that no such asymmetry exists. 2 Vikner & Schwarz (1992) argue that there is a distinction between extractions that involve arguments and those that involve adjuncts in terms of acceptability, the latter not acceptable, as in: (i) V.Viazoy hot zi gezogt az in shul hobn di kinder gelernt geshikhte? why has she said that in school have the children learned history "Why did she say that the children learned history in school?" Argument extraction is shown in (2)(h). 3 All examples, but not the syntactic analysis, are from Diesing 1990 except (2)(i) and (2)(j) which come from Heycock & Santorini 1992.
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(e) [IP Ikh veys nit [cpvuhin [Ip ir geyt]] I know not where (DIRECTION) you go "I don't know where you are going." (f) [IP Dos bukh shik ikh [vp avek]] the book send I away "I am sending the book away." (g) [IP Ikh veys nit [cp tsi [rp ot dos bukh hot er geleyent]]] I know not whether (Q-PRT) the book has he read "I don't know whether he has read the book." (h) [cp Vos hot [IP er nit gevolt [cp az mir zoln leyenen?]]] what has he not wanted that we are supposed read (INFINITIVE) "What didn't he want for us to read?" (i) [CP Ven/vu hot [IP er nit gevolt [cp az [IP ot di bikher zoln mir ley enen?]]] when/where has he not wanted that (PRT) the books are supposed we read (INFINITIVE)
"When/where didn't he want for us to read the books?" (J) *[CP V/vu hot [IP er nit gevolt [cp zoln [ IP ot di bikher mir leyenen?] (see (i)) (k) [IP Ikh fre g zikh [cp vos [IP es hot emitser gekoyft]]] I ask (REFL) what it (EXPL) has someone bought "I ask myself what someone has bought." (1) [IP Zi iz gekumen zen [cp ver [Ip frier vet kontshen]]] she is come see (INFINITIVE) who earlier would finish "She has come to see who would finish first/earlier." (m)[IP Ikh veys nit [cp ver [IP es iz gekumen]]] I know not who it (EXPL) is come "I don't know who has come." 1.2 Remaining questions about Yiddish. Those aspects of Yiddish syntax relating to V2 on which the cited analyses do not agree or for which they have no account are: (i) Is verb movement to independent of the V2 parameter, as Diesing (1990) claims? (ii) Is the Spec JP position an A or A'-position? Diesing claims it can be both, while Heycock & Santorini (1992) claim it is strictly an A'-position.
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39
(iii) Is this status of the SpecJP position crucial to the V2 parameter? Diesing (1990:77) assumes it is,4 (For further discussion of this question see te Velde (1994)). An initial conclusion we can draw from this quick summary, also pointed out by Diesing (1988:125), is that Yiddish allows a finite verb in second position (V2) to coexist with a complementizer, a basic fact that any account of Yiddish syntax must explain. In other words, in Yiddish a lexical complementizer and a finite verb do not compete for the same syntactic position; they may co-occur.5 By contrast, German and Dutch exhibit a classic case of complementary distribution of finite verb and complementizer (as observed already in Bach 1962 and Bierwisch 1963). Yiddish provides us therefore with a case in which the V2 parameter applies to IP, and IP, like CP, must in this case be considered a fully-saturated clause in the sense of Heycock (1991) and Webelhuth (1992). 2. Unifying Yiddish and German 2.1 Two functional head positions. Both the Diesing (1990) and the Heycock & Santorini (1992) account of V2 in Yiddish force us to come to terms with the status of the IP in verb-second languages. Even though Yiddish and German obviously show verb movement to C, attempting to generalize V-to-C for Yiddish, as in Vikner & Schwartz (1992), will not produce acceptable results. In what follows I will argue that the structure in (3) underlies both Yiddish and German, leaving open the question of whether SpecJP is A or A': 4
Diesing assumes that in order to explain the topicalization and wh-movement facts of Yiddish, we must assume that the SpecJP position can function as an A'- as well as an A-position and that the opposite setting of this parameter—assuming that the SpecJP position is only an A-position—will parametrize V2 as movement to I, but without allowing initial non-subject topics. She cites the Kru languages as evidence (1990:77) and leaves open the question of what parametrization might exist in a language like German which derives V2 by V-to-C which in Yiddish, the reader is reminded, is independent of V2 in her view. 5 Diesing (1988: 135) points out correctly that in certain construction types like the one in (i) we see the complementary distribution of a lexical complementizer and a finite verb when compared with (ii) (Diesing's (14)(a) and (14)(b)): (i) vos hot er nit gevolt az mir zoln leyenen? what has he not wanted that we are supposed to read "What didn't he want for us to read?" (ii) vos hot er nit gevolt zoln mir leyenen? "What did he want for us to read?" There is obviously a difference between this form of complementary distribution and what is evident in German, where a finite verb in second position stands in complementary distribution with a complementizer. 'Az' and 'zoln' arguably occupy initiai position in their respective clauses. Put another way, there is no equivalent of (ii) in German; only the option in (i) is available: (iiï)Was hat er nicht gewollt, daß wir lesen sollen? While the complementary distribution of finite verb and complementizer in Yiddish is confined to embedded clauses with V-to-C, in German it corresponds without exception to the main clausesubordinate clause asymmetry. See Section 3.2 for further discussion.
40
JOHN R. TE VELDE
I will assume — as do most accounts — that in all Yiddish declaratives the verb moves to the I position. I will also assume, contrary to Diesing (1990:41), that V-toC in Yiddish is not independent of V2, but results from essentially the same factors operative in German. I find that Diesing's assumption is problematic first of all because this type of movement is paradigmatically a V2 phenomenon in Germanic languages like German and Dutch; moreover, positing a different V2 parameter for Yiddish runs counter to a fundamental objective of generative grammar, namely, stating principles and parameters as simply and generally as possible so that, among other things, a more reasonable account of language acquisition can be gained. I will also argue, however, that V2 is more diverse than the generalized V-to-C account given in the standard theory which falls out of the complementary distribution of a lexical complementizer and a finite verb. In my view it seems desirable to assume that the parameters of Yiddish syntax which produce two different V2 effects might also be responsible for certain properties of German syntax such as the well-attested differences between matrix clauses which have an initial subject and those which have an initial non-subject, that is, some topicalized element in Spec,CP. Central to this approach toward unifying Germanic V2 phenomena will be the assumption that not just one but at least two finite verb positions are needed ahead of the VP. Only if we throw out the assumption — which has been the central feature of the standard theory — that all main clauses are derived by verb movement to can unification be achieved. To develop this argument, I begin with some evidence for Vto-I. 2.1 Evidence for V-to-I in Germanic Arguments going back to Travis (1984) in favor of distinguishing between two types of V2 clauses in German are many. They can be accounted for, as Travis argues, if one assumes that German has a medial I position, that is, a functional head
TWO VERB-SECOND CLAUSE TYPES IN GERMANIC
41
position between and VP which is the final landing site for verb movement in (at least) subject-initial clauses. Space constraints do not allow me to review Travis's arguments for a medial I; instead, I will consider some new arguments presented by Zwart (1992), as they provoke renewed consideration. 2.2 Zwart 1993 on AgrsP in Dutch6 Zwart (1993) and (1991a) draw on evidence from Dutch clitics, subject-verb agreement in dialects of Dutch, and complementizer agreement in Germanic dialects to support his theory of V-to-I. All of these present problems for the standard theory. He points out that subject clitics in Dutch immediately follow the lexical complementizer in embedded clauses and the verb in non-subject-initial main clauses, as seen in (4) (Zwart's (18) - (19)): (4) (a) ...dat 'k vandaag appels eet
vs.: ...dat vandaag *''k/iedereen appels eet
...that I today apples eat
that today I/everyone apples eat(s)
"...that I'm eating apples today."
"...that today I/everyone are/is eating apples."
(b) Natuurlijk eet ' vandaag appels
vs.: Natuurlijk eet vandaag *'k/iedereen ...
naturally eat I today apples "Of course I'm eating apples today."
In subject-initial main clauses, however, the subject clitic precedes the verb (Zwart's (21)): (5) () ' eet vandaag appels vs.: *Eet 'k vandaag appels I (CLITIC) eat today apples "Today I'm eating apples." (b) Waarom eet 'k vandaag appels Why eat I (CLITIC) today apples "Why am I eating apples today?" In embedded clauses, topicaiizations and wh-questions, the subject clitic cannot pre cede the complementizer or the verb (Zwart's (22)): (6) (a) *... 'k dat eet vandaag appels (b) *Natuurlijk 'k eet vandaag appels (c) *Waarom 'k eet vandaag appels? 6
Zwart assumes two Agr positions, Agrş and Agro, following Chomsky (1992). Abraham (1993a) argues that the two positions offer a possible explanation for clitic movement in dialects of German.
42
JOHN R. TE VELDE
A comparison of (5) and (6) suggests, according to Zwart, that the verb in a subjectinitial clause is not in Comp but in a lower functional head position. He states, "If the position of the subject clitic shows that the verb is in Comp in [4][b] and [5][b], it also shows that the verb is not in Comp in [5][a]" (1993: 308). Evidence from subject-verb agreement in dialects of Dutch and from the second person singular in Standard Dutch also suggests the presence of two functional head positions. In embedded clauses and in subject-initial main clauses, the verb ends in t;in non-subject-initial main clauses the verb is the bare stem (Zwart's (23) and (24)): (7) (a) ...dat jij naar huis gaatl*ga ...that you to house go "...that you're going home." (b) Jij gaat/*ga naar huis you go to house "You're going home." (8) (a) Vandaag ga/*gaat jij naar huis today go you to house "Today you're going home." (b) Wanneer ga/*gaat jij naar huis? when go you to house "When are you going home?" Zwart concludes (1993: 308) that the asymmetry in the clause structure between (7) and (8) suggests that the verbs are not all in the same position. Additional arguments, too lengthy to reproduce here, are also presented in Zwart (1993)7 The final conclusion he comes to is this: in the generalized V-to-C analysis, it is unclear what triggers verb movement and subject movement in subject-initial main clauses if these movements were to involve CP. The only way to account for them would be to assume that there is some feature of Comp that requires it to be lexicalized and which stipulates that the finite verb cannot be in the first position in V2 clauses (declaratives). Both of these meet with empirical and conceptual problems. All of the data and problems that he presents make perfect sense, however, if one assumes the two functional head positions indicated in (9) and that the subject moves nor farther than to Spec AgrP and the verb no farther than the Agr position,
7
See especially his (1993) and (1991a) discussions of complementizer agreement in Germanic dialects, indefinite clitics in certain dialects of Dutch, clitic climbing in Standard Dutch, and extraction out of embedded verb second clauses. Cases of the latter also exist in Yiddish and will be treated below.
TWO VERB-SECOND CLAUSE TYPES IN GERMANIC
43
unless topicalization occurs. In that case movement of an operator or operator-like element to Spec,CP triggers additional verb movement to C: (9)
2.2.2 Subject-object asymmetries in German In German many of the well-attested subject-object asymmetries (see Webelhuth 1992 for a summary) also provide evidence for the structure in (9). Coordinate constructions of the type in (10) also create problems for the generalized V-to-C analysis, as argued in te Velde (1992b). One is the violation of the coordinate structure constraint (CSC) on across-the-board deletion (or ellipsis) as discussed in Williams (1978): (10) [CP das Autoi[ [kauftej ] [IP Karl [vp in der Stadt i\ tj ]]] undv the car bought Karl in the city and [CP [zeigtek ] [IP e [vp es dann seinen Freunden tk ]]] showed it his friends "The car Karl bought in town and then showed it to his friends." If one assumes that not all verb-second clauses are CPs, then cases of coordinate asymmetry follow; in some cases cross-categorial coordination as discussed in Sag et al. (1985) is necessary, as in (11):8 (11) [cp das Autoi [C kauftej][Agrp Karlk [Agr tj' ] vp [in der Stadt ti, tj]]] und [AgrP=CP ek[ Agr=c zeigteti] vp[es seinen Freunden,]]] (see 10)
8 Heycock and Kroch (1993) argue against the generalized use of cross-categorial coordination to account for coordinate structures involving ellipsis. Space limitations do not allow me to present their counterarguments.
44
JOHN R. TE VELDE
For the analysis in (11) we need to assume that the subject Karl in the first conjunct is to be interpreted in the second conjunct by coindexation.9 In an alternate analysis within the standard theory, one of the across-the-board violations seen in (10) can be eliminated, but then one must assume that coordination can occur at the intermediate C' level, a questionable assumption at best, and we are still left with an asymmetrical gap in one IP and an asymmetrical trace in the VP, both violating the CSC: (12) [cp das Autoi[ [c kauftej ] und [ zeigtek ] [Agrp (see 10)
[Agrp Karl [γρ in der Stadt t¡ tj ]]] e [vp es seinen Freunden tk ]]]
In another example of coordinate asymmetry, seen in (13), the V-to-C analysis again runs into the difficulties described above: (13) [CP wenn [IP ich ihr [γρ den Ring gebe ]] und if I her the ring give and [CP siei\ [c heiratetj [IP ti tj [vp den anderen tj ]] ... she marries the other (MASC.) "If I give her the ring and she marries the other guy...." In the approach supported here, the problems are reduced, if not eliminated outright: (14) [CP Wenn [AgrP ich ihr den Ring gebe ]und[AgraPsie heiratet den anderen ]] (see 13) The only additional assumption I must make is that the position of the finite verb within AgrP has no bearing on the symmetry requirements of coordination, as defended in te Velde (1992b). 2.2.3 Clause Subjunction in German Further evidence for the need to distinguish object-initial main clauses from subject-initial and other main clauses comes from cases of clause subjunction in German. Consider the examples in (15) where the unacceptable constructions
9
Expanding the analysis of AgrP to include AgrgP and AgroP, in which case the shared subject occupies Spec,Agrs and the conjuncts are CP and AgroP, does not alter this coindexation. Topicalization of das Auto does not violate the CSC since coordinate symmetry is maintained.
TWO VERB-SECOND CLAUSE TYPES IN GERMANIC
45
consistently show that a main clause may have an initial subject or certain adverbials, but not an initial object, when preceded by a fronted embedded clause: (15) (a) Wäre er ein Verwunschener, ich wäre länger geblieben... were he a bewitched (person), I were longer stayed... "If he were a bewitched person, I would have stayed longer..." (from See geister, Aichinger (1992)) (b) *Wäre er ein Verwunschener, den hätte ich nicht viel länger gesehen ..., that one (MASC.) had I not much longer seen "...I wouldn't have seen HIM much longer." (c) Wäre er ein Verwunschener, dann hätte ich ihn nicht viel länger gesehen ..., then had I him not much longer seen "...then I wouldn't have seen him much longer." (d) Sei die Gefahr auch noch so groß, ich werde mich nicht furchten be the danger also yet so great, I will myself not fear "Even if the danger is still great, I will not be afraid." (e) ??Sei die Gefahr auch noch so groß, trotzdem werde ich keine Angst haben "..., nevertheless will I have no fear." (f) Als der Tag anbrach, da schickte der König Kundschafter aus.. 10 as the day to-broke, there sent the king scouts out... "As day broke, the King sent out scouts." (g) *Als der Tag anbrach, Kundschafter schickte der König aus... (see (f)) In the hypothesis supported here, the main clauses in acceptable constructions represent a different structure: because they are not CPs but have an available landing site for clause fronting, they allow this type of clause subjunction. I will return to consider these constructions once again below. For the moment I point out simply that the subject-initial main clauses behave differently with respect to clause fronting than do the other main clauses. 2.2.4 The Properties of es in German Additional support for two functional head positions as in (9) can be gained from an analysis of the properties of es, both as a full pronoun and as an expletive. Such analysis has been used to support both sides of the V2 issue. Vikner and Schwartz 10
This is a construction commonly found in Märchen, e.g., Zaunkönig.
46
JOHNR. TE VELDE
(1992) concede that the distribution of stressed versus unstressed pronouns in general may favor the account supported here because an easy explanation is available for the asymmetry between unstressed subject pronouns and unstressed object pronouns: only the former may occur in initial position. But they argue that the distribution of unstressed es clearly shows the need for two subject positions, one in Spec,IP for non-expletive es as in (16)(a) and one in Spec,CP for the expletive variety, as in (16)(b):n (16)(a) Es (i.e. das Kind) hat das Brot gegessen. it (the child) has the bread eaten "The child has eaten the bread." (b) Es ist ein Junge gekommen. it is a boy come "A boy has come/came." They argue that in the analysis supported here only one position is available, namely Spec,IP. This is not the case, however, as explained already in Travis (1984) where the option is left open for a subject to front to Spec,CP in case of topicalization. In like manner nothing prevents expletive es from fronting to or later deriving in Spec,CP in the approach supported here (see note 13). One analysis not presented anywhere to my knowledge which accounts for all the facts on es cited by Vikner & Schwartz can be formulated this way: only elements which can carry stress can bind a trace. The correlation between A-position and no emphatic stress on the one hand and A'-position and emphatic stress on the other is this: elements removed from their base, or D-structure, position typically require stress to mark their function as an operator: (17) (a) Weni kennst du noch nicht ti whom know you yet not "Who don't you know yet?" (b) Den Mann/den/ihni kenne ich noch nicht ti the man/that one/him know I yet not "That man/that guy/him I don't know yet." (c) Sie ist ti einkaufen gegangen ohne die Kinderi she is shopping gone without the children "She went shopping without the children." 1 1 Note that Vikner and Schwarz (1992) assume that in ' Es iz gekumen a jingV "there is come a boy' the 'es' occurs in Spec,CP, following their generalized V-to-C for Yiddish.
TWO VERB-SECOND CLAUSE TYPES IN GERMANIC
47
(d) Machi e ti die Tür schnell zu make the door quickly to "Close the door quickly" (e) Rufsti du ti noch heute an, dann ... call you yet today up, then... "If you call yet today, then..." Pronominal es always occurs in Spec,AgrP and is never fronted to Spec,CP, while expletive es always occurs in Spec, CP, an A'-position that requires emphatic stress, but only on elements which bind a trace. Neither type of es can carry emphatic stress and neither one must ever bind a trace.12 Subjects do not typically require any stress; if they happen to be stressed, one can assume that they have been fronted to Spec,CP as any other NP. Otherwise I will assume, following Travis (1984) and (1991) and Zwart (1993) that they occur in Spec AgrP, an A-position in German. 2.2.5 A cross-Germanic subject-object asymmetry Another form of subject-object asymmetry which is clearly evident in both German and Yiddish and supports the analysis in (9) is illustrated in (18). (18) (a) Vemen hot er nit gevolt zol ikh gebn ot dos bukh whom has he not wanted is supposed I give prt. the book "To whom has he not wanted me to give the book." (b) * Vemen hot er nit gevolt zol ot dos bukh ikh gebn (see (a); compare (2i) and (2j)) (c) Wem hat er nicht gewollt, daß ich das Buch geben soll? whom has he not wanted, that I the book give am supposed to "To whom has he not wanted me to give the book?" (d) *Wem hat er nicht gewollt, daß das Buch ich geben soll? (see ()) I will overlook the irrelevant syntactic differences and focus on just one property: topicalization. Notice that it is impossible in both Yiddish and German matrix whquestions. From this fact three preliminary conclusions are drawn: (i) there is a 12 This analysis of es may imply that es must be base-generated in Spec,CP, with the requirement that Spec,CP must be an A-position. One can avoid these undesirable consequences if one assumes, following the principles of economy of derivation (Chomsky 1991) that es appears in Spec,CP under the condition that Spec,CP be marked lexically when the S is [+declarative] and V-to-C has occurred without topicalization (see also note 19). This lexical realization takes place in PF, not in the base. For further discussion and other views, see the articles in Grewendorf & Sternefeld, eds. (1990) and in Cardinaletti (1992).
48
JOHN R. TE VELDE
requirement on where the subject may occur, a position that is otherwise available for topicalization in Yiddish, and (ii) this subject position is external to the VP and (iii) finite verb movement is required over the subject position. These characteristics are easier to account for if one assumes (9), there is a medial functional head position, and that the V+Agr which occupies it governs the subject position in a Spec-head relation, as argued in Chomsky (1992). This relation is impossible, as Zwart points out, if Agr is to the right of the clause-final verb position in German, as is assumed in the standard theory.13 Below I continue with a brief account of why both of these functional head positions are needed in Yiddish V2. Thereafter I will consider how the account can be applied to German. 3. V2 in Yiddish The need for two functional head positions in Yiddish is more obvious, as we have already seen from the examples in (2). But can the analysis of V2 proposed here provide an answer to the question raised in section 1.2: Is V-to-C part of the normally assumed V2 property? To answer this question, we need to consider some properties of topicalization in Yiddish. 3.1 Topicalization in Yiddish In most treatments of Yiddish (e.g., Heycock & Santorini 1992, Diesing 1990) the assumption is made that a topic like dos bukh in (2)(f) Dos bukh shik ikh avek lands in Spec,IP by A'- movement. What Yiddish gains from having an A' SpecJP position, according to Heycock & Santorini, is a way to account for a type of subjectobject asymmetry that shows up in matrix wh-questions, as seen in (19), an analysis of the constructions in (18) and (2)(g);14 (19) (a) [cp Vemeni hot er nit gevolt [cp ti [ c 'zol [Ip ikhj [vρ tj gebn i\ ot dos bukh ]]]]]
(see 18) (b) *[cp Vn hot er nit gevolt [cp ti [c' zol [IP ot dos h[vp ikh gebn ti tj ]]]]] (c) [cp ikh veys nit [cp tsi[IPot dos bukh hot [γρ er geleyent ]]]] I know not whether Q-prt. the book has he read
13 Recall that this form of topicalization (with wh-fronting to Spec,CP of the matrix clause) is allowed in Yiddish when a complementizer occurs in of CP, as seen in (2)(i) Ven/vu hot er nit gevolt az ot di bikher zoln mir leyenen? A complementizer is inserted in D-structure and has no effect on licensing since it is a weak Comp. See Section 3.1 for further details. 14 Heycock and Santorini (1992) have shown that the ungrammaticality of (19)(b) is not due to a violation of Relativized Minimality proposed by Rizzi (1990a).
TWO VERB-SECOND CLAUSE TYPES IN GERMANIC
49
These examples of topicalization in Yiddish reemphasize that (i) V2 is not restricted to V-to-C and (ii) a medial Agr position is central to accounting for V2 in Yiddish; otherwise there would be no landing-site for hot in (19)(c). What motivates V-toAgr? If one assumes that Yiddish, in contrast to English, has strong Agr, "strong" in the sense of "rich" used by Pollack (1989) (see also Chomsky 1991: 423) and discussed in Zwart (1992) and related papers on functional heads, then V-to-Agr occurs to satisfy the requirement that Agr must be morphologically or lexically marked (filled) in overt structure. Once Agr is thus marked, it allows the element in Spec AgrP to head an Α-chain. Consequently, Spec,CP is not available as a landing site for the head of an Α-chain. Only if of CP is the site of strong Agr can this occur. When a Yiddish subject fronts to Spec,AgrP it presumably heads an A-chain as does a verbal argument. 15 Heycock & Santormi present arguments for SpecJP /AgrP being strictly an A'-position. I will leave this discussion to further research.16 3.2 Wh-questions in German To-account for the requirement illustrated by (19) (a) that the subject must occupy Spec AgrP when V-to-C occurs in Yiddish, I draw on a comparison of matrix and embedded questions in Yiddish and German. In (19)(b) we see that the fronted NP ot dos bukh renders the construction unacceptable when the finite verb is in . This is at first sight a surprising requirement on Yiddish which as we have seen allows topicalization in embedded clauses —including questions introduced by a complementizer (see (19)(c)). Heycock & Santorini explain this subject-object asymmetry in terms of licensing; my account below will be similar. 17 We begin with
15 The difference between Yiddish and German in respect to subject agreement and the Spec,AgrP position can be reduced to one point: a paradigmatic German subject must occupy Spec AgrP for agreement with V+Agr whereas a Yiddish subject in Spec,VP is not checked overtly by V+Agr. The reason is that Yiddish does not have a strong N-feature on its Agr. 16 We could speculate and make the assumptions for German that Heycock & Santorini (1992) do for Yiddish, namely, that German has a non-thematic Spec,JP (Spec,AgrP) position (Höhle 1990), and that this position is licensed in S-structure, whereas thematic positions in the VP are licensed in D-structure, and that the subject position in German is also VP internal. There is a crucial difference between German and Yiddish which must be considered in making this assumption, namely, the landing site for topicalization in German is always Spec,CP, whereas in Yiddish it appears to be SpecJP (but see Vikner & Schwartz 1992). See also notes 14 and 19. 17 They assume that Spec,IP is licensed in Yiddish by nominative case-assignment which occurs in S-structure when the finite verb, the case assigner, is fronted to of CP. Otherwise nominative case assignment occurs by theta-role assignment in D-structure. Heycock and Santorini make several assumptions which force the licensing of a subject position to occur in S-structure when the finite verb has been fronted. The most important one is: when the verb is fronted, "considerations of minimality prevent case from being assigned to the underlying subject position, since I o is a closer potential head-governor. Nominative case must therefore be assigned to SpecJP, since otherwise a well-formedness condition requiring a one-to-one relationship between case-assigners and casereceivers would not be met (Platzack & Holmberg 1990,8)" (1992: 8). One must keep in mind that since Spec,IP is nonthematic in Yiddish in their view, it cannot be licensed in D-structure by thetarole assignment.
50
JOHNR. TE VELDE
a comparison of the two elements, one a finite verb, the other a complementizer, which are most closely linked to this asymmetry. When zol fronts to in (19)(a) it has the same effect as a complementizer or a finite verb in German; neither allows any element in the Spec AgrP position except a subject. We could assume, therefore, that zol, like any finite verb or complementizer in in German, places the requirement on the subject in terms of licensing as explained in section 3.3. In Yiddish, we note, the rule for V2 as in the main clause of (19) (a) hot er nit g evolt cannot result from the same factors which produce V2 in (19)(c) where there is a topicalized object in an embedded wh-question. Why the two different initial elements in the embedded clauses, one a complementizer and the other a verb, do not result from or cause the same V2 effects is a question which must be answered within an account of verb movement in Yiddish. 18 We move on then to a comparison of verb movement to in Yiddish and German in search of a solution. 3.3 V-to-C in Yiddish and German 3.3.1 Lack of AGR to COMP in Yiddish V-to-Agr occurs in Yiddish to satisfy a morphological requirement on the Vfeature of Agr as +strong. V+Agr heads an Α-chain and assigns case to the element in Spec,AgrP, allowing it to be available as a landing site for NP topicalization. In German, topicalization must occur by movement to Spec,CP, as argued in all versions of the standard theory for German. V-to-C may occur in both Yiddish and German whenever a lexical complementizer does not occupy the position, and to that extent there is a complementary distribu tion of the two elements. Overlooking some crucial differences between Yiddish and German that result from V-to-C (see note 6), I focus on a similarity in the syntactic relations that exist in a German embedded clause with a complementizer in C, and a Yiddish embedded clause with a finite verb in C. Both Yiddish and German require that Spec,AgrP be occupied by a subject in these clauses. Evidently German Comp is able to license the Spec AgrP position, just as the finite verb with Agr in Yiddish can, both bearing the feature [+Agr]. German Comp, as was argued originally by Platzack
18 In the standard theory for German, V-to-C is sometimes (see Taraldsen 1986: 17) assumed to be a result of NP movement to Spec,CP (topicalization).The question arises: Does topicalization in Yiddish force V-to-Agr, or are there cases of movement to Spec,AgrP which clearly do not result from topicalization? This question is virtually impossible to answer for Yiddish as is whether topicalization forces verb movement because V-to-Agr always occurs. But there is one clue: We note that in embedded questions an expletive es must appear in Spec AgrP if no topicalization occurs (if for instance the subject, in the form of a wh-word, has been fronted to Spec,CP e.g.: Ikh veys nit [CP ver [AgrP es iz gekumen ]] (Diesing 1990, example 46, my phrase markers). If one assumes that the filling of Spec AgrP with es is not a case of topicalization in that es binds nothing, and therefore cannot be a result of movement, then V-to-Agr is not a result of topicalization in this case, and therefore not generally.
TWO VERB-SECOND CLAUSE TYPES IN GERMANIC
51
(1983) and (1986), presumably can bear the agreement features which percolate up to it. Yiddish Comp, as supported by the lack of any evidence of complementizer agreement, cannot; neither can English Comp. Although Standard German does not show obvious complementizer agreement, it has the properties of a strong Comp which is able to license Spec,AgrP (see Chomsky 1991, Pollack 1989, et al.). Agreement between V+Agr (in AgrP) and the subject, a Spec-head relation, exists in Yiddish main and embedded declarative clauses (hence V2 in both), and in subjectinitial main clauses in German, as illustrated in (20): (20)(a) Syntactic relations for licensing of the subject position when V-to-Agr occurs in Yiddish main & embedded declaratives and German subjectinitial main clauses (declaratives): [cpXP [Agrp (Spec) Agrfe»[VP
I
I
e
NP
...]]]]
I V(head)
[+nom] licenser (b) Syntactic relations for licensing of the subject position (Spec,AgrP) in German subordinate clauses (complementizer in C) and in German and Yiddish clauses with V-to-C: Ger:
[CPXP C [Agrp (Spec) ti fa» [VP ...]]]]
I
I
Comp+Agrj
I
NP (head)
[+nom] licenser by virtue of Agr Both: [ C P X P [AgrP (Spec) ti [TP [VP...]]]] V+Agri
NP (head)
I [+nom] licenser by virtue of Agr The answer to the question why Yiddish Comp and V+Agr as initial elements in embedded clauses differ in respect to topicalization is found, therefore, in the nature of Yiddish Comp. In the absence of its licensing ability, there is no need for subject fronting to Spec AgrP; topicalization may proceed, therefore, in constructions like:
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JOHN R. TE VELDE
(2)(g)
(Ikh veys nit) tsi ot dos bukh hot er geleyent. I know not whether (Q-PRT) the book has he read "I don't know whether he has read the book."
Further empirical evidence that subject fronting to Spec,Agr actually occurs in Yiddish embedded clauses with V-to-C can be found in constructions like: (21) (a) Vu hot er nit gevolt [cp zol [¡p (*frier) ikh dos bukh ley enen?]] where has he not wanted am supposed to earlier I the book read 'Where has he not wanted me to have read the book earlier?' If ikh were occupying a licensed base position in Spec,VP in (21)(a), then an adverb like frier should be allowed in SpecAgrP· Since topicalization to Spec Agr is not allowed with Yiddish V-to-C, but can occur in the absence of V-to-C, we must conclude that subject fronting to Spec,AgrP is required when V-to-C occurs. Obligatory subject fronting can be explained in terms of feature checking which must proceed throughout the derivation: If the subject were to remain in the Spec,VP position in a Yiddish construction like (21)(a), then local feature checking would not be possible, as defined in Chomsky 1992: 8-9, when V+Agr occupies Diesing (1988: 137) points out that if a complementizer—which cannot license a specifier position in Yiddish—occurs in the embedded clause of a construction like (21)(b) instead of a verb, the ECP violation in the form of an unlicensed SpecAgrP can be marginally saved by an expletive es (Diesing's (16)(c)): (21) (b) IVer [hot er moyre az es vet tj kumen? who has he fear that it (expl.) will come "Who does he fear will come?" Notice that in German an expletive is not sufficient to save an equivalent construction: (21) (c) * Weri hat er Angst tj' daß es /t\ kommen wird? ( c')Wer\ hat er Angst tj wird kommen? The expletive es is not permitted in (21)(c) because a trace of the subject is required in SpecAgrP; but an Α-chain headed by wer is also out. In the Yiddish equivalent (21)(b) the Α-chain can coexist with es, despite the complementizer az. Many accounts of the so-called 'that-trace effect' as seen in (21)(c) have been proposed (see Haegeman 1991 for a summary). The fact that this effect is not as strong in Yiddish
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as it is in German undoubtedly has to do with the strong Comp parameter of German. Whereas no licensing relation exists between the Yiddish az and the subject, such a relation does exist in German, according to what has been proposed here. This relation cannot be nested in and/or crossed with the Α-chain headed by wer. By contrast (see (21)(c')), without daß and its relation to Spec,AgrP, the Α-chain can exists19 In contrast to German, wh-elements like vos in (21)(d) cooccur with V-to-Agr, just as with a complementizer (see (21)(b)), i.e., there is no complementary distribution of either wh-movement or a complementizer and V-to-Agr: (21) (d) Ikh freg zikh vos es hot emitser gekoyft (see the acceptability level of (21)(b)) I ask myself what it (EXPL.) has someone bought "I'm asking myself what someone bought." The syntactic relations that derive in embedded wh-clauses in Yiddish are not crossed, in contrast to what happens in German embedded clauses like (21)(c).20 Apparently Yiddish wh-elements like vos have some effect on licensing, if we take the higher acceptability level as an indication of this. Nevertheless, we must account for the licensing of SpecAgrP just as in main clauses, following the approach proposed here. If one assumes that a German whelement, like the Yiddish equivalent, has an effect on licensing, then an account for both languages is available. This account would be that a Q-morpheme occupies (assumed for Yiddish by Diesing 1988) and is able to bear Agr features, just as a complementizer in German. Before I accept this proposal, I consider one other difference between the Yiddish and German examples. Note that in German no verb movement occurs in embedded wh-questions (cf. (21)(d)): (21) (e) Ich frage mich, was jemand gekauft hat. There are two options available for explaining the lack of V-to-Agr fronting in (21)(e). One, we could posit an additional functional head position to the right of V in 19 I am not indicating a possible intermediate landing site in Spec,CP in (21c'). Also, I have not indicated any syntactic relation between wird and what is typically assumed to be its underlying, clause-final position. 20 (21)(d) does not require the additional movement to Spec,CP of the matrix clause, but even without that I would expect a crossing of syntactic paths in (21)(d) similar to what occurs in (21)(c), the German equivalent of (21)(b). In Chomsky (1992) paths or chains are supposed to cross with movement to Agr-positions, but not with wh-movement.
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German (see note 29). This position would then be available to [+Agr] as a more economical alternative when there is no need for verb fronting to the other Agr position for reasons of licensing, as in embedded clauses. The second way to explain the lack of fronting would be via a Q-morpheme in in embedded questions, as proposed above. This Q-morpheme would then have to be responsible—in combina tion with the syntactic properties of WH in German—to bear Agr features for satisfying the licensing requirements discussed earlier, as does Comp+Agr or V+Agr. This option is not available in the approach taken here, however; earlier it was claimed (Section 3.1) that strong features must be morphologically or lexically marked in overt structure. A Q-morpheme does not satisfy this requirement.21 The first option, a functional head position to the right of V in German, is also problemat ic in this approach for this reason: Comp would not be able to license Spec AgrP unl,ss Agr moves to (and does not move to the clause-final functional head position). The most likely reason for the lack of V-to-Agr in German subordinate clauses (versus embedded questions like (21)(e)) is this: the V is not needed for licensing Spec Agr; Comp+Agr can do it. Inversely, the finite verb is needed in main clauses for this licensing, hence V-to-Agr in them. But what bears [+Agr] in embedded questions? This dilemma involves explaining what role a medial functional head position, the locus of [+Agr] in German main clauses, plays in embedded interrogatives and relative clauses which do not require a complementizer. A tempting solution is to assume that in these cases the interrogative or relative pronoun occurs in C, just as a complementizer. There is little empirical support for this proposal, however, and some counterevidence does exist, as for instance the fact that some relative pronouns are preceded by a preposition (e.g., durch den...), forming a maximal phrase which could not occupy the position. The lack of V-to-Agr in embedded clauses is a complex issue, as pointed out by Zwart (1993:305 note 10). It may well be that a morheme like Q is sufficient to satisfy the morphological requirement on C. Space limitations do not allow me to pursue this matter here. 3.3.2 Expletive es and syntactic saturation in Germanic What follows from the weak versus strong complementizer parameter is the distribution of expletive es in each language. In Yiddish expletive es is required in subordinate clauses in Spec AgrP when the subject does not occur there, as seen in (21)(d). Presumably this operator position must be lexically filled in declaratives marked 'indicative' (see Section 3.3.6). In German, as I argued earlier, expletive es shows up in Spec,CP for the same reason when no topicalization occurs. In both 21
1 am indebted to the reviewer, Michel DeGraff, for this observation.
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languages Spec,AgrP must always be filled, but in Yiddish, because of its complementizer parameter, Spec AgrP behaves like Spec,CP when V-to-C does not occur, but cannot behave this way (i.e., allow an expletive) when V-to-C does occur because then, as in German, the subject must be licensed in Spec,AgrP. As stated earlier, in Yiddish, but not in German, a finite verb is always required in (medial) Agr when it does not move to C, even when a complementizer is present .22 In those cases when the verb moves to in Yiddish, the subject must front to Spec,AgrP; in the absence of V-to-C an expletive is not always allowed in Spec AgrP, however, but only in embedded clauses with V-to-Agr. The presence of the expletive is consistent with the VO parameter in Yiddish (see Section 4 also) which makes possible a Spec-head relation, necessary for feature checking, between the locus of V-trace after verb raising and Spec,VP, the locus of the subject when expletive es occurs in Spec,AgrP. The es serves to syntactically saturate the embedded clause, as defended in Heycock 1991. The matter of syntactic saturation can be put into the perspective of our earlier discussion of the complementizer parameter. I have argued that V-to-C occurs in Yiddish because its Comp is weak. The lack of the same complementary distribution in Yiddish between a finite verb and a complementizer that is evident in German must be attributed, as we would expect, to the complementizer parameter. Because Agr must remain in AgrP whenever V-to-C doesn't occur—and V-to-C occurs only in non-declaratives (see section 3.3.4)—CP does not determine the level of syntactic saturation in Yiddish declaratives. The Yiddish CP cannot be saturated as an [+S] unless Agr moves to .23 We see, therefore, that the complementary distribution of finite verb and com plementizer in German and Dutch is not a requirement for V2. Rather, this syntactic
22
Lexical marking by an expletive like es is normally considered necessary to satisfy a morphologi cal requirement when a theta position would otherwise be empty. If that is the case in Yiddish, then there is an argument for Spec,AgrP as a theta position. The problem with this explanation, how ever, is that subject fronting should be required to satisfy this requirement, and object fronting should be inappropriate. As the data indicate, this is not the case; in fact, the expletive es occurs in embedded questions even when the subject could move to the Spec,AgrPposition, as we see in (2)(k). Moreover, if Spec,AgrP were an A position only in those cases when a subject occurred or could occur in it, as Diesing (1990) claims, then the default for the filling of Spec AgrP in contexts like her (48) should be subject fronting rather than es insertion. 23 Expletive es in Yiddish reflects an asymmetry between main and embedded questions: es may occupy the SpecAgrP position in embedded questions, but not in matrix questions, the former involving verb raising only as far as Agr (in contrast to matrix questions in which the verb moves to C), making AgrP [+S]. However, AgrP cannot be [+S] unless the SpecAgrP position is lexically filled. In German expletive es is not allowed in embedded questions because the matrix verb occupies the position and must either check a wh-element or a Q-morpheme in Spec,CP. In Yiddish (non-wh) embedded questions the verb does not move to as it does in wh-questions because there is no [+wh] element to be checked by the finite verb. In Yiddish Comp is not strong (which would otherwise make CP [+S]); therefore the expletive es must occur in Spec,grP if the subject doesn't to make AgrP [+S].
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characteristic can be reduced to fixed principles and language-specific choices of parameters and is not a parameter in itself. We need to look beyond its prima facie qualities and consider that this characteristic can have any number of underlying causes, as Zwart (1993: 305) concludes from his analysis also. 3.3.3 Clause subjunction in German: An account In Section 2.2.3 we saw that a V2 clause preceded by an embedded clause sometimes allows a subject, but not an object, to precede the finite verb in German. If we take the assumptions of Vikner & Schwartz (1992) who support the standard theory, then we have no way to make a syntactic distinction between the clauses types, those with initial subjects versus the others. Both are CPs in their theory. If we take the assumptions in Zwart (1993), we have the option of explaining the distinction in syntactic terms. With them we can'rule out the bad sentences because in them there is no landing site for embedded clause topicalization, while in the good ones we have the normal landing site available, given that the subject occupies the Spec AgrP position:24 (22)(a) *[cp wäre er ein Verwunschener ] [cp den hätte ich nicht...gesehen ] were he a bewitched person, that one {masc. acc) had I not ...seen "If he were a bewitched person, I wouldn't have seen HIM." (b) [CP [CP wäre er ein Verwunschener ]¡ [IP ich wäre länger geblieben i\ ]] ... I were longer stayed "If he were a bewitched person, I would have stayed longer." 3.3.4 Verb second, mood markers and economy of derivation A central feature of a theory like the one supported here for V2 is that it accounts for a basic difference between matrix clauses with topicalization and those without it.
24
Constructions of the type in (i) and (ii) may involve V-to-C, but then we are left with the dilemma of where the subordinate clause lands when topicalization applies to it. If one assumes that the initial element in the main clause is adjoined to AgrP and no V-to-C occurred, then Spec,CP is available for the subordinate clause. (i) Wäre er ein Verwunschener, dann wäre ich länger geblieben (ii) Als der Tag anbrach, da schickte der König Kundschafter aus Constructions of this nature must, of course, be distinguished from the type illustrated in (iii): (iii) Weil er ein Verwunschener ist, werde ich ihn wohl nicht sehen In these we have essentially the same syntactic structure, but without the option of an adjoined adverbial. Why? Conditional and concessive clauses of the type in (i) and narrative clauses of the type in (ii) do not carry the same features as the embedded 'weil'-clause in (iii) which has more the properties of an operator and does not allow any element, not even a subject, to precede the verb in the main clause. I will assume that when an operator moves to Spec,CP, it cannot pass an adjoined element like dann or da as in (i) and (ii) for reasons which cannot be explored here.
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In this theory topicalization is fundamentally a stylistic rule, that is, an optional movement rule which should not be put on par with a syntactic operation which generates a subject in its (surface or underlying) subject position, given the (surface and underlying) asymmetries between subjects and objects (see Haftka 1994 for several analyses of topicalization as a stylistic rule). Much of this can be reduced to the fact that indicative main clauses are basic, and in a declarative sentence marked indicative the elements should be in their underlying positions, those which are derived by the maximum in economy of derivation and representation in the spirit of Chomsky (1991). Constructions in other moods require more derivation, central to which is verb movement to (see Poeppel & Wexler 1993 for further discussion and potential counterarguments). We see this in not only German, but also in other languages with a partial or full V2 parameter. In Yiddish, conditionals appear to require V-to-C:25 (23)(a) vet er humen morgn,vel ikh kumen oykh will he come tomorrow, will I come also "If he comes tomorrow, I will come too." (b) iz dos a guter restoran, vel ikh dortn avade esn is that a good restaurant, will I there certainly eat "If that's a good restaurant, I will certainly eat there." Imperatives also appear to require V-to-C: (24)(a) gey morgn tsum dokter! go tomorrow to the doctor "Go to the doctor tomorrow!" (b) zol er geyn in dr'erd araynl supposed to go into the earth in (PRT.) "Go to hell!" My reason for assuming that V-to-C occurs in these constructions is theory-internal but based on empirical evidence: in no main clause does a finite verb occur in initial position other than in interrogatives (see (2)(c)). In these "Yiddish"- topicalization (to Spec AgrP) is not allowed:26 (25)(a) *Hot Maksn Avrom gezen? (cf: Hot Avrom gezen Maksn?) has ... (ace) ... {nom) seen 25
I wish to thank David Braun for providing me with the data on Yiddish conditionals and imperatives. In addition, Heycock & Santorini (1992) note in their (7) that topicalization is not allowed in matrix wh-questions.
26
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"Has Avrom seen Maksn?" (b) *Hot dos bukh Maks geleyent? (cf. Hot Maks geleyent dos bukh?) has the book ... {nom) read "Has Maks read the book?" My reason for assuming that topicalization is not allowed in (2)(j) is essentially the same reason why topicalization is not allowed in V1 interrogatives like (25). In embedded wh-questions as in matrix questions the subject must move to Spec AgrP so that its [+nom] feature can be assigned and checked by the finite verb. This checking must take place in a Spec-head relation as outlined in (20)(b). The initial position of the finite verb in imperatives and conditionals suggests that they share with V1 interrogatives the same syntactic structure and derivation, in particular V-to-C. If one assumes that interrogatives., imperatives and conditionals are derivatives of declarative word order and that in them the verb plays a more prominent role in the sense that it lexically marks which licenses Spec,CP, then Vto-C must occur in them. We could assume that in all V1 clauses a null operator, similar to the wh-operators in Rizzi's (1990a) wh-criterion proposal, occupies Spec,CP. Given the null operator, V-to-C must occur to achieve the proper Spechead configuration .27 4. Summary and conclusion The main ideas discussed here have been the following: 1. V2 in Germanic can be manifested through the syntactic relations associated with two functional heads, and Agr, the latter obviously needed to account for the V2 effects in Yiddish. 2. V-to-C can occur in Yiddish when a lexical complementizer is absent, but a complementizer and a finite verb do not consistently follow complementary distribu tion; one can argue the same for German if we regard V-to-C in conditionals, imperatives and interrogatives as necessary, not to fill an empty position, but rather to satisfy a morphological requirement on as a strong Comp position that it be filled by a verb for licensing purposes and to create the proper syntactic saturation. In Yiddish it occurs for the same reasons, and in both languages V+Agr checks features on the subject. In Yiddish, because of the weak complementizer parameter, V-to-C is independent of any main clause/subordinate clause asymmetry, just as V-to-Agr is.
27
My thanks to the reviewer, Michel Graff, for pointing this out to me.
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3. V-to-C in Germanic represents a level of derivation which in many if not all cases requires more syntactic operations than V-to-Agr and is utilized in nonindicative constructions. Contrary to what might be expected, the approach argued here does not complicate the grammar of V2; it in fact parametrizes it according to more general principles rather than structure-specific needs. That should be the direction of all research and theory development in the generative framework. In contrast to the standard theory in which all main clauses are CPs because of the properties common to Vfin and Comp (both able to bear [+Agr]), the approach supported here does not need to explain undesirable consequences such as the fact that in German and Dutch a subject must, like an object—even though they are syntactically asymmetrical—undergo movement out of its syntactic domain (AgrP) in order for the derivation of a V2 clause to be complete. Rather, it posits movement where necessary and appropriate. In developing a theory of grammar in the spirit of economy of derivation, we need to consider what constitutes 'basic word order' in Germanic. The standard theory posits that the word order of subordinate clauses with a verb in final position is basic to German and Dutch, as expressed in the SOV typology. In all other Germanic languages SVO is basic (see Webelhuth 1992, ch. 2). As suggested in te Velde (1992a), there may be a component missing from such typologies. In fact, it is now common to see typologies defined with the category I. Locating the head of IP to the left of VP does not force us to bring Dutch and German in line with the other Germanic languages in respect to typology. It only allows us to assume that in all of these languages main clauses with initial subjects are also "basic" in a sense — as intuition indicates — though perhaps not as much as subordinate clauses, though even this point is subject to debate in my view. Rather, one can assume that the difference in typology between the Germanic languages can be reduced to one factor only: the order of the object and the verb.28 In short: all of them are SI, i.e., subjectINFL, and most are VO, with only Dutch and German OV.
28
With the SIOV assumption for Dutch and German, one can assume that both I and V license to the left and thereby avoid ad hoc explanations for why they, both essentially verbal categories, would not be uniform in this respect. In English, SIVO, we need an explanation for the non-uniform direction (why V assigns to the right but I to the left). Presumably, the typology itself does not dictate this parameter which is not universal but language-specific, depending on the role of functional versus lexical categories. See Zwart (1993) for an interesting discussion. Wayne Harbert argued at the Roundtable that to fully explain the distribution of verbs and verb particles in German, we need to assume that there are two positions for Agr, one in the location proposed here and one in sentence final position. Presumably, then, German would classify as an SIOVI language.
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REFERENCES Abraham, Werner. 1993a. "German Standard Pronouns and Non-Standard Pronominal Clitics". (This volume.) ---. 1993b. "Null Subjects in the History of German: From IP to CP". Lingua 89.117-142. ---, Wim Kosmeijer & Eric Reuland, eds. 1990. Issues in Germanic Syntax. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 44. Aichinger, Ilse. 1992. "Seegeister". Allerlei zum Lesen, ed. by Hermann Teichert & Lovette Teichert, 120-121. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath & Co. [Originally published 1953 in Der Gefesselte, 87-94. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.] Bach, Emmon. 1962. "The Order of Elements in a Transformational Grammar of German". Language 38.263-269. den Besten, Hans. 1990. Studies in West Germanic Syntax. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ---& Corretje Moed-van Walraven. 1986. "The Syntax of Verbs in Yiddish". Verb Second Phenomena in Germanic Languages ed. by Hubert Haider & Martin Prinzhorn, 111-135. Dordrecht: Foris. Publications in Language Sciences, 21. Bierwisch, Manfred. 1963. Grammatik des Deutschen Verbs. Berlin: Akademieverlag. Studia Grammatica, II. Cardinaletti, Anna. 1992. "On Cliticization in Germanic Languages". Rivista di Grammatica General 17. 65-99. Chomsky, Noam. 1991. "Some Notes on Economy of Derivation and Representa tion". Principles and Parameters in Comparative Grammar ed. by Robert Freidin, 417-454. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ---. 1992. "A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory". MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 1. MS., Cambridge, Mass.: Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT. Diesing, Molly. 1988. "Word Order and the Subject Position in Yiddish". Proceed ings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Linguistics Society ed. by James Blevins & Julie Carter, 124-140. ---.1990. "Verb Movement and the Subject Position in Yiddish". NLLT 8.41-79. Grewendorf, Günter & Wolfgang Sternefeld, eds. 1990. Scrambling and Barriers. Philadelphia & Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Linguistik Aktuell, 5. Haegeman, Lilian. 1991. Introduction to Government & Binding Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
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Haftka, Brigitta, ed. 1994. Was determiniert Wortstellungsvariation? Studien zu einem Interaktionsfeld von Grammatik, Pragmatik und Sprachtypologie. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Haider, Hubert. 1986. "V-Second in German". Verb Second Phenomena in Germanic Languages ed. by Hubert Haider & Martin Prinzhorn, 49-76. Dordrecht: Foris. Publications in Language Sciences, 21. Heycock, Caroline. 1991. Levels of Predication: the non-lexical syntax of clauses. Unpublished doctoral diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania. --& Anthony Kroch. 1993. "Verb Movement and the Status of Subjects: Implications for the Theory of Licensing". Groninger Arbeiten zur germanistischen Linguistik 36. 75-102. --. & Beatrice Santorini. 1992. "Head movement and the Licensing of NonThematic Positions". The Proceedings of the Eleventh West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics ed. by Jonathan Mead, 262-276. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information. Höhle, Tiiman N. 1990. "Assumptions about asymmetric coordination in German". Grammar in Progress. GLOW Essays for Henk van Riemsdijk ed. by Joan Mascaro and Marina Nespor, 221-235. Dordrecht: Foris. Koster, Jan. 1975. "Dutch as an SOV Language". Linguistic Analysis 1.111-136. McNally, Louise. 1992. "VP Coordination and the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis". Linguistic Inquiry 23:2.336-341. Platzack, Christer. 1986. "COMP, INFL and Germanic Word Order". Topics in Scandinavian Syntax ed. by Lars Hellan & K. Koch Christensen, 27-48. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. ---. 1983. "Germanic Word Order and the COMP/INFL Parameter". Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 2. Dept. of Linguistics, University of Trondheim. Platzack, Christer & Anders Holmberg. 1990. "The Role of AGR and Finiteness in Some European VO Languages". MS. University of Lund. Poeppel, David and Kenneth Wexler. 1993. "The Full Competence Hypothesis of Clause Structure in Early German". Language 69:1.1-33. Pollack, Jean-Y ves. 1989. "Verb Movement, Universal Grammar, and the Structure of IP". Linguistic Inquiry 20.365-424. Rizzi, Luigi. 1990a. Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ---. 1990b. "Speculations on Verb-Second". Grammar in Progress: a Festschrift for Henk van Riemsdijk ed. by Joan Mascaro & Marina Nespor, 375-386. Dordrecht: Foris.
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Sag, Ivan Α., Thomas Wasow, Gerald Gazdar & Steven Weisler. 1985. "Coordina tion and How to Distinguish Categories". NLLT3.117-173. Schwartz, Bonnie & Alessandra Tomaselli. 1990. "Some Implications from an Analysis of German Word Order". Issues in Germanic Syntax ed. by Werner Abraham, Wim Kosmeijer and Eric Reuland, 251-276. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 44. ---& Sten Vikner. 1989. "All Verb-Second Clauses are CPs". Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 43.27-50. Lund: Department of Scandinavian Languages. Taraldsen, Knut Taraid. 1986. "On Verb Second and the Functional Content of Syntactic Categories". Verb Second Phenomena in Germanic Languages ed. by Hubert Haider & Martin Prinzhorn, 7-26. Dordrecht: Foris. Publications in Language Sciences, 21. Thiersch, Craig. 1978. Topics in German Syntax. Unpublished Ph.D. diss., MIT. Travis, Lisa. 1984. Parameters and Effects of Word Order Variation. Unpublished Ph.D. diss., MIT. ---. 1991. "Parameters of Phrase Structure and V2 Phenomena". Principles and Parameters in Comparative Grammar ed. by Robert Freidin, 339-364. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. te Velde, John R. 1994. "Feature Checking and Germanic Verb Second: Comparing Yiddish, German and English". Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 37.247-263. ---. 1992a. "Problems with Movement Theories of Verb-Second in German: a view from a theory of coordinate ellipsis". On Germanic Linguistics ed. by Irmengard Rauch, Gerald Carr and Robert Kyes, 339-363. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Trends in Linguistics—Studies and Monographs, 68. ---. 1992b. "Subject-Object and Coordinate Asymmetries and the Syntactic Structure of German". Recent Developments in Germanic Linguistics ed. by Rosina Lippi-Green, 127-140. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 93. ---. 1989. "The Barriers X' Theory and V2: Some problems in German and a possible solution". Paper presented at the Fifteenth Annual Minnesota Conference on Language and Linguistics, University of Minnesota, 13-14 October, 1989. Vikner, Sten. 1994. Verb Movement and Expletive Subjects in the Germanic Languages. (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax.) Oxford University Press. ---. & Bonnie Schwartz. 1992. "The Verb Always Leaves IP in V2 Clauses". To appear in: Parameters and Functional Heads. Essays in Comparative Syntax ed. by Adriana Belletti & Luigi Rizzi. Oxford University Press.
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Webelhuth, Gert. 1992. Principles and Parameters of Syntactic Saturation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. ---. 1990. "Diagnostics for Structure". Scrambling and Barriers ed. by Günter Grewendorf & Wolfgang Sternefeld, 41-75. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Williams, Edwin. 1978. "Across-the-board Rule Application". Linguistic Inquiry 9:1.31-43. Zwart, C. Jan-Wouter. 1993. "Verb Movement and Complementizer Agreement". Papers on Case & Agreement I, ed. by Jonathan D. Bobaljik & Colin Phillips, 297-341. Cambridge, Mass.: Dept. of Linguistics, MIT. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 18. ---. 1991a. "Clitics in Dutch: Evidence for the Position of INFL". Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 33.71-92. ---. 1991b. "Subject Deletion in Dutch: a difference between subjects and topics". Language and Cognition, 1, ed. by Mark Kas, Eric Reuland & Co Vet, 333-349. Groningen: Universiteitsdrukkerij. (Yearbook 1991 of the Research Group for Linguistic Theory and Knowledge of Representation of the University of Groningen.)
ON THE SYNTAX OF DUTCH ER * ISABELLA BARBIER University of Queensland 1. Introduction In this paper I investigate the syntactic conditions on the appearance of Dutch er in presentational sentences, as in (1-4). (1) Er lachte niemand.1 There laughed nobody "Nobody laughed." (2) Er werd tot diep in de nacht gedanst. There was deep into the night danced "There was dancing till deep into the night." (3) Er valt sneeuw. There falls snow "Snow is falling." (4) Er heeft iemand een vos gezien. There has somebody a fox seen "Somebody has seen a fox." There exists some similarity between the distribution of Dutch er and English there in that both er and there appear only if the subject is indefinite, as shown in (5-6). (5) Er loopt een jongen in de tuin. There walks a boy in the garden "There is a boy walking in the garden."
* An earlier version of this paper appeared in Cornell Working Papers in Linguistics 11.1 would like to thank Wayne Harbert, three anonymous reviewers and the audience of the Michigan-Berkeley Germanic Linguistic Roundtable for their comments. 1 These examples are taken from Hoekstra (1991).
66 (6)
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*Er loopt de jongen in de tuin. There walks the boy in the garden 'There is the boy walking in the garden."
In Dutch, er also appears in sentences with no visible subject at all. (7) Er werd hard gelachen. There was loudly laughed "There was loud laughing." Dutch also differs from English in that the occurrence of er is not dependent upon the choice of the verb. In English, the appearance of there is restricted to unaccusative predicates. In Dutch, in addition to unaccusative predicates, both unergative and transitive2predicates are possible with er, as shown in (8-10). (8) Er gebeuren rare dingen in dat huis. (unaccusative) There happen strange things in that house "Strange things are going on in that house." (9) Er heeft iemand getelefoneerd. There has somebody telephoned "Somebody telephoned."
(unergative)
( 10) Er heeft niemand iets gekocht. (transitive) There has nobody something bought "Nobody bought anything." Both the status of er and the conditions under which it must appear in the above sentences has been a matter of debate. On the one hand, it has been regarded as an expletive in Spec IP, analogous to English there (e.g., Hoekstra 1984). On the other hand, it has been regarded as a clitic attached to a functional head Xo. Under the standard analysis of Dutch (e.g., den Besten 1990) Xo is taken to be C° since Dutch is held to be INFL final. In this paper I show that neither of these accounts can be correct. Instead, I will argue that er is a clitic hosted by the head of a head-initial projection lower than C°. The clitic is base-generated in a proclitic position preceding 2
There appears to be an indefiniteness requirement both on the subject and the object (Bennis 1986). ??Er heeft iemand het gekocht. There has somebody it bought "Somebody bought it."
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C°, but can move to an enclitic position following the higher functional head C° by head to head movement. I argue that er is required by licensing theory to license the content of Spec IP by Spec-head agreement when it is pro. If Spec IP is lexically filled, er can still appear since it is apparently freely generated. 2. Evidence against previous analyses of er In this section I present some evidence against the proposal that er is an expletive in Spec IP (e.g., Hoekstra 1984) and against the one that er is a clitic attached to C° (e.g., den Besten 1990). First it should be pointed out that, while in all the examples given above, er precedes the indefinite subject (if there is one), it is also perfectly possible for the subject to precede er, as shown in (11-13). (11) Rare dingen gebeuren er in dat huis. Strange things happen there in that house "Strange things are going on in that house." (12) Iemand heeft er getelefoneerd. Somebody has there telephoned "Somebody telephoned." (13) Niemand heeft er iets gekocht. Nobody has there something bought "Nobody bought anything." The relevant evidence against er as an expletive in Spec IP or as a clitic attached to C° is provided by the possibility of this type of alternation in embedded sentences, as in (14-15). (14) ...als er niemand een boek kocht. ... if there nobody a book bought "... if nobody bought a book." (15)... als niemand er een boek kocht. ... if nobody there a book bought, "...if nobody bought a book." The possibility of the subject niemand "nobody" appearing before er in the embedded clauses as in (15) suggests that Dutch er can not be an expletive subject
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occupying the Spec of IP position since that position is presumably filled by the subject NP.3 Nor can er occupy a clitic position immediately behind C° since such a configura tion does not leave any position for the subject NP between C° and the clitic, as in (15). In the current literature (e.g., Kayne 1991) it is assumed that clitics are hosted by a functional head Xo. Under the standard analysis of Dutch as INFL final (e.g., den Besten 1990), no such functional head below C° is available. Recently, however, this standard analysis of Dutch, has been challenged by Cardinaletti and Roberts (1991), Travis (1991) and Zwart (1991). They argue that in the Germanic languag es, there is some head-initial functional projection below C°. Most of their evidence is drawn from the behavior of clitics in these languages. For example, Zwart (1991) argues that the fact that Dutch unstressed object pronouns obligatorily occur immediately to the right of the subject, as shown in (16-18) can be easily explained if they are clitics. (16) ...dat Jan 'r gisteren gekust heeft. ...that John her yesterday kissed has "...that John kissed her yesterday." (17) *...dat Jan gisteren 'r gekust heeft. ...that John yesterday her kissed has (18) *...dat 'r Jan gisteren gekust heeft. ...that her John yesterday kissed has
3
One could possibly argue that the subject NP which precedes er in embedded clauses occupies a topic adjunct-position. There seems to be no agreement in the literature as to whether this kind of topicalization is possible or not. According to Perlmutter and Zaenen, it is not possible: *Hij zei dat de hele tijd er twee beeldjes op de tafel stonden. He said that the whole time there two statuettes on the table stood "He said that the whole time there were two statuettes standing on the table." (Perlmutter & Zaenen, p. 177) For Bennis on the other hand, "er does not necessarily occupy the first position in S", as demonstrated in ? ... dat morgen er op straat veel boeken zullen worden verkocht. ... that tomorrow there on street many books shall become sold ..."that many books will be sold on the street tomorrow" (Bennis, p. 87) In order to avoid this problem of possible topicalization, I give examples of embedded clauses introduced by the complementizer als " i f which disallow topicalization of any kind.
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He proposes that Dutch has a functional head position between C° and the VP, which he calls INFL. Cardinaletti and Roberts (1991) on the other hand call this projection AGR 1P. I will continue to call it IP, for convenience. At any rate, my notation translates directly into theirs. What is important for my purpose is the fact that the Spec position of this initial head Agr1P is the subject position, just as Spec IP is the subject position in my notation. Equally important is their claim that AGR1, Γ in my notation, is the host position for clitics. Consequently, I propose that er is an INFL type clitic.
3. Er as a licenser for pro In the previous section, I have shown that subjects can appear before er in embedded clauses. In some dialects of Dutch, however, this option appears not to be available. It is, according to Bennis (1986,174) "one of the diagnostic properties of expletive er that within S er appears before the subject, if there is one." To illustrate this, he gives the following examples: (19) *dat iemand er loopt. that somebody there walks (20) *dat boeken er te koop zijn. that books there for sale are Notice, however, that both examples are sentences which contain an unaccusative predicate. As pointed out above, Dutch differs from English in that the appearance of er is not restricted to unaccusative predicates, but can also occur with transitive and unergative predicates. Er has however a curious distribution where its occurrence before the subject in embedded clauses is concerned. A transitive predicate allows the subject to appear before er, as shown in (21, also 15). (21) Als iemand er een vos gezien heeft... If somebody there a fox seen has... "If somebody has seen a fox..." Unergative predicates (like telefoneren "telephone") behave like transitives in this respect, as shown in (22-23). (22) Als er niemand getelefoneerd heeft.... If there nobody telephoned has...
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"If nobody telephoned..." (23) Als niemand er getelefoneerd heeft... If nobody there telephoned has... "If nobody telephoned..." As in Bennis' examples, however, an unaccusative predicate (like gebeuren "happen") as in (24-25) does not allow the subject to appear before er in embedded clauses. (24) Als er rare dingen gebeurd zijn... If there strange things happened are... "if strange things happened..." (25) *Als rare dingen er gebeurd zijn... If strange things there happened are... Thus, the judgments depend on verb classes.4 On the one side, there are the unaccusative verbs and on the other unergatives and transitives. The fact that unaccusatives cannot precede er in embedded clauses suggests that they cannot appear in Spec IP. The Extended Projection Principle, however, requires all clauses to have subjects. Therefore, if Spec IP is not lexically filled, it must be filled by pro. I propose that Spec IP of unaccusative predicates in Dutch is filled by expletive pro. Following standard theories of pro-drop, I propose that nonthematic pro must be licensed. In particular, I propose that pro in Spec IP must be licensed by Spec-head agreement with the functional head Γ. In Dutch however, Γ by itself is not strong enough and requires the presence of the clitic er.
4
With these comments upon Bennis' examples (19-20), I do not intend to claim that the subject can appear before er in embedded clauses in all dialects. It is perfectly possible that in Bennis' dialect this can never happen, independent of the type of predicate. On the other hand, the fact that his only two examples involve unaccusative predicates still leaves open the possibility that in his dialect this alternation is possible with other predicates.
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(26)
4. The absence of Unaccusative Movement in Dutch In the previous section I have proposed that the argument of an unaccusative never precedes er in embedded clauses because it cannot move into Spec IP. One obvious question that arises is how these arguments obtain their nominative case. In the literature several mechanisms for extending the domain of nominative case to in situ objects have been proposed. Harbert and Toribio (1991) propose that nominative case is assigned to objects through coindexation with expletives in Spec IP. den Besten (1985,1990) proposes that nominative case is assigned by Chain-government down into VP from INFL.5 Presumably, where this mechanism is available, movement to Spec IP need not take place. Considerations of economy might then dictate that in fact such movement cannot take place. Clearly, the principle of economy which prevents the unaccusative object from moving to Spec IP, does not prevent subjects of transitive and unergative predicates from moving there. The question arises as to the relevant aspect in which unaccusative objects and subjects of transitive and unergative predicates differ. I would like to suggest that maybe this relevant aspect is the governing domain to which they belong. A principle of economy would then state that it is uneconomical to change the government relationships. Moving subject NPs from transitive and unergative predicates to Spec IP, would not change the government relationship 5
In his (1990) paper den Besten proposes that Chain government is universally available for I-final SOV languages, including Dutch. It is not clear why den Besten requires to be final. The only indication is his comment (p. 42) that government might be further restricted by adding unidirectionality of government to the definition. An anonymous reviewer suggests that the reason might be the position of the tense-marked verbal element in Dutch since it is not clear how Tense marking gets onto the sentence-final verb. In other work (Barbier 1993) I argue that Dutch is like English in that it lacks Vo to movement in the syntax.
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between Γ and the relevant NPs since they would be governed by Γ both in their base-generated position and in their landing site. Unaccusative objects on the other hand would leave the governing domain of Vo to become in the governing domain of Γ. The idea that governing domain is a unit for mesuring economy of derivation is similar to Chomsky's (1992) notion of 'shortest move', namely that two targets of movement are equidistant if they are in the same minimal domain. In this sense, whether subject NPs from transitive and unergative predicates occupy their basegenerated position or whether they move to Spec IP makes no difference from the point of view of economy since both positions are equidistant. Moving unaccusative objects from their base-generated position to Spec IP position on the other hand would be a violation of the 'shortest move' condition. 5. The unaccusative data In this section I discuss the distribution of the unaccusative data in some more detail. Recall that unaccusative predicates do not allow the unaccusative object NP to appear before er in embedded clauses, as shown in (27) below. In matrix clauses on the other hand, the unaccusative object NP can precede er. In this case the presence of er is required, as shown in (28). (27) Als rare dingen *er /*0 gebeuren... If strange things there happen... "If strange things are going on..." (28) Rare dingen gebeuren er/*0. Strange things happen there. "Strange things are going on." In embedded clauses er is obligatory and must precede the unaccusative object NP, as shown in (29). In matrix clauses, er can precede the unaccusative object NP. In this case too, er is obligatory. (29) Als er /*0 rare dingen gebeuren... If there strange things happen... "If strange things are going on..." (30) Er /*0 gebeuren rare dingen. There happen strange things "Strange things are going on."
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With the assumptions outlined in the previous section, the unaccusative data can now be explained. Unaccusative object NPs can not appear before er in embedded clauses, as shown in (27), because unaccusative object NPs can never move to Spec IP. Topicalization of the unaccusative object NP in matrix clauses is possible, as shown in (28) above. The unaccusative object NP occurs in the topicalization position Spec CP. However, nominative case cannot be assigned in Spec CP. Nominative case must be assigned to the trace in the VP internal position. To satisfy the Extended Projection Principle, Spec IP is filled by pro and the presence of er is required to license pro. Notice that this analysis implies that the unaccusative object can not only not have Spec IP as a landing-site for movement, but that it doesn't even move through Spec IP. If the unaccusative object moved through Spec IP, it would leave a trace which would presumably satisfy the ECP. (31=28)
CP
Notice that in these topicalization structures the clitic er follows the verb gebeuren. This is not the order we would expect if the verb moves through Γ on its way to C° because it is commonly assumed that once a clitic adjoins to a head, it cannot be separated from this head (Kayne 1991).6
6 An anonymous reviewer suggested that this clitic-verb order might be due to the process of excorporation. Another possible explanation comes from recent work by Roberts (1992) and Cardinaletti & Roberts (1991). They argue that in the Germanic languages, the verb must 'skip' Γ whenever Spec is filled and the inflected verb is thus clearly in Co.
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Recent work by Roberts (1991), however, has shown that this assumption is controversial. He proposes that 'excorporation' is possible. Excorporation is successive cyclic movement of a head which first incorporates into another governing head, but then moves out of the head, leaving something stranded. This same effect also obtains in questions, as shown in (32-33) . (32) Waar gebeuren er rare dingen? Where happen there strange things? "Where are strange things going on?" (33) Gebeuren er rare dingen? Happen there strange things? "Are strange things going on?" In embedded clauses, er is obligatory and must precede the unaccusative object NP, as shown in (29=34). Since there is no unaccusative movement in Dutch, the unaccusative object NP remains in the VP and receives nominative case in situ. As a result Spec IP remains empty and is filled by pro. Er must obligatorily appear to license pro.
To explain the obligatory presence of er, preceding the unaccusative object NP in non-topicalized matrix clauses, as shown in (35=30), I propose, following Travis
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(1991), that Dutch 'subject'-initial main clauses are IPs, with pro in Spec IP, er cliticised onto Γ and the object NP in situ. (35=30)
I prefer this analysis of 'subject'- initial matrix clauses as IPs to the alternative analysis (e.g., Vikner & Schwartz (1991) that Dutch 'subject'-initial clauses are CPs. Under the latter analysis, it would be difficult to explain why er precedes the verb in these structures. Indeed, the explanation would require saying that in this case no excorporation took place, in contrast to what happens in questions and topicalisations. (36)
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6. The transitive data Let us now turn to the distribution of the transitive data. (37) Er /*0 koopt een man een boek. There buys a man a book "A man is buying a book." For structure (37), we propose an analysis analogous to the one proposed for unaccusative predicates, since the clitic er is obligatory in this structure. The subject NP remains in situ and Spec IP is filledbpro. Er is necessary to license pro and occupies a proclitic position preceding Io. (38=37)
(39) Een man koopt er / 0 een boek. A man buys there a book "A man is buying a book." When the subject NP precedes er, as in (39), the presence of er is optional. I propose that the subject NP moves through Spec IP to Spec CP, leaving a trace in Spec IP. In this case, er is not needed. The fact that it can appear nevertheless suggests that it can be freely generated.7 7. Preposed Datives Den Besten (1985) observes that in unaccusative constructions with preposed datives er- insertion is optional in Dutch, as in (41) versus (40). 7
In fact, in my judgment the presence of er is really superfluous in these constructions and seems more a case of 'hypercorrection'.
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(40) ...dat er / *0 iets raars gebeurd is. ...that there something strange happened is "...that something strange happened " (41) ...dat er / 0 Karel iets raars overkomen is ...that there Charles something strange happened is "...that something strange happened to Charles." Since the unaccusative object stays in situ in the VP internal position, the Spec IP position is not filled. This allows the dative to move into Subject position. Er is not necessary since there is no pro to license, but can apparently be freely generated (cf. den Besten 1985). (42)
There is, however, a problem with the word-order within the sentence. Notice that in (41) er appears before the preposed dative in Spec IP. If, as I have proposed, er occupies an INFL proclitic position, we would expect the word-order to be as in (43) where the preposed dative precedes er. (43) ...dat Karel er / 0 iets raars overkomen is. ...that Charles there something strange happened is "...that something strange happened to Charles."
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In the dialect of Dutch in which it is possible to have subjects of transitive and unergative predicates precede er in embedded clauses, (43) is a perfectly possible word-order. I would like to propose that er optionally undergoes clitic-climbing from an INFL proclitic position to an enclitic position. This accounts for the change in wordorder. 8. Locative prepositional phrase Another construction in which er- insertion is optional is in the context of preposed locatives. Zwart (1991) says: A mysterious feature of Dutch expletive constructions is that er can remain unexpressed if and only if a locative PP is fronted. Thus, there is a clear contrast between [(44)], where a locative PP is fronted, and [(45)], where a temporal adverb is fronted.
(44) In de tuin werd gedanst. In the garden was danced "There was dancing in the garden." (45) ??Gisteren werd gedanst. Yesterday was danced "Yesterday there was dancing." According to Zwart, the construction is fine again if a locative PP is added to (45).8 (45) Gisteren werd in de tuin gedanst Yesterday was in the garden danced "Yesterday there was dancing in the garden."
8
I do not agree with this judgment about the sentence. I feel that er is still needed.
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Perhaps significant is the fact that there appears to be a clear preference for construc tions without er when a locative PP is fronted.9 Thus, (46) is strange compared to (47) and (48). (46) ?? In de kast zit er een lijk In the closet sits there a body "There is a body in the closet." (47) In de kast zit een lijk In the closet sits a body (48) Er zit een lijk in de kast There sits a body in the closet These facts are consistent with preverbal locative constructions in other languages, e.g., English (Toribio 1991), as shown in (49). (49) On the shelf sat the family portrait. Toribio proposes that in these constructions, the locative argument first moves into Spec IP and then undergoes subsequent movement to an IP adjoined position. The locative phrase moves into Spec IP to satisfy the Extended Projection Principle, which requires that sentences have subject positions at all syntactic levels. Toribio shows how Korean provides some evidence for her claim that locatives occupy Spec IP since in this language, locatives may demonstrate both dative and
9
An anonymous reviewer asked how my approach, where er is assumed to be an INFL clitic can account for the following contrast. In de tuin leest een jongen *er/ 0 een boek. In the garden reads a boy there a book In de tuin leest er/ 0 een jongen een boek. In the garden reads there a boy a book As I mentioned before, there clearly is dialectal variation among the use of er . I suspect that according to the judgment of this reviewer sentence (43) above is equally ungrammatical. ... dat Karel er iets raars overkomen is. ... that Charles there something strange happened is "... that something strange happened to Charles" In that case, it might be that in this dialect, freely generated er must obligatorily undergo cliticclimbing from an INFL proclitic position to an enclitic position.
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nominative case. Furthermore, the preverbal locatives behave like a subject with respect to raising, as shown in (50). (50) Down the road appears to be located a market. These locatives do not pattern completely like other phrases which occupy Spec IP though. For example, they do not behave like subjects with respect to the auxiliarysecond pattern of yes-no question and wh-extraction. Thus, Toribio proposes that the locative moves to Spec IP but cannot remain there because its presence violates the case-resistance principle. Therefore, they have to move to an IP adjoined position. If in Dutch the preverbal locative occupied either Spec IP position or an IP adjoined position, there would be a problem with regard to the position of er. The verb presumably occupies and er cliticizes onto Io. Notice however that er appears on the 'wrong' side of . It appears on the right of , while in all the previous cases it cliticizes to its left. I propose, therefore, that the preverbal locative moves to Spec CP through Spec IP, leaving a trace there. Thus, Spec IP is filled by a trace. There is no pro and thus no er required to license it. Since it is freely generated, it can appear nevertheless. 9. Prepositional er and quantitative er Finally, I would like to suggest the possibility of providing a similar analysis to two other instances of er in Dutch, as shown in (51-52). (51 ) Ik heb met hem er over pro gesproken I have with him there about talked "I have talked with him about it."
(prepositional)
(52) Ik heb er gisteren twee pro gekocht, (quantitative) ' I have there yesterday two bought "I bought two of them yesterday." In these cases too, er is associated with a gap, which I propose is filled by pro.10 I would like to claim that the function of er in these cases is similar to the INFL type er. Note however, that while INFL type er can only license expletive pro, preposi10 An anonymous reviewer points out that the semantics in these cases are very different and that it is not at all obvious that they should be given a unified account. While this is true, these three different uses of er do share the syntactic fact of being associated with a gap. For this reason, I believe it is worthwile to try to find an account which can unify these three different types of er.
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tional and quantitative er can license and identify thematic pro. Thus, these Dutch facts also bear upon pro-drop theory, viz. the conditions for identification. In Jaeggli & Safir's (1989) theory the difference between the two cases can be accounted for in the following way: in their theory "AGR can identify an empty category as thematic pro iff the category containing AGR Case-governs the empty category". Notice that INFL type er does not strictly c-command pro since the first branching node above er is Γ, not IP. Furthermore, if in Dutch nominative case is assigned by Chaingovernment down into the VP, as assumed above, INFL does not assign nominative case to the Spec IP position at all. Thus, INFL type er does not Case-govern pro. Therefore, it does not satisfy the conditions for identifying thematic pro. It can only license expletive pro. (53)
Prepositional er on the other hand strictly c-commands and Case-governs pro. Therefore, it satisfies the conditions for identifying thematic pro. (54)
How these facts can be accommodated by any other pro-drop theory (e.g., Rizzi 1986), where government is a condition for licensing, is not clear.
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10. Conclusion In this paper, I have argued that er is an INFL type clitic. The clitic is basegenerated in a proclitic position preceding Γ, but can move to an enclitic position following the higher functional head C° by head to head movement. This analysis entails that Dutch IPs are head-initial. Its presence is necessary to license pro in Spec IP. If Spec IP is lexically filled, er can still appear since it is apparently freely generated. I have also shown that there is no unaccusative movement in Dutch and that unaccusative objects are prevented from appearing in Spec IP by a principle of economy which states that government relationships must be respected. Finally, I have suggested the possibility of providing a similar analysis for two other instances of er in Dutch.
REFERENCES Barbier, Isabella. 1993. "The Structure of IP in German and Dutch: Arguments from First Language Acquisition". Paper presented at 10th Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, Columbus, Ohio. Bennis, Hans. 1986. Gaps and Dummies. Dordrecht: Foris. Besten, Hans den. 1985. "The Ergative Hypothesis and Free Word Order in Dutch and German". Studies in German Grammar ed. by Jindrich Toman, 23-64. Dordrecht: Foris. _____. 1990."The syntax of nominatives in SOV Germanic", Grammar in Progress ed. by Joan Mascara & Marina Nespor, 41-50. Dordrecht: Foris. Cardinaletti, Anna & Ian Roberts. To appear. "Clause Structure and X-second". Levels, Principles and Processes: The Structure of Grammatical Representa tions ed. by Wynn Chao & Geoffrey Horrocks. Dordrecht: Foris. Chomsky, Noam. 1992. "A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory", MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics l. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT. Harbert, Wayne & Almeida Toribio. 1991. "Nominative objects". Cornell Working Papers in Linguistics 9.127-192. Hoekstra, Teun. 1984. Transitivity: Grammatical Relations in GovernmentBinding Theory . Dordrecht: Foris. Hoekstra, Jaricn. 1991. "Expletive der and Resumptive pro in Frisian". Leuvense Bijdragen 80.61-80. Jaeggli, Osvaldo & Kenneth Safir. 1989. "The Null Subject Parameter and Paramet ric Theory". The Null Subject Parameter ed. by Osvaldo Jaeggli & Kenneth Safir, 1-44. Boston: Kluwer.
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Kayne, Richard. 1991. "Romance Clitics, Verb Movement, and PRO". Linguistic Inquiry 22.647-686. Perlmutter, David & Annie Zaenen. 1984. "The Indefinite Extraposition construction in Dutch and German". Studies in Relational Grammar 2 ed. by David Perlmutter & Carol Rosen, 171-216. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rizzi, Luigi. 1986. "Null Objects in Italian and the Theory of pro". Linguistic Inquiry 17.501-557. Roberts, Ian.1991. "Excorporation and Minimality". Linguistic Inquiry 22.209218. ____. 1992. Verbs and Diachronie Syntax . Dordrecht: Kluwer. Toribio, Almeida. 1992. "A note on there-insertion and preverbal locative construc tions". Paper presented at the 1992 Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Travis, Lisa. 1991. "Parameters of Phrase Structure and Verb-Second Phenomena". Principles and Parameters in Comparative Grammar ed. by Robert Freidin, 339-364. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Vikner, Sten & Bonnie Schwartz. To appear. "The Verb always leaves IP in V2 clauses". Parameters and Functional Heads: Essays in Comparative Syntax ed. by Adriana Belletti & Luigi Rizzi. Zwart, Jan-Wouter. 1991. "Clitics in Dutch: Evidence for the position of INFL". Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 33.,71-92.
THE ATTRIBUTIVE GENITIVE IN THE HISTORY OF GERMAN* RUTH LUNT LANOUETTE Lawrence University Appleton, Wisconsin Behaghel (1923 IV:181) lists three stages in the development of the attributive genitive in the history of the German language: 1) At first, any type of genitive could precede the head. 2) In the next stage noun phrases denoting concrete objects or abstract concepts 'wander' to the right of the head noun. 3) Finally nouns denoting persons occur to the right, and even personal names can occur in this position. In modern German the prenominai position is largely restricted to single lexical items which denote persons, personal names, or possessive pronouns: Vaters Hut, Mutters Fahrrad, Peters Haus, sein Hut, ihre Mutter. According to Behaghel, then, the original situation was that any kind of genitive could precede the head noun. Lockwood (1968) supports this by citing instances (from Monsee Matthew) where the Latin order Noun + Genitive (NG) was changed in a German translation to Genitive + Noun (GN): (1)
Latin a. in corde terrae b. in ventre ceti contra filium hominis
OHG (from Lockwood, 1968:17) in haerda hrewe in wales wambu widar mannes sune
Evidence such as this leads Lockwood to conclude about the order GN that "[c]learly, this was the living idiom" (1968:17). If this was the case, then there are two main questions: 1) How did the change from prenominai to postnominal genitives get started in the first place? 2) Why was the main linguistic factor determining the ordering a distinction between personal and non-personal genitives? One thing that might help would be to determine what the situation actually was in the older stages of Germanic. There is some disagreement here. Behaghel (1923
* I am very grateful to Wayne Harbert for his many helpful comments on a first draft of this paper. I would also like to thank Daniel J. Taylor for help with some of the Latin constructions. Any errors which remain are, of course, my own.
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IV:182) maintained that a distinction between personal and non-personal genitives can already be seen in Gothic. Using only those instances where the translator changed the order in the text he was translating from, or the original had no genitive, Behaghel found in the Gothic Bible eight examples of personal genitives preceding the noun. He also found five instances of personal genitives following the noun. However, in one case — all gawi bisitande (Luke IV, 14) — the genitive follows because of "... eine Abneigung ... gegen die Einschaltung des Genitivs zwischen Adjektiv und Substantiv" (1923 IV: 181). Behaghel claims that the other four cases follow the Latin text which the translator consulted for the less frequently occurring words. Thus, he finds no postposing of personal genitives where there is no special reason for doing so. This leaves him with eight preposed personal genitives and no postposed personal genitives. For concrete and abstract genitives, he found ten instances of the genitive preceding the noun, and five following. From this he concludes that the personal/non-personal distinction is already present. Carr (1933) disputes Behaghel's findings. While he agrees with the results concerning personal genitives, he says that the five examples of concrete or abstract nouns following the head noun are all doubtful cases (1933:466). Two of Behaghel's cases are dismissed by Carr because Carr claims that "... the order is clearly that of the Latin" (1933:466). In another case, "the translator is repeating the order of words in an earlier passage" (1933:466). The other two examples, both aiwa dage, Carr considers to be partitive genitives, and these were most likely to follow the governing noun, even in the earliest stages of the language. Even if we accept the three uncertain cases, the ratio is less than Behaghel claimed. Carr also disputes Behaghel's numbers for Tatian and Isidor, and states: "In fact, the genitive after the noun is practically unknown in earliest O.H.G., except when the Latin order is followed" (1933:470). He does agree, after an examination of Notker's works that "... by the end of the O.H.G. period it was more usual for the non-personal genitive to follow the noun than to precede it" (1933:473). Thus, he seems to agree in principle with Behaghel's three stages of development of the attributive genitive. Part of the problem in determining the order in the earliest OHG texts has to do with the order of elements in the Latin original. In Tatian, the order for attributive genitives in relation to the head noun is almost exclusively NG, and the same is largely true for Isidor. Thus, while there is ample opportunity for the order NG to be changed to GN, there is almost no opportunity for the reverse. Still, the data from these texts can tell us something about preferred ordering in OHG. Because of the disagreement between Behaghel's and Carr's findings, I took my own small sampling of the two texts, 20 pages each of Tatian and Isidor. In these 40 pages there were only examples of the NG order in the Latin.
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In Isidor there were 16 examples of Latin NG being changed to German GN. Of these 16 noun phrases, 14 involve personal genitives. A few examples are: (2) Latin German (a) Vox domini Truhtines stirnna (b) ab oculis hominum fona manno augom (c) in persona christi in unseres druhtines nemin domini nostri The two instances which involve non-personal genitives are: (3)
Latin (a) gloriosos terrae (b) in spiritu oris euis
German aerdrihhes hruomege sines mundes gheistu
In Tatian there were 13 examples of Latin NG being changed to German GN. In this case, only one did not involve a personal genitive: (4)
Latin (a) regnum caelorurn
German himilo richi
Based on this small "Stichprobe", it does seem that personal genitives are much more likely to be preposed than non-personal genitives when the order in the Latin original is NG. However, these statistics may not tell the whole story. In 20 pages of Isidor, I found a total of 24 NP's with attributive genitives. Of these 24, only five involved non-personal genitives. The Latin order for all five was NG, the German order showed two with the order GN and three with the order NG. In the 20 pages from Tatian there were a total of 21 genitive NP's. 1 Of these, six involved non-personal genitives, only one of which showed the order GN. These numbers suggest that one reason personal genitives were more likely to precede the noun in OHG texts was that they occurred much more frequently than non-personal genitives. Because the amount of data collected from 40 pages of OHG texts was so small, I looked at an additional 30 pages of Tatian. In the first 50 pages of Tatian, there are a total of 178 attributive genitive NP's. Of these, 130 involve personal genitives and 48 involve concrete or abstract genitives. There are more than twice as many personal genitives in this sample. However, of the 130 involving personal genitives, 68 show the order GN — slightly more than half. On the other hand, of the 48 involving
1 There were also two partitive genitives: ahtuzug iaro, zeulif iaro. But since these are generally treated separately from attributive genitives, I have not included them in this study.
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concrete or abstract genitives, only 11 show the order GN. Thus, even though the personal genitives greatly outnumber the non-personal genitives overall, the evidence still indicates that personal genitives were more likely than non-personal genitives to show the order GN despite the Latin NG.2 But if any type of genitive NP could precede the head noun, why did a distinction arise between personal and nonpersonal genitives in the course of the history of German? Behaghel's explanation for the distinction between the ordering of personal and non-personal genitives arising in the first place, and for the change from GN to NG taking place at all, is his 'Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder.' Simply stated, this means that 'heavier' noun phrases, noun phrases which contain more modifying adjectives, had a greater tendency to be moved to the right of the head noun. Since nouns denoting concrete objects or abstract ideas would be more likely to have modifiers than personal names or nouns denoting persons, we would expect that the majority of 'heavy' noun phrases would involve concrete or abstract nouns. However, according to Ebert (1986:97) this so-called 'Gesetz' is in fact only "... eine relativ schwache Tendenz." In addition, we would need an explanation for why this rule came into force when it did. There are cases of personal genitives following the Latin order of NG that could be explained by Behaghel's 'Gesetz der wachsenden Glieder.' (5)
Latin (a) in domo David pueri sui (b) imperii Tiberii Caesaris
German in huse Dauides sines knehtes thes rihtuomes Tiberii thes keisores
But what do we say about the many instances where a single lexical item is not preposed? Of the 178 genitive NP's found, 67 are names (excluding the 30 instances of 'Gott'). Of these 67, 34 show the order GN, and 33 show the order NG. Only eight of those that are NG can be said to be 'heavy' in relation to the head noun. In two other cases, one attributive genitive modifies two conjoined nouns: (6)
Latin (a) in spiritu et virtute Heliae (b) de domo et familia David
German in geisto inti in megine Heliases fon huse inti fon hiuuiske Dauides
The other 23 cases involve a single name. Some examples are: 2
There are 12 cases in which there is a genitive NP in the OHG, but no genitive in the Latin. In all 12 cases, the OHG order is GN, and all 12 cases involve personal genitives. This indicates that the preferred order for personal genitives was, in fact, GN, but does not tell us anything about the preferred order for non-personal genitives.
THE ATTRIBUTIVE GENITIVE IN THE HISTORY OF GERMAN
(7)
Latin (a) annum domini (b) de domo David (e) in lege domini
89
German iar truhtines fon huse Dauides in euuu truhtines
A few examples of the order GN are: (8)
Latin (a) socii Simonis (b) ad genua Ihesu (c) secundum legem domini
German Simones ginoza zi thes heilantes knevvun after truhtines euuu
If the order GN, especially involving personal genitives, was 'the living idiom', as Lockwood has suggested, then why did the translator choose to change the Latin order in some of these cases and not in others? Of particular interest are the two examples (7c) and (8c), where the phrases are virtually identical. Behaghel's proposed first stage for Germanic languages was that any kind of genitive could precede the head noun. Perhaps it would be better to state that any kind of attributive genitive could occur on either side of the noun, with GN being the preferred order, at least for personal genitives. Whatever the case was in OHG, studies by Ebert (1986) and others have shown that by Early New High German (ENHG) times, there was clearly a distinction between personal and non-personal genitives, with personal genitives being much more likely to precede the head noun. Again we must ask how such a distinction came about, or if it was a factor from the beginning, why was this so? Why would personal genitives occur in pre-nominal position more often than non-personal genitives (or, conversely, why do non-personal genitives more often follow than precede the head noun.) Peter assola (1985; reported in Ebert 1988) did a study of a 15th-century legal text in which he looked at the position of the genitive in terms of the semantic relations between the genitive and head noun. He found that certain types of genitives — possessive and subjective — tended to precede the head noun, while others, such as genitives of origin, characteristic and partitive genitives tended to follow the noun. Why should this be the case? For help in answering this, let us turn to Government & Binding theory. Before looking at the NP in the older stages of German, let us first consider the structure of the modern German NP.
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As previously noted, modern colloquial German generally allows only names or single lexical items which denote persons to occur as prenominai 'genitives', the socalled Saxon Genitive, such as those in (9): (9)
a. b. c. d.
Peters Hut Annas Fahrrad Mutters Haus Vaters Buch
Examples (9b) and (9d) show that this is not true genitive case-marking, since feminine nouns in genitive noun phrases can never take the ending -s. The 'grammaticality' or 'acceptability' of full genitive NP's preceding the head noun will be discussed later. For now, let us note that full genitive NP's follow the governing noun in spoken German, as in (10): (10)
a. das Haus meiner Mutter b. das Buch meines Vaters c. die Namen meiner Freunde
Bhatt (1990) notes that a genitive NP must immediately follow the governing noun. (Examples are taken from Bhatt 1990:126-127.) (11)
a. *das Verständnis für Maria Peters b. das Verständnis Peters für Maria
Also note that German does not allow two genitive NP's to follow the noun if both are dependent on the same head noun. (12)
a. *die Behandlung seiner Mutter Peters b. Peters Behandlung seiner Mutter
From this, Bhatt concludes that an № (head noun) can only assign case to an adjacent Determiner Phrase (DP).3 Bhatt suggests the following structure for Modern German NP's:
3 Abney (1986) proposed that the Determiner actually projects a phrase, and that this phrase — called 'DP' or 'Determiner Phrase' — is a functional category like CP (Complementizer Phrase) and IP (Inflection Phrase). DP dominates the noun phrase (NP) just as CP and IP dominate the verb phrase. Following Abney and others, I assume this structure for the Modern German noun phrase.
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(13)
Different types of genitives are generated in different positions, depending on their relationship to the head noun. If the head noun is deverbative, for example, the object would be the internal argument (sister of №), the subject would be the external argument (sister of N'). Thus, the structure for the ungrammatical (11a) would be as follows: (14)
In this structure, the PP fur Maria stands between the noun and its subject; therefore, the N0 cannot assign genitive case to the DP Peter. The resulting sentence is ungrammatical because it would violate the Case Filter, which states roughly that all nouns must be assigned a (single) case. In the structure shown in (14) there is no way for the DP Peter to receive case. If, however, we extrapose the PP für Maria, the resulting noun phrase is grammatical. The structure for (1 lb) is as follows (from Bhatt 1990:127):
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(15)
Presumably the trace left by the movement does not block the head noun from assigning case to the DP. Thus, the DP Peter receives case, and the NP is grammati cal. But this will not work for the ungrammatical noun phrase in (12a), which would have the structure in (16): (16)
In this structure, case assignment to the DP Peter is again blocked, and the resulting noun phrase is ungrammatical. But what if we extrapose the sister of №, as we did in (15)?
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(17)
In (17), the trace should not block case assignment, so the DP Peter can be assigned case. (Presumably, the DP seiner Mutter is marked for case before movement.) The problem is, the resulting noun phrase is, at least according to Bhatt, ungrammatical: ( 18)
*die Behandlung Peters seiner Mutter
Note that there is a grammatical alternative here, which was given in (1 lb) — Peters Behandlung seiner Mutter. One possibility would be to move the DP Peters to the Specifier position (SPEC) of DP, where it could receive case from a possessive element (POSS) present in D°: (18)
But this raises yet another problem. As (19) shows, it is not possible to move the internal argument to SPEC of DP, even when it is a personal name:
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*Petersj [Behandlung ti des Arztes]4
To solve this problem, Bhatt suggests that in grammatical noun phrases such as the one shown in (18) — Peters Behandlung seiner Mutter — the DP Peters is basegenerated in SPEC of DP. It is co-indexed with an empty category 'e' in the external argument position within NP. In this way it can receive its theta-role as 'subject of N0, The structure is given in (20): (20)
If we assume that all prenominai genitive NP's are base-generated in SPEC of DP, then the structure for the ungrammatical noun phrase in (19) would be: (21)
4
Note that this NP is ungrammatical if the intended, and expected, meaning is that it is the doctor who is treating Peter.
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Presumably, then, the difference in the grammaticality of (18) and (19) can be attributed to a difference between the trace left by movement in (15) and the basegenerated empty category in (21). While case-assignment is not blocked by the trace, it is blocked by the empty category.5 This correctly predicts that an internal argument (object of №) can only appear in prenominai position when there is no lexically realized external argument (subject of №), as is shown by the following examples from Bhatt (1990:129): (22)
a. Caesarsj Eroberung Galliens ei b. Galliensj Eroberung ej c. *Galliensj Eroberung ej Caesars
The trees for (22a,b) are given in (23):
(23)
5
a.
Bhatt suggests that the empty category has the same status as a WH-trace, and is therefore a variable. It can only occur in A-positions, is lexically governed by N0 and is A'-bound.
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b.
An alternative analysis, suggested by Wayne Harbert (personal communication), is that the traces resulting from movement do block case assignment. If this is the case, the example given in (18) is correctly ruled out, since the trace left by the NP seiner Mutter would block case assignment to the NP Peter. If we take Bhatt's empty categories to be traces, then the contrast between the two NP's in (20) and (21) can be explained. In (20), Peters Behandlung seiner Mutter would be correctly categorized as grammatical, since there is nothing to block case assignment to the NP seiner Mutter, and the preposed NP Peter receives its case from the POSS element in D°. The ungrammatical NP in (21) is ruled out because the trace left by the NP Peter blocks case assignment to the NP des Arztes. This leaves only the grammati cal example in (15) unaccounted for — das Verständnis Peters fur Maria. Harbert suggests two possibilities: 1) Perhaps the PP is not base-generated as a sister of № , or 2) even if it does start out as a sister, PP-traces may behave differently than other traces with regard to the adjacency condition on case-marking. In any case, it is clear that there must be either a trace or an empty category within NP for subjective and objective genitives in order for the NP to receive case and a theta-role from the head noun. Possessive genitives often occur prenominally. These are not part of the argument structure of the head noun, and thus do not have to be coindexed with an empty category in NP, as in (24):
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(24)
Full NP possessors, such as that in des alten Mannes Hut, are generally labelled 'archaic' or 'stilted' by native speakers of German. While most will not call them ungrammatical, they do not seem to be part of the internal grammar of the speakers. I would like to suggest that genitive noun phrases were generated in the same way in the older stages of the language, and that this would explain why the distinction in the ordering seems to be one of personal versus non-personal genitives. In the case of deverbative nouns, if both the subject and object were present, only the subject could, and in fact had to, occur prenominally in order for the phrase to be grammati cal. Subjects are very often persons, or at least animate, while objects are often concrete or abstract NP's. Unfortunately, there seems to be little data from OHG to support (or refute) this suggested ordering. The earliest example containing both a subjective and objective genitive listed by Behaghel is from the 14th century (from Mystik I): (25) Samuelis minne siner viende Though there were no examples of a head noun with both a subjective and objective genitive in my sample, I did find twelve objective genitives and three subjective genitives. The Latin order for all of them was NG'. Of the twelve objective genitives, only two were GN, and both were personal genitives: (26)
Latin German (a) piscatores hominum manno fiscara (b) in captura piscium in thero fisco fahungu
of the nine examples of the order NG, three are personal nouns:
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Latin (a) redemptionem Hierusalem (b) ad revelationem gentium (c) redemtionem plebi suae
German arlosnessi Hierusalem zi inrigannesse thiotono losunga sinemo folke
In one case, the genitive is a pronoun with a dependent PP: (28)
Latin in ruinam et resurrectionem multorum
German in urresti managero in Israhel
If, in fact, subjective and objective genitives were base-generated to the right of the head noun (as in Modern German), but either, occurring alone, could move to the left of the head noun, then we should expect to find both the GN and NG order. Possessives can be freely generated in SPEC of DP (according to Bhatt's model), and possessors are most often personal or animate. But they can also be generated to the right of the head noun. In the 50 pages of Tatian, there were 58 cases which I categorized as possessive. Of these, 29 showed the order GN, and 29 were NG. In most of the GN cases, the genitive is a single lexical item. A few examples are: (29)
Latin (a) verbum dei (b) ex voluntate viri
German gotes uuort fon gommanes uuillen
On the other hand, most of the ones with the order NG involve a genitive NP with modifiers — at least an article or possessive pronoun: (30)
Latin (a) liber prophetae Esaiae (b) de manibus inimicorum nostrorum
German then buoh thes uuizagen Esiaes fon hentin unsero fianto
There are exceptions in both cases. Some genitives in the order GN have a definite article or possessive pronoun: (31)
Latin (a) ad genua Ihesu (b) voluntatem patris mei
German zi thes heilantes knevvun mines fater uuillon
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Some cases showing the order NG involve a genitive which is a single lexical item: (32)
Latin (a) in domo Iacob (b) per os sanctorum
German in huse Iacobes thuruh mund heilagero
There are, of course, many different kinds of genitives other than the three discussed here — objective, subjective and possessive. One difficulty encountered in studying this problem is that there is no clear classification of the different types of genitives. In order to make a strong case for my argument, it would be necessary to arrive at a classification for all types of genitives. It is particularly difficult to classify those genitives which often involve persons. For example, both (31b) and (32b) could arguably be classified as genitives of identity, one of Behaghel's categories. Since the personal genitives seem to occur on either side of the noun with about the same frequency, it might be more useful to look more closely at types of genitives that are often not personal. Objective genitives have already been discussed. Another category suggested by Behaghel is genitive of characteristic. These will, by nature, generally involve abstract genitives. In Behaghel, these kinds of genitives generally follow the head noun. I found only one case in my sample, and it shows the order NG (33)
Latin hominibus bonae voluntatis
German mannun guotes uuillen
The genitive of identity often involves abstract or concrete nouns. Some examples from my data are: (34)
Latin German (a) altarisi incensi thes altares thero uuihrouhbrunsti (b) in umbra mortis in lantskeffi todes (c) in terrain Israhel in erda Israhel (d) annum domini iar truhtines (e) progenies viperarum cunmi natrono
There are a total of 55 genitives of identity in my sample. Of these, 17 show the order GN, and the other 38 were NG. Of the 17 GN cases, 7 were some form of himilo rihhi, and 2 were non-personal:
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Latin (a) Ulia agri (b) lux mundi
German thes accares lilia mittilgartes lioht
Of the 38 cases of NG, 16 involved personal genitives. It seems, then, that genitives of characteristic and identity are much more likely to follow than to precede the head noun. There are at least two ways to license a phrase in GB theory: theta-role assignment and predication. Theta-role assignment applies to such things as subjects and objects. Possessives in NP would, according to Bhatt, get their theta-role from the POSS element in D0. Genitives of characteristic and identity would probably be licensed through predication. Travis (1984) states that predication has always been (and still is) to the right in the history of German. Thus, we would expect that these two types would be generated to the right of the head noun. While they could possibly be moved to the left, they might not occur pre-nominally as often as, say, possessives which can be freely generated on either side. It may well be, then, that the distinction of personal vs. non-personal genitives arose as a result of different grammatical relations between the head and the attributive genitive. Now we tum to the second question. Why did the order change from GN to NG? We have already dealt with part of the question. The order was not strictly GN in OHG. Either order was possible. If we assume Bhatt's structure for the Modern German NP, then the real question is not why full noun phrases (including following complements) COULD occur prenominally in OHG, but rather why they CANNOT occur prenominally in Modern German.6 Structurally, there is nothing to stop a subject such as des Arztes in (21) from being base-generated in SPEC of DP, coindexed with an empty category in NP. The structure would be as in (36):
6 While most Germans would find a phrase such as des Arztes Behandlung Peters grammatical, they consider it archaic or stilted, and would never produce it in speech. Full NP possessors do not seem to be allowed in the internal grammar of native speakers.
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(36)
We could say that SPEC of DP cannot contain a full DP in German (a very arbitrary rule), but another possibility is that the SPEC of DP (labelled 'DP' by Bhatt) is absent in Modern German. If we assume that all non-adjectival modifiers occur in D°, then we have an explanation for why only single lexical items — names or pronouns — can occur pre-nominally. The -s on such phrases as Annas Hut or Vaters Haus would then be simply a grammatical marker. Thus, the change from OHG to Modern German was the loss of the SPEC of DP. This change is easily motivated, of course, as straightforward simplification of the grammar. To summarize, then, the distinction between personal and non-personal may have arisen, or rather, been present from the beginning, as a result of different grammatical relations between the head noun and the attributive genitive. A speaker learning the language would learn that genitives could be generated on either side. Based on the surface data discussed here, some generation of speakers would have hypothesized that the distinction between personal and non-personal genitives was the prime factor in determining order, thus resulting in the simplification described above. If this personal/non-personal distinction in fact became part of the grammar, then all personal genitives would be more likely to precede the head noun and all concrete and abstract nouns would be more likely to follow, regardless of their grammatical relationship to the head noun. If this is the case by ENHG times, then classifying the genitives in these data according to grammatical relations will be of no help. However, the ENHG data have not been carefully studied in these terms, and since that is the time period which offers the most prose texts that are not translated from the Latin, and which represent a variety of styles, these data clearly need to be investigated further. It is also during the ENHG period that the decline of the prenominai genitive begins, so a closer look at the texts may help determine when and why the SPEC position of DP was either lost, or could no longer contain a full NP.
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REFERENCES Abney, Steven. 1986. "Functional Elements and Licensing". Unpubl. MS, MIT. . 1987. The English NP in its Sentential Aspect. Ph.D. dissertation; MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Behaghel, Otto. 1923-32. Deutsche Syntax: Eine geschichtliche Darstellung. 4 vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Bhatt, Christa. 1990. Die syntaktische Struktur der Nominalphrase im Deutschen. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Carr, Charles. 1933. "The Position of the Genitive in German." Modern Language Review 28.465-479. Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government & Binding. Dordrecht: Foris. Ebert, Robert Peter. 1986. Historische Syntax des Deutschen II: 1300-1750. Bern: Peter Lang. .1988. "Variation m me Position of the Attributive Genitive in Sixteenth Century German". Monatshefte 80:1.32-49. Fukui,Naoki. 1986. A Theory of Category Projection and its Applications. Ph.D. dissertation; MIT, Cambridge, Mass. Lockwood, William Burley. 1968. Historical German Syntax. Oxford: Clarendon. Travis, Lisa. 1984. Parameters and Effects of Word Order Variation. Ph.D. dissertation; MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
THE VERSCHÄRFUNG AS FEATURE SPREAD* GARRY W. DAVIS & GREGORY K. IVERSON University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 1. Introduction The process of Verschärfung, often also referred to as Holtzmann's Law, is one of the most discussed yet least understood developments in the history of the Germanic languages. The extent of scholarly agreement on the Verschärfung, in fact, is generally limited to a description of its occurrence. In short, the Proto-Germanic glides -j- and -w-, when preceded by a short vowel and followed by a vowel, either long or short, usually appear with geminated obstruents in their East and North Germanic reflexes: thus the now famous examples of PGmc *twa-jē > Gothic twaddjē, Old Norse tv eggja "of two"; PGmc *trewa-s > Go triggws, ON tryggr "true". Great controversy centers around the possible causes of Verschärfung, the apparent exceptions to it in North and East Germanic, and its putative nonoccurrence in West Germanic. For detailed reviews of the pertinent research, the reader is directed to the lengthy survey by Collinge (1985) and the several discussions of Verschärfung available in the standard handbooks. We will summarize the previous research here only to the extent necessary to focus on the rather specific points raised in this paper. First, we consider certain typological evidence that would appear to make a 'laryngeal' explanation for Verschärfung even more plausible than heretofore believed, and second, drawing attention to various issues of syllable contact and resyllabification, we suggest that Verschärfung had already taken place in ProtoGermanic (when laryngeals presumably were, still extant) even though it was realized differently in the three major dialect groups. 2. Proposed Explanations for Verschärfung One explanation of the Germanic Verschärfung holds that the accent placement in Proto-Germanie triggered the strengthening of glides to stops. Here opinion seems to be split as to whether preceding accent on a short vowel caused the 'sharpening' (Kluge 1879, 1913). Holtzmann himself, Bechtel (1885), Trautmann (1906, 1925), * We thank Mark Hale, Edith Moravcsik, Edgar Polome, and Joe Salmons for their several comments offered in connection with this paper, along with an anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for publication.
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Mikkola (1924), and Hirt (1931) all favored one variation or another of the notion that the strengthening came about due to the presence of a long preceding vowel and a following accented syllable. Other researchers — Smith (1941), Lehmann (1952), Polome (1949), Jasanoff (1978) — however, have taken recourse to the probable retention of laryngeal consonants in Proto-Germanic. According to this hypothesis, of which there are almost as many variations as there are proponents, the presence of a laryngeal either before or after the sequence in question could have brought about Verschärfung. Non-laryngeal explanations for Verschärfung have also come to the fore. Some of these ideas favor the notion of glide-reinforcement (Hammerich 1955), others champion an account tied to hiatus neutralization (Cathey 1970, perhaps Marchand 1992), still others see no significant patterns at all (Beekes 1972). The most insightful recent interpretation, however, in our view, is Suzuki's (1990) special version of glide-reinforcement, which appeals to principles of syllable structure in conjunction with the assumption that laryngeals were retained into Proto-Germanic. Before proceeding, it will be helpful to review the most pertinent facts regarding Verschärfung: 1) The North and East Germanic (Gothic) reflexes of Verschärfung are not identical. Thus Proto-Germanic intervocalic *-j- is realized as -ddj- in Gothic, but as ggj- in Old Norse, whereas the other reconstructed glide, *-w-, is similarly affected in both dialects, becoming -ggw- in Gothic and -ggv- in Old Norse. In addition, the Proto-Germanie cluster *-gj- remains -gj- in Gothic (as in lagjan "to lay"), but is geminated to -ggj- in Old Norse (leggja).1 2) The presence of Verschärfung in North and East Germanic is sometimes cited as justification for positing a closer relationship between just these two groups within Germanic (but cf. also point 1 above). It has been acknowledged by various sources, however, that remnant forms of Verschärfung likely persisted into West Germanic (Kögel 1884, Brugge 1888, Polome 1949), a possibility which points to origin of the phenomenon in Proto-Germanie. 3) Recent Verschärfung-like developments have taken place in Faroese (Roe 1965), in some Low German dialects (Reed 1959), and in a number of nonGermanic languages, including Ganda, a Bantu language (where -w- regularly yields -ggw-), as well as in dialects of Greek and Romansch (Kaisse 1992). 1 It is sometimes claimed that *-gj- should have been realized identically in Gothic and Old Norse if Verschärfung were a common innovation in these two dialect areas, since Go. -ggw- and ON -ggvpresumably would have passed through a parallel stage (i.e., *-gw-) in the process of glide sharpening (Cathey 1970).
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4) There appear to be exceptions to Verschärfung even within East and North Germanic; cf. ON Frigg vs. Go frijōn "love", ON hỏggva "to cut" vs. Go hawі "hay", ON priggia vs. Go prijē "of three", etc. These have triggered speculation that the consequences of Verschärfung may have been obscured due to effects of analogy (Prokosch 1938:93). 3. Role of the Laryngeals Although it is not the purpose of this paper particularly to lay out arguments for the PIE laryngeal hypothesis, a brief explanation of its importance for present concerns is in order. (For an exhaustive survey, cf. Lindeman 1987.) The positing of laryngeal consonants for PIE, of course, derives from the early work of de Saussure (1879) and Kuryłowicz (1927). There are many variations on the theory, and its several versions continue to evolve, but it is safe to say that most proponents now reconstruct up to three different PIE laryngeal consonants, usually symbolized as H1, H2, and H3, the phonetic values of which remain open to speculation. These segments generally act like consonants within the PIE root structure and sometimes 'color' the articulation of surrounding vowels. Thus the presence of a laryngeal could change a neighboring vowel's quality, or extend its quantity, depending on the specific laryngeal involved and its position within the PIE root. In PIE reconstruc tions like *H1ed- "eat" (cf. Latin edo) or *H1es- "be" (cf. Greek esti), laryngeals disappeared without affecting the vowels next to them. In other cases, however, such as *pleH1- > *plē- "fill" or *dheH1- > *dhē- "put", the loss of the laryngeals resulted in compensatory lengthening of the preceding contiguous vowel. As pointed out by Lindeman (1987:21), such loss of consonant with compensatory lengthening of a preceding vocalic segment is known from many languages (cf. also Hayes 1989 and other sources cited there), and, indeed, it is this function of the reconstructed laryngeals which interests us most here, since compensatory lengthening is crucial to the part that we argue laryngeals played in the Germanic Verschärfung. 4. Verschärfung and Syllable Contact Suzuki's (1990) syllable structure-based account of Verschärfung holds that the strengthening of glides to geminate voiced stops took place in two stages. At the beginning of stage 1, by crucial and now common assumption, laryngeals were still present in Germanic (Lehmann 1952, Jasanoff 1978, Lindeman 1987). For example, OIc. byggvi "to dwell" descended from a PIE stem, *bhewH2-, which still contained a laryngeal at the beginning of the Proto-Germanic period. Existence of a laryngeal in this PIE form, it should be emphasized, is strongly supported by the otherwise mystifying 'long syllabic resonant' alternation involving zero-grade versus e-grade ablaut in the Sanskrit cognates followed by a consonant-initial suffix, viz. bhüū-tá "to
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be" p.p.p. (< *bhwH2-, i.e. *bhøwH2) vs. bhavi-tar noun (< *bhewH2֊). When followed by a vowel-initial suffix in Proto-Germanic, however, the laryngeal in PIE *bhewH2-, or early PGmc *biwH2-, would naturally have syllabified with the following vowel, since ordinary principles of syllabic organization invariably assign intervocalic consonants to onsets rather than codas. Subsequent loss of this laryngeal, Suzuki infers, then resulted in insertion of a glide in its place in order to function as a 'hiatus breaker', i.e., to fill-in the vacated onset-position previously occupied by the laryngeal. As postulated first by Jasanoff and modified by Suzuki, these developments would have proceeded as in (1), where V stands for any vowel, for any laryngeal, G for a glide, and the symbol $ marks a syllable boundary. (1) -VG$HV- > -VG$V- > -VG$GVPIE *bhew$H2-eje > Early PGmc *biw$-ī > PGmc *biw$w-ī > Ole byggvi Upon loss of laryngeals, on this account, syllable contacts of a highly unstable kind would have arisen at an intermediate stage of Proto-Germanie. Besides VG$HV > VG$V as illustrated in (1), there would also have been many instances of VT$HV > VT$V and VR$HV > VR$V (where represents any obstruent and R any resonant). Suzuki argues that the new intermediate sequences (VT$V, VR$V, VG$V) in fact must have been under considerable pressure to resyllabify, since a more natural prosodie configuration would place the syllable boundary before rather than after the intervocalic consonant, i.e., V$TV, V$RV, V$GV. This is because syllabification with onsets at the expense of codas conforms to the now familiar Syllable Contact Law, which holds that syllable junctures are the more preferred as the sonority value at the termination .of the first syllable increases and that at the beginning of the second syllable decreases (Murray & Vennemann 1983, Vennemann 1988). Indeed, as incorporated into the 'Onset First' principle of universal syllabifi cation, VC$V is prosodically quite impossible, even as an intermediate stage on the way to V$CV, and so actually could not have arisen at all. On the view of language change subscribed to here, consequently, according to which intermediate stages of a language are believed to conform to all the grammatical principles which govern attested languages, this critical component in Suzuki's description of the development of Verschärfung must be reevaluated. Suzuki's account may be summarized as follows: Loss of the laryngeal consonant in a VG$HV sequence yielded VG$V, with the highest possible (and thus least preferred) sonority value of a vowel at the beginning of the second syllable. Gemination of the coda glide then took place toward the end of stage 1 in order to achieve the more preferred syllable contact embodied in VG$GV. Sequences involving VT$V and VR$V, by contrast, achieved conformity with the Syllable
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Contact Law rather more directly, by resyllabifying to V$TV and V$RV. Though it would be expected that sequences of VG$V should have resyllabified in the same way (i.e., to V$GV), there were paradigmatic pressures to preserve the unity particularly of VG sequences due to the ubiquity of Proto-Germanie ablaut forms of the shape CeGC/CaGC/CGC. In order to retain VG unity and yet conform to the Syllable Contact Law, then, the glides underwent gemination rather than resyllabification in this, the first, or Germanic, phase of Verschärfung. The second phase in Suzuki's interpretation of Verschärfung took place separately within North and East Germanic — necessarily, therefore, in the post-ProtoGermanic period. Since this part of Verschärfung would have been limited to North and East Germanic, its absence in West Germanic can be easily explained (the apparently isolated occurrence of some sharpened forms in West Germanic could be attributed to dialect borrowing). In Gothic, sequences of VjjV and VwwV were strengthed to VddjV and VggwV, respectively, whereas in Old Norse VjjV and VwwV developed into VggjV and VggwV, respectively. Like many other research ers dating back to Prokosch (1938), Suzuki discounts the possible phonetic difference between Go VddjV and ON VggjV, whose exact phonetic nature appears to be impossible to determine anyway, beyond acknowledging them to have represented geminate voiced stops with probably glide-like secondary articulation. Nonetheless, Suzuki and others see this stage of Verschärfung in Gothic and Old Norse as two independent innovations, whereas earlier research generally held that these otherwise rather odd developments indicated a special affinity between the two daughters in which they occur. In this second, hardening phase of Verschärfung, Suzuki once again calls upon the Syllable Contact Law. The syllable nexus in pre-Gothic and pre-Old Norse sequences of the type Vj$jV and Vw$wV, though superior to the presumed intermediate PGmc Vj$V and Vw$V, still would have been less preferred than a contact in which the onset of the second syllable had a lower sonority value, or possessed greater consonantal strength. In order to achieve an even more nearly optimal result, then, the second glide in the sequence was hardened to a stop, which in turn affected the first glide (with which it shared all features) as well, hence VddjV (VggjV) and VggwV. Thus the East and North Germanic defects in syllable structure which loss of the laryngeals precipitated were not repaired at once, but rather in two stages: first gemination (PGmc), then hardening (Go, ON). In West Germanic, by contrast, the syllable contact inherited from stage 1 was enhanced only minimally, by vocalization of the first of the two glides (as in OHG zweijo "of two").
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5. Laryngeals and Compensatory Lengthening In what follows, we present an alternative means by which Verschärfung may have come about, still under the assumption that laryngeals were extant at the beginning of the Proto-Germanie period but without positing any syllabically improbable or impossible intermediate stages in the development. Our view conjectures that a major class feature ([consonantal]) spread from the laryngeal to the preceding glide in concert with the disappearance of laryngeals in the late ProtoGermanie period, and that the gemination aspect of Verschärfung was itself a compensation for this loss of laryngeals. Unlike previous accounts, the present study also draws parallels between the Germanic situation and the mechanism by which glides are assimilatorily hardened in other languages, recently investigated by Kaisse (1992). We observe that, as a type of assimilation,2 glide-to-stop conversion appears to be triggered by an immediately adjacent true consonant, which Kaisse expresses as spreading of the feature [consonantal] into the glide (along with subsequent 'default' provision of the other features characteristic of stops). Importantly, the independent ly motivated supposition that laryngeals existed in the input to Verschärfung at its earliest stage in Proto-Germanie presents a similar environment, because the [consonantal] property of the laryngeal can spread into, and so sharpen, the adjacent glide. This is not possible, however, if, as Suzuki suggests, loss of laryngeals took place first and produced defective syllable contacts like VG$V, the repair of which triggered glide gemination. Indeed, if VG$V structures were intermediate between the laryngeal and geminate glide periods of Verschärfung at stage 1, the simplest repair would have been to resyllabify directly to V$GV, skipping the gemination phase altogether. Though Suzuki suggests this actually was the case, as reviewed above, when obstruents or other sonorant consonants occupied the pre-laryngeal position (i.e., VC$HV > VC$V > V$CV), he maintains that the glides were resistant to such repair, in part because their higher sonority aiready made for preferred codas per the Syllable Contact Law, in part because the diphthongal integrity of VG sequences in Germanic was presumably inviolable. Nonetheless, the absence of any onset consonant in the second syllable of VG$V still remained prosodically highly irregular (if not altogether impossible, in his view), hence gemination of the glide in order to produce VG$GV. We surmise that Germanic responded to the pending loss of laryngeals somewhat differently, viz. in terms of compensatory lengthening accompanied by the spread of [consonantal]. More precisely, the segmental disappearance of the laryngeal in 2 Nonassimilatory strengthenings of glides (especially to fricatives or affricates) are also possible, as decribed below in discussion of other instances of Verschärfting-like phenomena.
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VG$HV left its skeletal or timing slot intact, into which the features of the glide extended to produce a novel geminate structure; coterminously, we further suppose, the [consonantal] quality of the laryngeal spread leftward into the glide, sharpening it to a voiced stop which still retained its glide-like properties as a secondary articulation (/j / > /dj/, /w/ > /g w /). The phonation type which we consider spellings like Gothic twaddje to have represented then was one in which these secondarily articulated stops had also become geminated at the expense of the segmental existence of the laryngeal, i.e., Vj$HV > Vd$dJV. This compensatory lengthening interpretation of the disappearance of post-glide laryngeals, significantly, parallels the function served by these segments in accounting for PIE long vowel ablaut, whereby vowel plus laryngeal often yields long vowel; in the Germanic cases at hand, it is glide (= nonsyllabic 'vowel') plus laryngeal that undergoes the coalescence, hardening as well to a geminate stop. Moreover, there is no postulation on this account of improbable or impossible syllabifications, since intermediate configurations of the form VC$V (< VC$HV) do not arise; rather, the skeletal portion of the disappearing laryngeal remains to serve as the docking site for the hardening, geminating glide. Viewed stepwise, the hardening component of Verschärfung would parallel the several cross-linguistic developments identified by Kaisse (1992), who, as men tioned, attributes this kind of phenomenon to spreading of the feature [consonantal] from a neighboring true consonant into an adjacent glide. For example, in Cypriot Greek the abstract noun suffix /ia/, normally [ja], appears as [ka] after most consonants (/omorf+ia/ → [omorika] "beauty"), and in Bergüner Romansch both /w/ and /j/ harden to [g] when before a consonant (/lavowra/ → [ləvogrə] "works", /la bijza/ → [la bigza] "snowstorm"). In the Germanic case, by our similar hypothesis, spreading extends into a glide (which, alone among the consonants, is otherwise not specified for [consonantal]) from a following laryngeal consonant. The laryngeals of PIE, we will assume, were distinguished from other phonation types by a primary place articulator indicating pharyngeal constriction, either Radical (per Clements 1993) or Pharyngeal (per McCarthy 1988). As illustrated in Figure 1, then, hardening of trie glide would ensue as a consequence of its having attracted into itself the feature [consonantal] from a neighboring true consonant.
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Fig. 1: 'Hardening' of glide through spread of [consonantal]fromlaryngeal Hardening on this analysis thus parallels the typological pattern identified by Kaisse (1992) and at the same time makes crucial use of the phonetic properties of the independently posited laryngeal segments, namely, their consonantal quality. The gemination aspect of Verschärfung, in turn, can be represented as a simple compen satory lengthening of the glide in association with segmental loss of the immediately following laryngeal. Laryngeals were eliminated in all other environments, too, of course, but on this account their removal would have had a special effect on glides, as it did on vowels in PIE (*dheH > *dhē, etc.). Still, since true consonants were not compensatorily lengthened upon the loss of laryngeals in Proto-Germanic, gemina tion, if interpreted independently, would have had to have been formulated so as to affect only glides, a restriction which is built in by stipulation in Figure 2 of the Vocalic-Place feature [high].
Fig. 2: Laryngeal loss with compensatory lengthening of preceding glide Taken alone, the process identified in Figure 2 would also represent a more rational accounting of the glide gemination event which Suzuki attributes to Proto-Germanic. That description, it will be recalled, proceeds through stages in which loss of the laryngeals gives rise to unacceptable intermediate syllabifications (VG$HV > VG$V) which are repaired by subsequent, ex nihilo gemination (VG$V > VG$GV); by contrast, the bisegmental, heterosyllabic structure of glide plus laryngeal sequences posited for PIE is retained, not recreated, in the assimilatory or compensatory
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lengthening analysis (VG$HV > VG$GV) illustrated in Figure 2. Thus, even the view of Verschärfung in which only glide gemination is considered to have been a common property of Proto-Germanic is improved by the compensatory lengthening interpretation. Strictly speaking, however, the gemination aspect of Verschärfung constituted perhaps not so much a 'compensatory lengthening' (typically a tautosyllabically restricted phenomenon, cf. Hayes 1989) as it did a complete assimilation of the laryngeal to the 'hardening' glide — cf., e.g., such heterosyllabic total assimilations as PGmc *driηkan > ON drikka "to drink". In any case, the two components of the Verschärfung process, hardening and lengthening, can be more economically and more insightfully interpreted together, as complementary aspects of the same ProtoGermanic phenomenon. That is, the compensatory lengthening which accompanies loss of the laryngeal can be associated with the glide hardening process directly, which results in a single, simpler, and considerably more general statement of Verschärfung. With hardening and gemination interpreted as two sides of the same historical coin, a natural (rather than stipulated) account emerges as well for why only glides, not the other consonants, were compensatorily geminated upon disappearance
(Compensatory Lengthening) Vj$HV > Vd$dJV (Spread of [consonantal])
Fig. 3: Gmc Verschärfung = hardening in association with gemination of the laryngeals: On the assumption that features may not spread through or into structures for which they are already specified (Kiparsky 1985, Archangeli 1988, Clements 1993), only glides could be subject to the spreading of [consonantal] since they are alone among -segments in not already having that feature. As the skeletal position of the segmentally vacated laryngeal attaches to the Root node of the consonant preceding it, then, geminating it, only glides are affected because the spreading of [consonantal] via the hardening process laid out in Figure 1 is itself (inherently) restricted to glides. Figure 3, a generalized composite of Figures 1 and 2, portrays Verschärfung as we now suppose it to have occurred in Proto-Germanie.
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We thus consider that the Verschärfung consisted of two interrelated actions affecting glide plus laryngeal sequences: (a) attachment of the root node of the glide onto the timing slot of the laryngeal as the laryngeal's own root node delinks, which represents compensatory lengthening associated with segmental loss of the laryngeal, and (b) regressive spread of the feature [consonantal] from the laryngeal into the glide, hardening or sharpening the new geminate structure into a true (stop) consonant with glide-like secondary articulation. In the absence of evidence that the hardening component preceded compensatory lengthening chronologically, or vice versa, the simplest and most direct account is the interpretation of these functions as complementary aspects of the same phenomenon. Nonetheless, if the hardening process did take place first historically, its unique shared feature output relative to [consonantal] could have served as a trigger for the compensatory lengthening with which it later would have joined to form the single synchronic statement of Verschärfung illustrated in Figure 3; conversely, if compensatory lengthening occurred first, the resulting shared Root configuration could have been taken as the structural basis for a (then nonassimiliatory) hardening of geminate glides prior to merger of the processes synchronically. Introduced as one general development, however, Verschärfung takes the form presented in Figure 3 directly, a composite yet simple sound change which we believe was implemented throughout Germanic as laryngeals came to be deleted in all environments. Indeed, the segmental 'loss' of laryngeals embodied in the Verschärfung process may be construed as the seed which grew into the generalization by which laryngeals eventually were eliminated acrossthe-board in Germanic. In both Gothic and Old Norse, to recapitulate certain relevant facts, sequences of VwwV developed into VggwV, which is expected in both these daughters given our view that Verschärfung came about as a common development during the ProtoGermanic period. The contrary assumption of Suzuki and others, of course, i.e., that the hardening aspect of Verschärfung was a separate, later innovation, entails that its emergence in both East and North Germanic (if not also West Germanic — cf. below) was due either to 'drift-like' coincidence or to a special genetic affinity which obtained between just East and North Germanic, neither of which seems at all probable to us. Like Suzuki, however, we are not disturbed by the apparent disparity between the Gothic and Old Norse reflexes of PGmc VjjV, which was strengthed to VddjV in Gothic but to VggjV in Old Norse. Instead, we concur with Prokosch (1938:92) and others that both spellings may signify the same sounds, namely, a long voiced central stop followed by (or probably simultaneous with) a palatal glide. As for the apparent random exceptions to Verschärfung in East and North Germanic, the present account, like others before it, relies on the effects of analogy to have caused the regression of hardening in some words that contained both
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strengthened and non-strengthened forms in their paradigms. For example, though the PIE word for "two" is generally reconstructed with a laryngeal (which caused Verschärfung in the way outlined here, cf. Go twaddje), the word for "three", which is not usually reconstructed with a laryngeal, shows apparent effects of Verschärfung in ON priggja, but not in Go prijē "of three". We suppose that the appearance of Verschärfung of ON priggja came about due to analogy with the Germanic word for "two", noting that the system of PIE numerals has proved susceptible to the effects of analogy on other occasions as well: Old Church Slavonic deveti "nine" developed an initial d on presumed analogy with OCS deseti "ten" (Lehmann 1992:15), and the Germanic word for "four" is thought to have obtained its initial ƒ from the word for five (Go. fimf) since development of f- from PIE *kwetwo:r- cannot be explained by means of regular sound change (Prokosch 1938:74). In reverse fashion, Latin quinque "five" derives from a pre-Latin *penkwe, with the change of /p/ to /kw/ due to distant assimilation to the following labiovelar (of which there are several other examples in the history of Latin, cf. Hock 1986:63); a conspiring factor in this familiar change may also have been the initial consonant in Latin quod "four", which itself begins with a labiovelar.3 In West Germanic, though not without leaving certain relics (cf. Polome 1949), we believe the Verschärfung underwent a basic structural simplification that eliminated its [consonantal] spread portion, leaving just the compensatory lengthen ing process to produce VG$GV geminate glide forms of the same sort as Suzuki ascribes to Proto-Germanic alone. In some cases, certainly, lexical restructuring would have removed all trace of underlying etymological laryngeals in post-glide position — presumably laryngeals had disappeared context-freely in all other positions by this time — and so would have given rise to forms whose hardened segments remained intact. But in the majority of cases, West Germanic daughters show simple gemination as the reflex of Verschärfung, a development which we now attribute to the formal simplification of the process expressed in Figure 4.
3 For a fuller discussion of the various analogical changes that have occurred in the IE numerals, see Markey (1984:68-70).
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Fig. 4: West Germanic simplification of Verschärfung We speculate with Suzuki that the West Germanic innovation may be associated with the broader occurrence there of syllable-contact motivated gemination before the particular glide j (VC$jV > VC$CjV). It may be no accident, in other words, that West Germanic alone introduced a general pre-glide consonant gemination process, and that just there Verschärfung reduced to one of its elemental, gemination-only components.4 In any case, the reduction of Verschärfung in West Germanic to mere gemination, implemented through the familiar mechanism of simplification, is compatible with — indeed, derivative of — the presumed Proto-Germanic origin of the overall phenomenon as presented in Figure 3. By postulating that the full Verschärfung process originated in Proto-Germanic, the present account avoids several difficulties that confound the Syllable Contact Law explanation advanced by Suzuki. As mentioned, Suzuki assumes that early PGmc VG$HV went through a stage of first VG$V (via laryngeal loss), then of VG$GV (via glide gemination), rather than just resyllabifying directly to V$GV in parallel to developments involving any other consonant followed by a disappearing laryngeal (VC$HV > V$CV). Suzuki maintains that certain paradigmatic pressures in ProtoGermanie may have motivated emergence of the geminate glide structure in VG$GV over the more optimal syllable contact which would have arisen in V$GV, but he must then also assume that the intermediate VG$GV configuration persisted into each of the three daughters, North, East, and West Germanic. The path of least resistance to improve on VG$GV syllable contacts, however, would appear to have been simply to vocalize the first glide in the geminate sequence so as to achieve a more sonorous (and thereby preferable) syllable offset, as actually did happen, it appears, in just West Germanic (e.g., OHG zweijo). 4
East and North Germanic appear to have improved on VC$jV contact points, too, either through gemination of particular consonants (velars in North Germanic, cf. Prokosch 1939:88) or through direct resyllabification (VC$jV > V$CjV), as in some of the modern Scandinavian languages (Vennemann 1972, Anderson 1984).
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North and East Germanic improved upon this syllable contact, too, according to Suzuki, by nonassimilatory hardening of the onset glide into a stop, simultaneously affecting as well the preceding glide with which, as the other half of a geminate, it shared all features (i.e., VG$GV > Vd$dJV, Vg$gwV). Ironically, Suzuki argues throughout that the various stages of Verschärfung conform to the diachronic tendency toward more preferred syllable edge alignments, yet he must posit a substantial intermediate period between Proto-Germanic and its daughters during which the nonoptimal syllable contact of VG$GV existed — only then to arrive at a final, hardened stage in both North and East Germanic which is itself scarcely ideal with regard to syllable juxtaposition since the left syllable now terminates with the low sonority of an obstruent stop. Moreover, he is forced to conclude that North and East Germanic developed in this way independently when they otherwise would be expected to have handled the matter in common, and more simply, viz. by vocalizing or syllabifying the coda glide in VG$GV along with West Germanic. The account offered here, by contrast, explains the less than optimal syllable contacts that obtained in North and East Germanic as the common retention of a general assimilatory development that occurred in Proto-Germanic, namely, the removal of laryngeals with simultaneous compensatory lengthening and hardening as described above. Loss of the hardening component of Verschärfung in West Germanic then derives from a formal simplification of the overall process in which the resulting syllable contact is further improved by the apparent syllabification of coda glides. The assumption that Proto-Germanic Verschärfung was inherited, albeit simpli fied, in what later became West Germanic is further supported by various West Germanic relics that show the effects of the complete process. While the early research also tended to see these forms as examples of inherited Verschärfung (Kögel 1884), more recent work has assumed their existence to be the result of dialect borrowing from North or East Germanic. As Polome (1949) has pointed out, however, a number of forms in West Germanic appear to have been affected directly. Thus, he reasoned that in at least one respect Verschärfung had also operated in West Germanic, specifically, in the sequence syllabic + laryngeal + non-syllabic w. Under these circumstances, Polome suggested, the laryngeal coalesced with the preceding -u- when this vowel was stressed, or combined as a velar fricative with the following bilabial -w- to produce a labiovelar -gw- under the conditions of Verner's Law. His conclusions derive from the existence of several putative remnant forms in various West Germanic dialects as exemplified by the names of the midge (mosqui to): Polome posited an original form (in Indo-Hittite) of *mûH-y~ containing a laryngeal, a variant of which yielded Middle Swedish myggia (< *mu-Hw-y, strengthened forms of this word occur in other West Germanic dialects as well, e.g.,
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Old Saxon muggia. A similar account would explain the existence in modern Dutch dialects of possible Verschärfung in forms such as snugger "brainy, bright, clever" and its Low German cognates in snigger and snogger "slim, graceful", even though these forms are attested relatively late. In addition to the examples cited by Polomé, finally, the occurrence of the nominative and accusative plural of Old High German ei "egg" can be cited, attested as eigir, along with the genitive plural form aegeroß 6. Other Instances of Strengthening in Germanic We emphasize that the present proposals are not intended as an explanation for all instances of glide-to-stop strengthening in Germanic, nor do they imply that every instance of strengthening in Germanic or any other language group necessarily derives from a laryngeal-like consonant through the process of [consonantal] spread. Indeed, the recent occurrence of Verschärfung-like strengthening in Modern Faroese (búgva [bigva] "to dwell" < /biw+wa/ < /biw+a/), for example, obviously has nothing to do with laryngeals, and there are several further instances of consonant strengthening in the history of the Germanic languages for which no laryngeal explanation is even conceivable. It is nonetheless interesting to note that the Faroese glide hardening appears not to be a true, independent Verschärfung, but rather forms part of a more general dissimilation that "...affects nonconsonantal as well as consonantal sonorants" (Anderson 1974:170) since not only geminate glides but also sequences of 11, nn, mm, rn, In, etc. undergo obstruentization of their first element, cf. e.g., morgun [morgun] "morning" nom.sg. vs. morni [modni] dat.sg. Other cases have been discussed by Reed (1959), who presents various examples of the emergence of nonetymological -g-, as in OS nigemo "new", snegig "snowy" and OS juguth, OHG jugund (cf. Latin iuventus). Although such developments traditionally are not grouped together with Germanic Verschärfung, they appear similar to it in that, in each case, the obstruent developed from an etymological glide. 5 Polomé (1984:402) recently abandoned his views on the development of the "midge" word cited here from his 1949 paper. His retraction was precipitated by the arguments of Seebold (1982) and by the putative existence of extra-Germanic cognates for the midge that attest guttural cognates, thus making a laryngeal explanation of its etymology unnecessary. In addition, he expresses the opinion that laryngeals may have played no role at all in the Verschärfung, noting many scholars now believe that the laryngeals merely lengthened the glides involved and did not directly strengthen them into stops. Referring specifially to the Verschärfung, Polomé (1984:405) hypothesizes that "... recent theories on syllabification will presumably provide a better explanation, more consistent with the historical data, than the somewhat unwarranted projection of the phenomenon [of Germanic laryngeals] into a distant prehistory." We contend, however, that Polomé's abandonment of the ideas he put forward in his 1949 paper may well be premature. The evidence of remnant forms of the Verschärfung in the West Germanic languages is more extensive than the midge-word itself, even if a laryngeal etymology of this particular word eventually proves unfounded. Moreover, the lengthening effect that many scholars are willing to attribute to the laryngeals in the development of Verschärfung is (as far as it goes) compatible with the analysis we propose here, which, as argued, has decided advantages over the syllable-based account advanced by Suzuki.
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Other examples of non-etymological obstruents can be found in modern German dialects, including egger e "eggs" and eugge "meadow", which apparently occur first in 14th Century Westphalian. In addition, the rather more sporadic development of non-etymological obstruents in Romance (Lat. maior > It. maggiore) and elsewhere would suggest that the strengthening of glides to obstruents can occur under various conditions, many of which are as yet not entirely understood. In this paper, simply, we have tried to show that, in conjunction with compensatory lengthening, spread of the feature [consonantal] from a disappearing laryngeal into a preceding glide is a quite plausible — indeed, likely — origin of the particular obstruent strengthening in Germanic known as Verschärfung, or Holtzmann's Law. 7. Conclusion and Implications There are four chief advantages inhering in this interpretation of Verschärfung. First, an account of sharpening via spreading of the feature [consonantal] from an adjacent consonant into the glide has precedent in the numerous cases uncovered by Kaisse (1992), whereas general (as opposed to sporadic) independent hardening of even geminate intervocalic glides to stops appears to lack such cross-linguistic motivation. Second, the Verschärfung reflexes in both East and North Germanic derive from the Proto-Germanic origin of the phenomenon rather than from an improbable coincidence, or the positing of an otherwise dubious genetic affinity between just North and East, and this at the same time provides for a natural source of the reported relic forms in West Germanic. Third, the two quite different phonetic manifestations, hardening cum gemination in the North and East versus mere gemination in the West, are tightly related in terms of their formal properties, with development of the West Germanic variant attributed to the familiar mechanism of simplification. Fourth, an explanation is provided for why the Verschärfung overall affected just glide plus laryngeal sequences, not also configurations of obstruent or other sonorant consonant plus laryngeal; specifically, [consonantal] spread, the 'hardening' aspect of the process, could take place only into consonants which were not already specified for that feature (i.e., glides), whereas syllable contact improve ment for the other sequences upon loss of the laryngeals was accomodated without segmental modification, through simple resyllabification.
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REFERENCES Anderson, Stephen R. 1974. The Organization of Phonology. New York: Academic Press. . 1984. "A Metrical Interpretation of Some Traditional Claims about Quantity and Stress". Language Sound Structure: Studies in phonology presented to Morris Halle by his teacher and students, ed. by Mark Aronoff & Richard T. Oehrle, 83-106. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Archangeli, Diana. 1988. "Aspects of Underspecification Theory" Phonology 5.183207. Bechtel, Friedrich. 1885. "Über die germanische Verschärfung von j und v". Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen (Phil.-Hist. Klasse) 6.235-239. Beekes, Robert Stephen Paul. 1972. "Germanic Verschärfung and No Laryngeals". Orbis 21.327-336. Bugge, Sophus. 1888. "Zur altgermanischen Sprachgeschichte: Germanisch ug aus uw". Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 13.504515. Cathey, James E. 1970. "A Reappraisal of 'Holtzmann's Law"'. Studia Linguistica 24.56-63. Clements, George N. 1993. "Lieu d'articulation des consonnes et des voyelles: Une théorie unifée". Architecture des représentations phonologiques, ed. By B. Laks & A. Rialland, 101-145. Paris: CNRS Editions. [Translation and revision of the 1991 Cornell University manuscript, "Place of Articulation in Consonants and Vowels: A unified theory".] Collinge, Neville E. 1985. The Laws of Indo-European. (= Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Volume 35.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hammerich, Louis L. 1955. "Die germanische und die hochdeutsche Lautverschieb ung". Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 77.165203. Hayes, Bruce. 1989. "Compensatory Lengthening in Moraic Phonology". Linguis tic Inquiry 20.253-306. Hirt, Herman. 1931. Handbuch des Urgermanischen. Vol. I. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Lautlehre. Holtzmann, Adolf. 1870. Altdeutsche Grammatik I: Die specielle Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus.
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Jasanoff, Jay. 1978. "Observations on the Germanic Verschärfung". Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 37.77-90. Kaisse, Ellen. 1992. "Can [consonantal] spread?". Language 68.313-332. Kiparsky, Paul. 1985. "Some Consequences of Lexical Phonology". Phonology Yearbook 2.85-138. Kluge, Friedrich. 1879. "Beiträge zur Geschichte der germanischen Conjugation (Excurs über Gotisch dd und gg)". Quellen und Forschungen 32.127-130. . 1913. Urgermanisch. 3rd rev. ed. Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner. (1st ed., 1909.) Kögel, Rudolf. 1884. "Über w und j im Westgermanischen". Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 9.523-544. Kuryłowicz, Jerzy. 1927. "ә indo-européen et h hittite". Symbolae Grammaticae in Honorem Ioannis Rozowadowski 1.95-104. Lehmann, Winfred P. 1952. Proto-Indo-European Phonology. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. . 1992. Historical Linguistics. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. (1st ed., 1962.) Lindeman, Fredrik Otto. 1987. Introduction to the 'Laryngeal Theory'. Oslo: Norwegian Univ. Press. Marchand, James W. 1992. "The Germanic Verschärfung". Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association, New York City. Markey, Thomas L. 1984. "IE -w- > Gmc. -g- and OFr. si(u)gun ' 7 ' and ni(u)gun ' 9 ' " . Miscellanea Frisicia ed. by N. R. Århammar, Ph. H. Breuker, Freark Dam, A. Dykstra & T.J. Steenmeijer-Wielenga, 67-77. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum. McCarthy, John J. 1988. "Feature Geometry and Dependency: A review". Phonetica 45.84-108. Mikkola, Jooseppi Julius. 1924. "Die Verschärfung des intervokalischen j' und w im Gotischen und Nordischen". Streitberg Festgabe, 267-171. Leipzig: Markert & Petters. Murray, Robert W. & Theo Vennemann. 1983. "Sound Change and Syllable Structure in Germanic Phonology". Language 59.514-528. Polome, Edgar . 1949. "A West Germanic Reflex of the Verschärfung". Language 25.182-189. . 1984. "Are there Traces of Laryngeals in Germanic?" Die Laryngealtheorie ed. by Alfred Bammesberger, 383-414. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Prokosch, Eduard. 1939. A Comparative Germanic Grammar. Philadelphia: Linguistic Society of America.
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Reed, Carroll E. 1959. "The Structural Dialectology of Hiatus Consonants in German Dialects". Orbis 8.143-148. Roe, Harry A. 1965. Verschärfung in Faroese. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Univ., Cambridge, Mass. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1889. Memoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. [Reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1968.] Seebold, Elmar. 1982. "Der Übergang von idg. -w- zu germ. -- und -g-". Indogermanische Forschungen 87.172-194. Smith, Henry Lee Jr. 1941. "The Verschärfung in Germanic". Language 17.93-98. Suzuki, Seiichi. 1990. "The Germanic Verschärfung: A syllabic perspective". Journal of Indo-European Studies 19.163-190. Trautmann, Reinhold. 1906. Germanische Lautgesetze in ihrem sprachgeschicht lichen Verhältnis. Ph.D. dissertation, Königsberg Univ. . 1925. "Suum cuique". Zeitschrift fúr vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen 53.89-90. Vennemann, Theo. 1972. "On the Theory of Syllabic Phonology". Linguistische Berichte 18.1-18. . 1988. Preference Laws for Syllable Structure and the Explanation of Sound Change: With special reference to German, Germanic, Italian, and Latin. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
GERMANIC CLASS IV AND V PRETERITS* MARY NIEPOKUJ Purdue University The preterits of Germanic strong verbs of classes IV and V offer a puzzling exception to the general ablaut pattern seen in the other strong verbs. Germanic strong preterits, by and large, continue the Indo-European perfect and exhibit the Germanic reflexes of o-grade vocalism in the singular and zero-grade vocalism in the plural. Classes IV and V, however, are exceptional in that they exhibit o-grade vocalism in the singular but lengthened-grade vocalism in the plural. The question of the origin of the lengthened-grade vocalism naturally arises. In this paper I will discuss the various explanations that have been proposed for these classes, and cite a number of problems with each analysis. I will then consider the forms in the context of patterns of behavior exhibited by perfect stems in other Indo-European languages, and will propose an analysis which relates the anomalous Germanic preterits to morphological patterns reconstructed to the proto-language; ultimately, I will argue that the split between singular preterits and plural preterits exhibited in these classes is an archaism rather than an innovation. Figure 1 gives examples of the Class IV and V verbs found in the various Germanic languages: Class IV Gothic: Old English: Old Norse: Old High German Class V Gothic: Old English: Old Norse: Old High German
niman beran bera stëlan
nam bær bar stal
nēmum bæron barum stālum
numans boren borinn stolan
"take" "bear" "bear" "steal"
giban metan gefa geban
gaf mæt gaf gab
gēbum mæton gafum gābum
gibans meten gefinn geban
"give" "measure" "give" "give"
* I would like to thank Robert Kyes and Joseph Salmons for helpful comments and suggestions. The present version of this paper has benefitted greatly from suggestions, comments, and criticism received at the Michigan-Berkeley Germanic Roundtable.
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As the above examples illustrate, the preterit singular forms exhibit the reflexes of Proto-Indo-European *o; the preterit plural forms, on the other hand, exhibit the reflexes of long *ē. The verbs that fall into these two classes can be characterized by their phonological shape: most of those in class IV have the shape CVR- and most of those in Class V have the shape CVT-, where = obstruent. One explanation that has been proposed (Kuryłowicz 1956; Bammesberger 1986) is that the lengthened-grade arose through the influence of Class VI verbs such as faran "go," which exhibit lengthened-grade vocalism in both the singular and plural preterits. In this analysis, the relationship geban'.gēbum is modeled on that of faran:fōrum. As it stands, the analogical proportion does not seem unreasonable, but it leaves two crucial questions unanswered: Why would analogy affect only the plural forms, when the resulting ablaut pattern is so unusual in comparison to the other strong verb classes, and where did the lengthened vowel in the Class VI verbs come from? In other words, why were lengthened-grade plural forms created instead of lengthened-grade singular forms, when a Class VI verb such as faran shows lengthened-grade throughout the paradigm? A second explanation is that proposed by Krause (1968:104), in which he relates the Germanic forms to Latin lengthened-grade perfects such as vēnī "I have come" and lēgī "I have looked at, I have read": "Hier liegt grundsätzlich ein anderes Ablautschema vor, insofern der Pluralstamm des Prät. nicht wie bisher Schwund-, sondern dehnstufig gebildet wird; man vergleiche got. qemum "wir kamen" mit Lat. vanimus." Under this analysis, Proto-Indo-European must have used lengthenedgrade vocalism to create some perfect stems. These forms happened to be preserved in the plural preterits in Germanic but not in the singular. Again, this analysis seems reasonable, and again, it runs into problems. Speaking of the Latin forms, Watkins (1968:153-4) argues that the these lengthened-grade perfects are largely a late innovation, influenced partly by verbs with Attic reduplication and partly by the isolated lengthened-grade aorist stem sēde- "sit" (perhaps also attested in the Sanskrit form sādad-yoni- "sitting at one"s place"). He states: Das formale Zusammenfallen von ēmī, ēdi von redupliziertem e-ed-, e-em- mit dem isolierten sēdi von *sēde- bleibt das verantwortliche Modell für die Ausbreitung eines scheinbar derivativen Dehnungprozesses: em- → ēm-, sed- → sēd-, daher leg- → lēg- (lēgi) ...
In this analysis, then, the Latin forms are based on a lengthened-grade aorist and on forms such as ēmī and ēdi with a long vowel due to Attic reduplication. Is such an analysis possible for Germanic? One vowel-initial form, itan "eat" belongs to Class V; thus the lengthened vowel in the preterit could be a trace of Attic-like reduplication, sitan also belongs to Class V, raising the possibility that a lengthened-vowel aorist form based on *sed- had an influence on other verbs of similar shape. Unfortunately, the same objection may be raised to this analysis as to the last: Why lengthened-grade only in the plural forms?
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A third possible analysis is that the forms arose from reduplicated perfects with the root in zero-grade, which would result in a medial consonant cluster. Meid (1971: 51-2), following an analysis proposed by earlier scholars such as Streitberg and Hirt, suggests that Reduplikation plus Schwundstufe hätten in bestimmten Fällen eine schwer sprechbare, der üblichen Struktur germanischer Wörter zuwiderlaufende Verbindung ergeben, die nach Erleichterung gedrängt hätte. So hätte etwa *ge-gb- zu *gēb- erleichtert werden können[...].
In this analysis, the first element of the consonant cluster was lost, with compensato ry lengthening of the preceding vowel. Meid notes a number of problems with this analysis; the main difficulty, he suggests, lies in the fact that in general the reduplicat ed perfect stem seems to have been lost in Germanic, without a trace in Germanic (except in the case of Class VII verbs) so that invoking it in this particular instance constitutes a petitio principii. An analysis similar to that suggested by Meid has been proposed for Latin sēdī;if the form does not reflect a lengthened-vowel aorist, it may be a reduplicated perfect stem with the root in zero-grade, with loss of the medial -s- and compensatory lengthening. In Germanic, however, such an analysis is not possible. One problem is the observation that a medial cluster such as PIE * -sd- is retained in Germanic though it is simplified in other languages: compare Latin nidus and Vedic nīda with English nest. Thus, in Germanic a reduplicated stem *se-sd- ought to result in unattested Germanic *si-st-. A second problem is the observation that the singular preterit forms belonging to this class are not reduplicated. If reduplication is to be invoked as an explanation for the Class IV and V preterit plurals, then its absence elsewhere must somehow be explained. A radically different approach to the forms in question is suggested by Prokosch (1939:162-4). Prokosch argues that the Germanic strong preterit actually represents a conflation of the Indo-European perfect and aorist verb forms; in particular, he argues that the lengthened-vowel preterits seen in Classes IV and V represent aorist rather than perfect stems. Prokosch bases his argument on a number of points. The first point he makes is that the lengthened-vowel preterits in Germanic can be directly compared neither with the Latin lengthened-grade perfects nor with Sanskrit forms such as sedima. I will demonstrate that the Sanskrit forms represent a parallel but independent formation comparable to that seen in Germanic; Sanskrit forms have a similar origin but slightly different development. The second point Prokosch adduces to support his analysis is the fact that in general, reduplication is not present in classes I-VI; he suggests that invoking it to explain the lengthened-vowel forms in classes IV and V requires the assumption that it was lost without a trace elsewhere. I will argue later in this paper that principled reasons exist for suggesting that the plural forms in classes IV and V were reduplicat ed in the proto-language while other perfect stems were not.
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The third point he makes is that Verner's Law, which generally indicates that the original accent of plural verbs was on the suffix, seems to behave irregularly in these forms. This argument, however, provides no evidence to choose between an aorist origin for the plural forms or a perfect origin, since one would expect a form such as an aorist 3rd plural to also have the accent on the suffix (see Watkins 1968:40-42 for a discussion of the accentuation of the root aorist in Indo-European). The fourth piece of evidence Prokosch cites is the fact that the endings of the 2nd singular, the 2nd plural, and the 3rd plural are not perfect endings, and the 1st plural also need not be attributed to the perfect. Thus, if the endings are not perfect endings, the stem must not be a perfect either. Two pieces of evidence can be adduced against this argument. The first is the fact that in Greek stems which are clearly perfect take endings which are clearly not: the 2nd singular ending is (aside from a handful of archaic forms ) *-as (with final -s on analogy with the aorist); the 3rd plural is -āsi from *-anti, which is an analogical extension from the present form. In general, the perfect endings were anomalous compared to the primary and secondary endings seen on other verbal forms; as a consequence, perfect endings tended to be replaced by other endings. A second piece of evidence is the fact that in Sanskrit and Old Irish verbs of a parallel shape (TVT-) with lengthened-vowel stems are associated with endings which are clearly perfect; examples are Skt. Bedhur, 3rd plural of badh- "bind," and OIr. -f'adatar, 3rd plural of fed- "goes".1 I suggest that these forms represent comparable parallel developments in these languages in response to the same factors that were responsible for the lengthened-vowel Class IV and V forms in Germanic. These parallel forms strengthen the case for treating the Germanic forms as original perfects rather than aorists. The various approaches outlined above all have the same failing: they offer no explanation of why the vowel lengthening should occur in only the plural forms. The question of the origin of the lengthened-grade preterit plural forms must be ap proached in a different way: by considering how the class as a whole interacts with general morphological patterns in the proto-language. One pattern is the distribution of reduplicated perfect stems in the proto-language, and the second pattern is the ablaut alternation between full-grade and zero-grade vocalism. At this point a brief discussion of the general behavior of the Indo-European perfect is helpful. In general, it appears that Proto-Indo-European originally had two ways of forming the perfect stem: one way involving the unreduplicated root plus ovocalism in the singular, as seen in Greek oîda "I have seen,"and the other way involving the reduplicated stem, as in Greek Veloipa "I have left." Since Brugmann, reduplication has been regarded as optional; it is a standard practice to cite a reconstructed perfect stem with a reduplicated prefix in parentheses to indicate its optional nature, and with the root in o-grade vocalism. This practice obscures the fact 1 The suffix seen in the Old Irish 3rd plural seems to consist of the original 3rd plural perfect ending *-ur preceded by another ending with -nt (Thurneysen 1966:434).
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that in several of the daughter languages the split between reduplicated and unreduplicated stems shows quite a bit of systematicity. If the split seen in languages such as Latin, Old Irish, and Germanic is reconstructed back to the proto-language, it becomes possible to explain the many otherwise puzzling patterns. To illustrate this split, I will briefly survey the reduplicated perfect forms found in these three languages. One general tendency noted in Watkins (1962) is that roots with PIE a-vocalism have a strong tendency in Old Irish, Italic, and Germanic to form reduplicated preterits2. The following are some examples from Old Irish and Latin: Old Irish reduplicated preterits based on PIE *-abraigid bebrag֊ "farts" *bhragclaidid cechlad֊ "digs" *kladcanid cechan"sings" *kanmaidid memad"breaks" *madLatin reduplicated preterits based on PIE *-acadō cecidī "fall" *kadcanō cecinī "sing" *kancaedō cecidī "cut" *kaidfallō "deceive" *(s)phalfefellī pangō pepigī "fasten" *paktangō tetigī "touch" *tag-
The above forms demonstrate that roots with a-vocalism rather than the e-vocalism normally seen in Proto-Indo-European roots had a strong tendency to form redupli cated preterits. In Gothic, one group of preterit forms clearly exhibits the reflexes of the reduplicated perfect stem: the verbs belonging to Class VII. As Beeler (1978) notes, the majority of the members of the class exhibit a-vocalism in their present stems; unfortunately, relatively few of the roots can be reconstructed back to Proto-IndoEuropean. The following are the roots for which reliable etymologies have been proposed: Gothic reduplicated preterits (Class VII) based on PIE *-afāhan faifāh "sieze" *pakaf-aikan af-aiaik "deny" *aig*maitan maimaitun (3rd pl.) "cut" *mai*aukan (ana-)aiauk "add" *aug2
In Old Irish, Italic, and Germanic, the distinction between perfect and aorist was lost. In Old Irish and Germanic the class that resulted from this collapse has traditionally been called the preterit. In Latin, on the other hand, the class has traditionally been called the perfect. Throughout this paper, I will use the term preterit to refer to the past tense formation exhibited by these three groups and will restrict my use of the term perfect to those cases in which the class is morphologically distinct from the aorist.
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It is probably the case that the verbs belonging to this class which do not have good Indo-European etymologies but which exhibit a-vocalism in their present stems developed reduplicated preterits on analogy with verbs such as these. Bader (1968) extends this observation to the claim that reduplication was obligatory for the perfect stem if the root in question could not exhibit distinctive ograde vocalism, but was otherwise optional. She claims that Latin data points to such an originally bipartite perfect system. One system involved o-grade vocalism and no reduplication. The other system (reflected by such forms as dedī) involved reduplica tion and the zero-grade form of the root. She argues (pp. 169-174) that none of the Latin reduplicated preterits is distinctively characterized by o-vocalism;3 instead, the vocalism is either zero or identical to the vocalism of the present. Bader finds that the same distinction can be pointed to by comparing other IndoEuropean languages. She notes that even in languages in which the normal means of forming a perfect involves reduplication, isolated remnants of non-reduplicated forms exist. In Greek, for instance, she notes that forms which have a prothetic e- do not reduplicate, and that a non-reduplicated Mycenian form woke is attested. She also finds that in Vedic, some participles made from perfects do not show reduplication; for example, -visivas-, a non-reduplicated form, exists along side vivéśa (from vis"enter"), and sāhvas- exists along side sāsāha and sāsahvas- from sah- "vanquish." She claims that cognate sets, such as Goth, man compared to Skt. martiné and Goth. kaus compared to OIr. roi-gu (from an earlier reduplicated form), also point to the optional nature of reduplication. She concludes by summarizing the distribution of the two kinds of reduplication in the following manner: La relation entre la presence ou l'absence du redoublement peut se définir de la manière suivante: le redoublement est facultatif, mais un parfait n'en peut manquer que s'il a le vocalisme *-o(type oída, got. man).
To paraphrase Bader, then, an unreduphcated perfect stem was only possible if the root in question could exhibit o-grade vocalism. If, for some reason, the root was incapable of such vocalism, then reduplication was obligatory, and the root occurred in zero-grade. This pattern explains the strong tendency for roots with a-vocalism to undergo reduplication: such roots could not fit into the standard ablaut pattern. In Niepokuj (1991) I note that in Latin and Old Irish, if the present stem of a verb consistently exhibits something other than -grade vocalism, for example due to the
3
One set of forms, however, exhibits o-vocalism in both the present and the perfect stem: those for which the present stem is an old iterative. Note that in the case of these forms, o-grade vocalism cannot distinctively characterize the perfect stem.
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presence of an infix or a suffix, then that root tends to form a reduplicated perfect stem. In each of these languages, if a verb developed a present֊tense stem which was phonologically similar to one of these groups which formed a reduplicated perfect, then that verb formed a reduplicated perfect as well. Although some of these roots theoretically could have exhibited zero-grade vocalism, I argue that speakers had reanalyzed the stems in question so that such stems no longer participated in the normal e/o/zero-grade alternation. Due to space limitations I will not cite all the data discussed in that work; the following groups of forms are indicative of the general tendency. One distinct subset of stems are those which involve a root which ended in -i- in the proto-language and which have also taken the nasal suffix also seen in Sanskrit Class IX verbs such as grbh-na-mi "I grab". The following are the stems cited by Thurneysen (1966:427-8): Old Irish nasal suffix verbs *den(a)id 3 sg. did len(a)id cren(a)id glen(a)id tlen(a)id ren(a)id
The presence of the nasal suffix guaranteed that the roots would always be in the zero-grade and hence would exhibit invariant vocalism; the presence of the root-final *-i- guaranteed that the vocalism was something other than *-e-. An interesting point to note is that the stem ren(a)id "sells" also fell into this class because of the resemblance of its present stem to the other members of this class, even though the root did not end in an *-i- in the proto-language. This point is significant because it illustrates a general tendency in Old Irish for a root to form a reduplicated preterit if its present stem rhymed with that of another verb which also formed a reduplicated preterit. This tendency supports my argument; it suggests that to Old Irish speakers (or pre-Old-Irish speakers), the most important factor determining how a root formed its preterit was the shape of its present stem. The present stem, rather than the root, had assumed the major role in determining whether or not a verb formed a reduplicat ed preterit. A second coherent group of forms are those which contain or contained the rootfinal sequence nasal plus stop. The models for the group most likely were originally those roots which, in Indo-European terms, took the nasal infix in their present stem,
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seen in such forms as (oss-)bond- "refuse" and possibly lingid "climbs,"which exhibit nasal-infix present stems in other Indo-European languages as well: compare Grk. pun θanomai "I learn of' and Lith. bundu "I awaken" with (oss-)bond-. Old Irish roots lingid dringid (oss-)bondbongid cingid (for-)ding
Note that lingid, leblang- "leaps" exhibits a medial -b- in its reduplicated preterit; this -b- is the reflex of the original root-initial *p-, which was lost in initial position but was retained in medial position. The unusual preterit seen in dringid, debrang"climbs" was created due to the resemblance of the present form dringid to the present stem, lingid. This analogical development supports the claim that speakers of Old Irish used the present tense form of a given verb as a cue to which verbs formed reduplicated preterits. The nasal infix had the effect of obscuring ablaut variation in the present stem, since it required the zero-grade form of the root; for example although in the Sanskrit present paradigm we see variation between singular and plural forms such as fullgrade yunàjmi "I yoke" and zero-grade yuñjmás "we yoke", the fact that in the present stem the root vowel u doesn"t undergo its normal ablaut variation between vowel and semi-vowel would have made the root vocalism seem invariant; the infix carries the ablaut variation instead of the root. If the root contained a sonorant which could be vocalised in zero-grade, then that sonorant would have remained vocalised throughout the present paradigm. This invariant vocalism would have motivated speakers to use reduplication to form the perfect stem. Once a root-internal nasal was established as the marker of present stems which underwent reduplication to form the perfect stem, then roots in which the nasal was not a separate infix would be liable to reduplication as well. A further identifiable subgroup of reduplicated preterits in Old Irish are based on roots which form their present stem with a zero-grade root with thematic conjugation.
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Old Irish roots from athematic presents nigid nenag"washes" *neigligid lelag"licks" *leigsnigid senag4"drips" *sneigwhmligid do-ommalgg "milks" *melgWatkins (1962:141) points out that these verbs, as well as the verbs fichid "fights" and dligid "is entitled to" have in common the fact that they are formed on the zerograde of the Indo-European root, with thematic conjugation. Following Meillet, he argues that in Indo-European all of these roots were the basis for athematic present paradigms. In Celtic, he argues, the zero grade of the root was generalized through out the paradigm, and the athematic endings were replaced by thematic endings. Meillet (1911:62), discussing the various reflexes of the root *melg- "milk," notes that the athematic paradigm was lost very early on in the prehistories of the daughter languages. In the context of this study, what is interesting is the fact that after this change in the paradigm took place, the present stem would have exhibited invariant vocalism. It is at this stage that the reduplicated preterits must have been formed. Certainly the high correlation between these stems with zero-grade vocalism and thematic conjugation and the reduplicated preterit suggests again that speakers were more concerned with present stem shape than with root shape when they were creating preterits. Unsurprisingly, the verbs sligid, -selag- "fells," reg-, -rerag"straighten,"and (con-)rig, -rerag "binds" all formed reduplicated preterits because of their resemblance to stems such as mligid and nigid. A number of the reduplicated preterits seen in Latin correspond to some of the groups seen in Old Irish. One such set of forms consist of verbs which show a nasal infix in their present stems. Nasal infix tangō pangō tundō pungō scindō
4
verbs in Latin tetigī "touch" pepigī "fasten" tutudī "strike" pupugī "pierce" scicidī "cut"
*tag*pag*teud*peug*skei-d-
The forms senag- "drips" must come from an earlier form *se-snag-; similarly, the double -mm- in the form do-ommalgg "milks" points to an originally reduplicated form.
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MARY NIEPOKUJ
Some of these verbs undoubtedly formed a present stem with the nasal infix in ProtoIndo-European: scindō corresponds to Skt. chinätú "he cuts,"and tundō corre sponds to Skt. túndate "he bumped". Other members of this group developed the nasal infix during the prehistory of Latin; Ernout & Meillet (1932:975) note that the verb tangō most likely did not take the nasal infix in the proto-language. Forms which acquired a nasal infix at a late date must have developed reduplicated preterits through analogy with forms such as scindō and tundō. Again, this analogical development suggests that speakers looked at the shape of the present stem to determine the form of the preterit stem. The verbs tendō, tetendì "stretch" from *ten(d)-, pendō pependi "hang down" (possibly from *(s)pen-d-), spondeō, spopondï "pledge" from *spend- and tonde õ, totondī "shave" from *tend- also developed reduplicated preterits because of their phonological resemblance to the members of the nasal infix class. Bader (1968) also identifies another distinct subgroup: reduplicated preterits corresponding to present stems with -o- vocalism which are iteratives. The following are examples: Iterative present stems in mordeō momordī tondeō5 totondī spondeō spopondī
Latin "bite" "shave" "pledge"
etymology uncertain *tend*spend-
The crucial point to note about these forms is that they are incapable of using ovocalism distinctively to form preterit stems. The preceding discussion argues that, in general, perfect reduplication is less serendipitous than has generally been assumed. At least in Western Indo-European, there exists a strong correlation between the shape of the present stem, its ability or inability to distinctively use o-vocalism to form a perfect stem, and the presence or absence of reduplication. O-vocalism, however, is only characteristic of the perfect stem in the singular. In the plural, unreduplicated perfect stems exhibit zero-grade vocalism in conjunction with the various inflectional suffixes which are unique to the perfect class. This raises the question of how reduplication correlates with zero-grade forms. It is standard in introductory handbooks to illustrate ablaut variation by describing the various forms a root such as Grk. leip- "leave" exhibits in different morphologi-
5 Note that tondeō and spondeō exhibit both o-vocalism and the sequence nasal plus stop discussed in the last paragraph. Both of these factors may account for the verbs developing reduplicated preterits.
GERMANIC CLASS IV AND V PRETERITS
131
cal contexts. For example, Szemerényi (1990:88) illustrates the phenomenon of ablaut by citing Grk. Leíp-õ "I leavt"lê-loip-a "I have left," and e-lip-on "I left." In the case of roots of the shape TVT- however, with obstruents in initial and final position and with no resonant to vocalise in zero-grade, the pattern becomes problematic: the examples Szemerényi cites all involve forms with a prefix of some sort which prevents the consonant cluster from being in word-initial position: for example, Grk. eptòmen "I flew" from *pet-, Lat nidus "nest" from *ni-zd- based on the root *sed- "sit." To be sure, initial clusters involving two obstruents were not impossible, as forms such as Grk. kîeis "comb" illustrate, but they were at least problematic; the phenomenon known as schwa secundum was probably an epenthetic vowel used to break up initial consonant clusters created by zero-grade vocalism".6 The roots seen in Germanic Classes IV and V all have the form CVR- or TVT-. A root of this shape would certainly have no difficulty exhibiting o-grade vocalism in the singular, and hence would not need reduplication to form a perfect stem. In the plural, however, a TVT- root with initial and final obstruent would result in a wordinitial consonant cluster, many consisting of two stops. Speakers would have had a number of different ways of coping with such a cluster in general; in the case of perfect stems, they already had a morphological process which would prevent a cluster of two stops from functioning as a syllable onset. Reduplication would thus be favored for plural forms of TVT- roots, but o-grade vocalism would be favored for the singular forms. The split paradigm created by using o-grade vocalism to create the perfect stem in the singular but reduplication in the plural was ripe for leveling. Simplification of the medial consonant cluster plus compensatory lengthening would have made the paradigm more regular; in addition to resulting in unreduplicated stems in the plural as well as the singular, it would have established an alternation between o-grade and lengthened grade vocalism for the perfect stem. The class would thus to some extent parallel the ablaut gradations exhibited by other perfect stems: o-grade vocalism in the singular, and something other than o-grade vocalism in the plural. This analysis of the Germanic forms thus parallels that suggested by Meid (1971); the forms are the result of simplification of medial consonant clusters plus compensa tory lengthening. It differs from his analysis, however, in that it provides a motivation for the split between the singular and the plural forms in Classes IV and V. The evidence from Latin and Old Irish suggests that we need not assume that perfect reduplication was a wide-spread process that was simply lost in Germanic; 6
For a discussion of schwa secundum and some problems associated with it, see Mayrhofer (1986:175-177.)
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MARY NIEPOKUJ
instead, the split seen in Classes IV and V can be reconstructed at least to ProtoGermanic. As I will argue in the remainder of the paper, it is possible that the split can be reconstructed to Proto-Indo-European as well. An association between lengthened-grade vocalism in the perfect and roots of the shape TVT- is found in other Indo-European languages. One such language is Old Irish. The following are examples of the lengthened ā-preterits found in Old Irish (Thurneysen 1966:429): Old Irish ā-■preterits techid táchrethid ráchfáid fe(i)didfáig figid gu(i)did gádscochid scáchro-lamiethar -lám(a)ir daimid -dámair
Watkins (1962:116) discusses the lengthened-vowel ā-perfect seen in this language; he argues that the ā-perfect was originally in complementary distribution with the reduplicated perfect, stating "roots with structure TeT- (i.e., with root vowel e) formed the ā-perfect, and possibly roots with structure TeR- as well." He offers no explanation, however, of why the ā-perfect should have been associated with roots of this shape. Within the framework outlined in the present paper, the association is readily motivated. The roots were originally reduplicated in their plural forms but not in their singular; in a process parallel to that seen in Germanic, the reduplicated forms underwent consonant cluster simplification and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel; the newly created long ā was then generalized throughout the paradigm via paradigmatic leveling. Outside of Western Indo-European, an association between lengthened-vowel perfect stems and TVT- vocalism is found in Vedic. The forms exhibit an unreduplicated stem with the vowel -e- in the root; e is metrically long in Vedic. The forms found are the following: Vedic cartandabh-
It is impossible to directly compare the long vowel seen in these forms with the lengthened vowels seen in either Old Irish or Germanic; on the other hand, the consistent correlation between root shape and lengthened vocalism is too striking to ignore. It is interesting to note that nearly all of the attested Vedic forms are either plural or middle; middle forms are normally characterized by zero-grade vocalism as well. A way of accounting for the Vedic forms as well as the Germanic and Old Irish forms is the following: at some stage early in Proto-Indo-European, perfect reduplication was relatively limited in distribution. It was favored, however, in the zero-grade forms of TVT-roots because it offered a way of avoiding word-initial consonant clusters with two stops. In the singular forms, on the other hand, o-grade vocalism, which was also strongly associated with the perfect verb, was favored. At some point during the prehistories of the various daughter languages, the medial cluster of one or more of these reduplicated stems was simplified, with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. This development must have happened independently, since the lengthened vowels found in the daughter languages do not exhibit a regular correspondence. In Germanic, this resulted in the anomalous paradigm seen in Class IV and V preterits; in Old Irish the lengthened vowel resulting from this development was generalized throughout the paradigm for roots of the shape TVT-; and in Vedic, this resulted in unreduplicated forms which remained as archaisms when reduplication became generalized as the method of forming perfect verb stems. Certainly other solutions to the problem of integrating the TVT- roots into the paradigm were conceivable; for instance, speakers could have used the epenthetic
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MARY NIEPOKUJ
vowel schwa secundum to break up the unwieldy consonant clusters that would result in unreduplicated zero-grade stems. In this case, however, since reduplication was already associated with the perfect paradigm, speakers tended to make use of it rather than of other possible solutions to the problem, The parallel behaviors of roots of the shape TVT- in Germanic, Old Irish, and Sanskrit must be no coincidence; instead, it points to an association between reduplication and the zero-grade forms of these roots already existing in Proto-Indo-European. The only independent innova tion in the three languages was the simplification of the medial cluster and compensa tory lengthening of the preceding vowel. In all three of these branches the cluster simplification and compensatory lengthening offered a way of resolving the dilemma created by the split perfect paradigm associated with TVT- roots. In each case it resulted in a singular/plural ablaut distinction which was, if not identical to the full-grade/zero-grade alternation seen in other paradigms, at least a comparable way of distinguishing singular from plural. The striking degree of parallelism in these cases can be explained by the pressure created in each language by the inherited Indo-European ablaut system; to borrow terminology from evolutionary biology, the developments represent similar adaptive mechanisms to similar environmental pressures. After all, a whale looks like a fish because both live in water; in the case of the Indo-European daughter languages, each branch was faced with the problem of integrating TVT- roots into a full-grade/zero-grade ablaut pattern. That the solutions adopted were so similar should be no surprise.
REFERENCES Bader, Francoise. 1968. "Vocalism et Redoublement au parfait radical en latin". Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 63.160-196. Bammesberger, Alfred. 1986. Der Aufbau des germanischen Verbalsystems. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. . 1988. "Der indogermanische Aorist und das germanische Präteritum". Languages & Cultures: Studies in honor of Edgar . Polome ed. by M. Jazayery & W. Winter, 55-62. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Beeler, Madison. 1978. "Verbal reduplication in Germanic and Indo-European". Pacific Coast Philology 8.5-10. Ernout, A. & A. Meillet. 1959. Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue Latine. Paris: Klincksieck. Krause, Wolfgang. 1968. Handbuch des Gotischen. Munich: . . Beck.
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Kuryłowicz, Jerzy. 1956. L' apophonie en indo-européen. Wroclaw: Polska AN. Macdonnell, Arthur. 1910. Vedic Grammar. Strassburg: Karl Trübner. Mayrhofer, Manfred. 1986. Lautlehre. Indogermanische Grammatik, I, 2. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Meid, Wolfgang. 1971. Das Germanische Praeteritum. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft. Niepokuj, Mary. 1991. The Historical Development of Reduplicative Systems with Special Reference to Indo-European. Unpub. doctoral dissertation; Univ. of California, Berkeley. Renou, Louis. 1952. Grammaire de la langue Védique. Paris: IAC. Sprachwissenschaft. Szemerényi, Oswalt, 1990. Einführung in die vergleichende Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Thurneysen, Rudolf. 1966. Ճ Grammar of Old Irish, trans, by D. Binchy & O. Bergin. Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies. (1st ed., 1946.) Van Coetsem, Frans. 1990. Ablaut and Reduplication in the Germanic Verb. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Watkins, Calvert. 1962. Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb. Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies. der Indogermanischen Verbalflexion. (= . 1968. Geschichte Indogermanische Grammatik, III.) Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
GERMANIC IN EARLY ROMAN TIMES EDGAR C. POLOME University of Texas at Austin The Romans apparently never bothered very much to record data about the speech of the peoples they conquered and subjugated, nor did they make any distinct effort to learn the languages of the "barbarians" at the confines of their empire (Polome 1983,1988). As a consequence, we know very little about the Germanic vernaculars spoken by the tribes along the Roman border in the Germania libera: apart from an * occasional gloss in classical sources, such as Caesar's Gallic War or Pliny's Natural History, all we have are names of persons, tribes, rivers and other geographical features of the country. In some cases, we deal with areas where Germanic and Celtic peoples had long been in contact, as the studies of Weisgerber (1968, 1969) show, and it is sometimes difficult to attribute some anthroponyms to the proper ethnic group. Even when we deal with Germanic tribes transferred from across the Rhine into Roman territory, onomastics only provides limited information about their actual dialect. Moreover,the transmission of the data not engraved in stone has often been rather poor through the centuries, and manuscript information is sometimes totally unreliable; names have been misspelled to the verge of being unidentifiable, as the collections of Schönfeld (1910) and Reichert (1987) indicate. As a result, many of the forms used by scholars for their discussion of early Germanic are mere recon structions on the basis of an often quite aberrant manuscript tradition. Moreover, in view of the scarcity of the materials available for the oldest period, it is often tempting to extrapolate from the more recent and more diversified data of the Migration Age, but the Franks, the Saxons, the Alemanni and the other regroupings that took place after the crisis of the third century, reflect a different socio-political and cultural pattern of Germanic society which is bound to have substantial linguistic consequenc es (cf., e.g., Schwarz 1956; Bach 1970:97-99; Wells 1985:40-44). The oldest wellattested Germanic dialect, Gothic, diverges thoroughly from the later western continental dialects. Therefore, it would appear extremely difficult to reconstruct the form of Germanic the Suebian troops of Ariovistus or the Cheruscan followers of Arminius may have used! Nevertheless, historico-comparative grammar has provided us with tools to reconstitute what the pattern of Early Germanic may have looked like, starting with
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EDGAR C. POLOMÉ
the phonology, including prosodic features and morpho-phonemic alternations, continuing with the description of assumed forms of the paradigms of the various nominal and pronominal inflections, as well as of those of the different classes of strong and weak verbs, and concluding, in the best cases, with a brief outline of the major syntactic structures. This is what we find in Streitberg (1896), Hirt (1931-34), Prokosch (1939), Ramat (1981) and others, from the days of the Neogrammarians to recent years, and even the latest efforts of Voyles (1992) do not fully coordinate the implicatory sequence of phonological rules with the paradigmatic development of Germanic inflections, as is illustrated, e.g., by his failure to deal conclusively with the problem of Gmc. *ē2 in correlation with the western treatment of the reduplicative strong verbs when h follows essentially Lüdtke (1957) in the description, but derives Gmc. *ē2 from a stressed long diphthong *ez, as Lehmann (1952:66-73) does, but without recourse to the laryngeal theory, and lumps it together with the dialectal OHG *ē2 in gēt. Taking into account the difficulties of associating the diachronically complex evolution of the Germanic sound inventory and inflectional system with an absolute chronology, and keeping in mind that early Germanic was a language actually spoken by Germanic tribes that came into closer contact with the Romans along the Rhine and, temporarily at least, as far east as the Elbe, one might wonder whether it is at all feasible to provide an integrated picture of the kind of Germanic that might have been used by the likes of Ariovistus or Arminius in the days of Caesar and Augustus, by combining whatever clues are offered by Latin authors or other ancient sources with the relative chronology of the diachronic changes in Germanic phonology and morphology (and, perhaps, syntax). Obviously, problems are likely to pop up at every step one would take to do so, e.g., was the Germanic consonant shift completed at that time, and what about Vennemann's 'bifurcation theory' (1984) in this context? There is the famous contrast between Vacalus in Caesar and Vahalis in Tacitus to designate the Waal on the basis of which it has often been assumed that the shift from /k/ to /x/ (written ) had not yet been completed in this part of the Germania when Caesar arrived, but the orthographic inconsistencies in the reproduction of Germanic terms with initial or internal /x/ from earlier /k/ preclude any decisive conclusion on that issue. On the other hand, most of Voyles' objections (1992:30-33) against the glottalic theory need to be re-evaluated in the light of Salmons' recent (1993) monograph on this subject, and Vennemann's latest study on the Matronennamen of the Rhineland in the second and third centuries A.D. (1994:282-295) tries to bring new evidence to back up his views on the status of the obstruents in early Germanic. For the sake of argument, let us suppose that the voiceless stops were strongly
GERMANIC IN EARLY ROMAN TIMES
139
"aspkated," if not spiranticized, before the Germanic people of the Rhineland came in touch with Caesar's legions. Voyles' chronology of Proto-Germanic (1992:76-79) postulates, however, that the first sound shift took place about 400 B.C. That is hardly compatible with the occurrence of the name of the Cimbri with constant initial /k/ versus the designation of their homeland as Himbersyssœl in the Middle Ages, but if one accepts Schönfeld's objection (1965:64) that this association is not warranted, his derivation of the name from Gmc. *kimb- "edge" does not solve the problem since the word is strictly localized to the Ingweonic area and the Baltic region close to northern Jutland (de Vries 1971:320), and designates them as the "people of the rim" (Du. і means "horizon"). It should be noted, however, that the Harudes, living in the Lower Elbe region are mentioned constantly by Caesar and other early sources with initial in Latin and <X> in Greek, while their name survives in the toponym Hörðaland near the Hardangerfjord. On the other hand, /k/ before /t/ is apparently not shifted to /x/<[c]h> in the tribal name Tencteri in Caesar,1 who also writes alces for the Germanic name of the elk (OHG elahho versus ON elgr < *algi-, in agreement with Verner's Law).2 This, again, appears to confirm that the shift of /k/ to /x/ was NOT completed in Caesar's days. On the other hand, the shift from /g/ to /k/ had definitely taken place by the time Caesar referred to the "beech forest" of Germany as silva Bacensis. As for Verner's Law, the recent work of Salmons on the Germanic accentual change (1992:173) situates it at the time of the close Germano-Celtic contacts in the middle of the first millennium B.C.; it also fairly well excludes Voyles' backing of Hirt's and Prokosch's hypothesis based on morphological evidence that the stress shift was initiated in East Germanic. Whatever the case may be, we have no hard evidence to indicate whether or not the operation of Verner's Law was completed by the beginning of the Christian era. At that time, the inherited long vowels /a:/ and /e:/ appear to have been preserved or, at least, /a:/ had not been sufficiently raised to be perceived as a mid-low back vowel and written by the Romans, though /e:/ may have started moving down to /æ:/ while still being perceived as a mid-low front vowel by the Romans and written <e>. Unfortunately, the tribal name Eudoses in Caesar rests on a conjecture about 1 The manuscript tradition from the ninth till the twelfth century (according to Schönfeld, 1965: 221) shows Tencteri (3x), Tenctheri (5x), Tencheri (2x), Tanctheri (1x),Thencteri (lx), Theneteri (lx), Thenctheri (lx), Thenetheri (lx), Tenchteri (lx), Tencheteri (lx), Tinctheri (lx), Thinctheri (lx). Thus, occurs only once before , and once more with an inserted <e> inbetween; however, is followed by in nine times out of 17 (+ 2 conjectural) mentions in the text. It is also possible that Latin or Greek where Gmc. <xt> is expected may be simply due to "sound substitution." 2 A pre-Germanic *olk-i- is implied by Russian oleni.
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EDGAR C. POLOME
the manuscript tradition Sebusii based on the occurrence of the term in Tacitus, but on the basis of the evidence in Tacitus and Ptolemy, it is fairly certain that the diphthong /ew/ <eu> remained unaffected by the "first Umlaut" of Germanic until the end of the first century A.D. The same Umlaut does not appear to have affected the names of the Cheruscan leaders Segimundus and Segimerus, although the manu script tradition may present some problems, in particular in Strabo (Schönfeld, 1965:205; Reichert, 1987:595). The diphthong /ey/ is perhaps also maintained: the inscription on the helmet of Negau, most probably datable to the Pannonian insurrection of the first decade of the first century A.D., does not help as what used to be read teiva (a theophoric anthroponym reflecting LB *deywos [Lat. dïvus]), is presumably a Latin genitive Tei referring to the father of Harigast(iz), Teus,a.Latinized form of Gmc. *pew(az) [= Goth, pius] — what follows then indicates the v[exillatio] a[larum], the detach ment of auxiliaries, presumably from the Rhineland, to which this soldier belonged. However, the divine name Alateivi[ae] on an undatable inscription from Xanten (CLL. XIII, 8606) is only a disputable example of a non-monophthongized <ei>, although the assumption that the name was Celtic (Schönfeld 1965:11) is now less acceptable in view of recent work on the Matronennamen (Bauchhenss & Neumann 1987; cf. also Reichert, 1987:31).3 As /e/ is otherwise maintained under the conditions of the "first Umlaut", i.e., before a nasal cluster or /i, j / of the following syllable, it is presumably safe to assume that original /ey/ was still a diphthong in the early first century A.D. Similarly, from the preservation of /a:/ and /e:/ in Northwest Germanic, it can plausibly be inferred that /o:/ was not raised to /u:/ in early Roman loans as it was in Gothic (e.g., Rūma 'Rome'). As for the short Indo-European /o/, it had obviously become /a/ in stressed position, but was not yet affected by the Umlaut; at the end of the first member of compounds, it seems to have been maintained longer in unstressed position as the name Ariovistus would suggest if one were sure that it is Germanic (cf. Schönfeld 1965:28; Reichert 1987:70-72), and Tacitus shows in the first part of the ethnic name Langobardi and the personal name Chariovalda. This does not imply, however, that the same was true for unstressed [a] from IE *o in inflectional paradigms. In stressed position we have accordingly the following vowel phonemes:
3
Strangely enough, Voyles (1992:49) who clearly indicates that stressed /e/ goes to /i/ in East Germanic before any segment except /r, h( w )/ does explicitly formulate a similar rule for Northwest Germanic: IE *ghréybon[om] "seize" > early Gmc. *gréipon[om] > (eventually) OE gripan (as the ultimate result of the "first Umlaut").
GERMANIC IN EARLY ROMAN TIMES
Short Front
141
Long Back
Front
Back
High
/i/
/u/
/i:/
/u:/
Mid
Id
/o/
/e:/
lo:l
Low
/a/
/a:/
with [] as an allophone of /a/ in unstressed position. The diphthongs were: /ey/ /ew/ and /ay/ /aw/, the latter documented by the tribal name Chauci.There is no clear early evidence for /ay/ as the Cimbrian royal name Caesorix is a Celto-Latin rendition of Gmc. *Gaizorikaz (cf. Lat. Gaisaricus for a fifth century king of the Vandals), but a number of ethnic names show in the later first century A.D. (Polome 1994:8). Very little can be said about the unstressed syllables on the basis of the written documents relating to the early contacts with the Germanic tribes: about all we have is the dative plural forms of some names of Matronae in which -ims alternates with Lat. -iabus, e.g., Aflims (date uncertain) versus Afliabus (second c. A.D.), Vatvims (date uncertain) versus Vatviabus (date uncertain), which document the early loss of -/- in the last unstressed syllable in the paradigm of -i-/ja-/-jo-stems (cf. Gmc. *gaslimi from pre-Gmc. *ghostimis). This is practically also the only direct evidence we have of the morphology of Germanic in early Roman times. Taking the traditional view on Germanic consonantism and referring to Moulton's careful assessment of the alternation between voiced obstruents and spirants in the Germanic reflexes of the IE voiced aspirates (Moulton 1972:141-173), we could represent the early Germanic obstruent system as follows:4
4
Note in the table: Earliest attestation of
appears on the third century A.D. dedication to Mars Thingsus on Hadrian's wall by Germanic auxiliaries from Twente in the Low countries, /f/ is first found in the ethnic name Frisiiae in the first century A.D.; later, in the names of Matronae in the third century (e.g., Fa[c]hine[i]ae), as well as in the designation of an obscure deity Fimmilenia to whom the cives Tuihanti (= Twente) dedicate an altar. Finally, "the comparative evidence suggests that labial /b~/ and the dental /d ~ ð/ were stops initially, i.e., [b-] and [d-]; but that velar /g ~ γ/ was a fricative initially, i.e., /γ/" (Moulton 1972:143), which it still is in Dutch. There is no preliterary evidence for the reflexes of/g w ~ Y W /.
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EDGAR C. POLOMÉ
Labial Voiceless stops
/p/
Aspirates/
Dento-alveolar
Velar
/t/
/k/
([kh])
Labiovelar /kw/
Fricatives
/f/
/P/
/x/
/x w /
Voiced Obstruents/ Fricatives
/b~b/
/d~ð/
/g~y/
(/g w ~Y w /)
Taking all of this into account, is it possible to reconstruct with some degree of validity the speeches that Caesar, for example, reports in the indirect style from his confrontation with Germanic tribes? Let us take Gallic War, book 4, chapter 7: the Usipetes and the Teneteli, pressed by the Suebi, have crossed the Rhine and captured Menapian territory and plundered their resources; as Caesar moves to meet them, they beg for good will and help, and for the permission to continue to occupy the land that they have seized. We have neither the vocabulary nor reliable syntactic evidence to translate into the early Rhineland Germanic dialect their complex plea to the Roman general, but we could imagine that he embellished their simple words for stylistic effect. They might have said something like this: ni haðugernõz izumz ja ba (x)itõ nauðiparfta murium weixamz Swēbōz hidrē kwēmun auði siē unsar landa auðja layiðun unsiz uzlaubi hēr s aljanan welēmē Rōmanōnz peuðōz fri[j]ōndz wesan
"We are not aggressive "If we deem it necessary, "we fight. "(The) Suebians came here "and they laid our land waste. "Allow us to stay here. "We want to be friends of "(the) Roman people."
In the first sentence, the negation is in front and the verb at the end according to Lehmann's negation placement rule [no. 7] (Lehmann 1972: 261) in a SOV sentence pattern. The predicately used compound adjective haòugernõz agrees with the underlying subject "we"-nominative masculine plural, strong declension. - is a well-known ancient term for "combat," which Germanic shares with Celtic (cf. anthroponyms Gaul. Caturīx = OHG Haðurih);, the second term -gern- (adjectival astem) "desirous, lusting for" occurs in a number of compounds such as Goth. faihugairns "avaricious." The copula (1st person plural) izumz is given here, with a
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preserved the final consonant, the loss of /i/ from unaccented Id in the last syllable and raising of unstressed Id to weak /i/ in the first syllable, from original preGermanic form *ezumes, assuming this form was. already affected by the weakening process in unstressed position and the same treatment of the final syllable as underlies ON prim[r] (If the Auslautsgesetze should have been fully operative, we would have to revise all the 1st person plural endings in a more progressive way.) The conjunction introducing the second sentence contains the IE relative stem *yo+ the Germanic emphasizing particle -ha (IE*hō):it performs the same function as OInd. yadi, an originally locative formation meaning "in the case in which," serving to introduce a conditional clause. The neuter anaphoric pronoun (x)itō (IE *[k]id [ō ]) has an optional initial lxi as the area is later included in the territory showing pronouns with initial /h/; as for its position, it reflects Lehmann's (1972:261) it insertion rule [no. 6]. The compound nauðiparfia, strong neuter singular accusative, is an adjective which appears in Gothic in the Skeireins in the meaning "necessary," and has been preserved as a noun in Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Middle Dutch and Old High German. Murium is the expected 1st person plural of the preterito-present man "think, deem," as is weixamz in the presumed form of the 1st person plural indicative of the strong verb weixanan. Suēbōz is the nominative plural of an α-stem; hiðdrē represents the "allative" from the IE pronominal stem *ki- with the locational suffix -tr- (cf. English hither) and the ablative ending -ed; kwēmun is the 3rd person plural preterit of the 4th class strong verb * kwemanan "come" (or, perhaps *kumanan in view of the later Western forms). The sentence connective anði introduces the coordinate second sentence in which the 3rd person plural pronoun siē refers to the Suebians. In the absence of a possessive, the genitive unsar of the personal pronoun of the 1st person plural is used; it precedes the noun landa (neuter singular accusative) as expected in a SOV language. The expression auòja layjanan is a substitute for a non-available verb "devastate"; layiòun is the 3rd person plural preterit of the weak 1st class verb layjanan; auðja has the shorter neuter singular ending of the strong adjectival declension in agreement with landa, as an indefinite reference is intended. The imperative 2nd person singular uzlaubi governs the infinitive saljanan; the first person plural dative personal pronoun unsiz precedes the verb, just as the locative adverb hēr is placed in front of the infinitive in conformity with the SOV pattern of the sentence and Lehmann's rules (1972:236 ff.). The verb *uzlaubjanan has been chosen rather than lētanan to convey the idea of "permission," involving mutual trust (Buck 1948: 1341 [19.47]); saljanan is used here in the meaning of "stay, dwell" rather than verbs with the connotation of "leave behind, remain stuck" (Gmc. *bilaibjanan), "wait patiently" (Gmc. *beiēanan), "gain, win" > "occupy,
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dwell" Gmc. *wunjanan), "delay, linger" > "dwell" (Gmc. *dwaljanan) and the like (Buck, 1948:456-457 [7.11]; 837 [12.16]). In welēmē, we have the 1st person plural of *weljanan with the subjunctive ending; the second syllable long vowel reflects the early monophthongization of unstressed /ai/ as in the weak verbs of the 3rd class. This verb governs the infinitive wesan "be"; the genitive Rõmanõnz peuðōz precedes the noun fri[j]õndz (SOV pattern). Rõmanõnz is the genitive feminine of the borrowed adjective in the weak form for a definite reference; peuòõz is the expected genitive singular form of a feminine -ø-stem; fri[j]õndz is the expected nominative plural of a masculine -nd stem. A non-phonemic glide can be expected to break the hiatus between HI and /o:/, and in the sequence dental/alveolar nasal — dental fricative — alveolar sibilant, early shift to the dental stop lál can be assumed for /ð/. It is obvious that a good deal of this is purely conjectural, but we can try, at least, to make it plausible. We could play the same game with the way Arminius might have addressed potential allies: ek Arminjaz Seyimēres sunuz im xailaz wes pu ermanaz kuningaz unsiz hehēî [h]immu fulyēnan
"I am Arminius, the son of Segimer(us). "Be thou hale! (Hail to thee!) "The powerful king ordered "us to follow him"
The final a of the first person singular pronoun is elided before the initial a of the anthroponym Arminjaz. The -i- from *-e- in the second syllable reflects the early action of the first Umlaut on unstressed syllables. The genitive Seyimëres precedes the noun sunuz, and the verb im (1st person singular indicative present of "to be") stands at the end, as expected in a SOV pattern. In the 2nd sentence, the predicative adjective xailaz is topicalized, which entails the position of the subject after the verb (Lehmann's rule no. 17 [1972:266]). The strong adjectival nominative singular is expected for the predicate xailaz. The last sentence would refer to the ruler of the Cheruscans, the Roman-educated Arminius avoiding presenting himself as the actual leader of the uprising against the Romans. The strong adjectival nominative masculine singular ermanaz agrees with the following noun; it means "great, exalted, glorious" (cf. ON Jörmundr as name of Odin; OHG irmindeot, irmingot in the Hildebrandslied; the tribal name (H)Erminones in Tacitus, etc.) The sentence structure is typically SOV: subject NP = Adj + N, followed by the dative of the 1st person plural pronoun unsiz and the reduplicative preterit 3rd person singular of the Vllth class verb xaitanan (German heißen) + infinitive: "order, command to". It is assumed that the accent shift to the
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reduplicative syllable has taken place, entailing the monophthongization of the unstressed [ai] of the verbal stem to [e:]. The same monophthongization has also occurred in the infinitive of the 3rd class weak verb fulyēnan which is assumed to govern a dative object as it still does in German — hence, the dative singular anaphoric pronoun [h]immu (perhaps with the initial h- occurring later in the Ingweonic dialects; the location of the Cheruscans makes it difficult to decide).
REFERENCES Bach, Adolf. 1970. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. 9th ed. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer. Bauchhenss, Gerhard & Gunter Neumann, eds. 1987. Matronen und verwandte Gottheiten: Ergebnisse eines Kolloqiums veranstaltet von der Göttinger Akademiekommmission für die Altertumskunde Mittel- und Nordeuropas. (= Beihefte der Bonner Jahrbücher, 44.) Köln: Rheinland Verlag; Bonn: i. Komm. Rudolf Habelt. Buck, Carl Darling. 1948. A Dictionary of Selected. Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages: A contribution to the history of ideas. Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, de Vries, Jan. 1971. Nederlands etymologisch woordenboek. 2nd ed. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Hirt, Hermann. 1931-1934. Handbuch des Urgermanischen. 3 vols. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Lehmann, Winfred P. 1952. Proto-Indo-European Phonology. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press/Linguistic Society of America. . 1972. "Proto-Germanic Syntax". Toward a Grammar of Proto-Germanie ed. by Frans van Coetsem & Herbert Լ. Kufner, 239-268. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Lüdtke, Helmut. 1957. "Der Ursprung des germanischen *e2 und die Reduplikationspräterita". Phonetica 1.157-183. Moulton, William. 1972. "The Proto-Germanic Non-Syllabics (Consonants)". Toward a Grammar of Proto-Germanic ed. by Frans van Coetsem & Herbert L. Kufner, 141-173. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Polomé, Edgar C. 1983. "The Linguistic Situation in the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire". Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung ed. by Hildegard
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Temporini & Wolfgang Haase, 509-533. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. . 1988. "Sprachzustände in den westlichen Provinzen des römischen Kaiserreichs". Sociolinguística 2.52-72. . 1994. "Proto-Germanic and the Reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European". NOWELE 23.3-40. Prokosch, Eduard. 1939. A Comparative Germanic Grammar. Philadelphia: Linguistic Society of America/University of Pennsylvania. Ramat, Paolo. 1981. Einfuhrung in das Germanische. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. Reichert, Hermann. 1987. Thesaurus Paleogermanicus, Lexicon der altgermanischen Namen. Teil 1: Text. Wien: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Schriftreihe der Kommission für Altgermanistik. Salmons, Joseph C. 1992. Accentual Change & Language Contact: Comparative survey & a case study of early Northern Europe. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press. . 1993. The Glottalic Theory: Survey and synthesis. (= Journal of IndoEuropean Studies; Monograph Series, 10) McLean, Va.: Institute for the Study of Man. Schönfeld, Maurits. 1965. Wörterbuch der alt germanischen Personenund Völker-namen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. (Originally published Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1910.) Schwarz, Ernst. 1956. Deutsche Stammeskunde. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Streitberg, Wilhelm. 1896. Urgermanis che Grammatik. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Vennemann, Theo. 1984. "Hochgermanisch und Niedergermanisch: Die Verzweigungstheorie der germanisch-deutschen Lautverschiebungen". Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 106.1-45. . 1994. "Dating the division between High and Low Germanic: A summary of arguments". Language Change and Language Structure: Older Germanic languages in a comparative perspective ed. by Toril Swan, Endre Morck & Olaf Jansen Westvik, 271-303. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. . In press. "Sprachgeschichtliche Betrachtung zu den niederheinischen Matronennamen." Voyles, Joseph B. 1992. Early Germanic Grammar. Pre-, Proto- and PostGermanic Languages. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers/Aca demic Press Inc. Weisgerber, Leo. 1968. Die Namen der Ubier. (= Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen der Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Forschung des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen, 34) Köln & Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
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. 1969. Rhenania germano-celtica: Gesammelte Abhandlungen. (Dem Autor zum siebzigsten Geburtstag) ed. by Johann Knobloch & Rudolf Schützeichel. Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid. Wells, C[hristopher] J. 1985. German: A linguistic history to 1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
TOWARD A PHONOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION OF l PALATALIZATION IN CENTRAL YIDDISH* NEIL G. JACOBS The Ohio State University, Columbus
1. Introduction Varieties of Eastern Yiddish (EY) have — to varying degrees and nature — palatalized consonants. It is commonly recognized that contact with Slavic has played a role in the development of palatalized consonants in these varieties of Yiddish.1 In many (though not all) Slavic languages, palatalization and palatalized consonants constitute an important, pervasive part of the phonology. However, palatality in Yiddish≠palatality in the Slavic source language(s); in EY, the presence of palatalized consonants (as well as ongoing processes of palatalization) is much more limited than in Slavic (see Bratkowsky 1974 for discussion and bibliography). It is insufficient to view palatality in Yiddish solely in terms of (incomplete) borrowing from Slavic. Rather, the task for the linguist is to look at the ways this contact-induced phenomenon has been integrated into the basic phonology of Yiddish. Apparent from the discussion in Bratkowsky (1974) is that there is much that remains unclear and unresolved in the scholarly literature about palatal and palatalized consonants in Yiddish. The present paper seeks to make a small contribution toward an understanding of the wider question of palatality in Yiddish phonology by focusing on one specific issue in a specific EY dialect area: /-palatalization in Central Yiddish (CY). The present paper divides itself into three main areas of discussion: (1) description of the main types of l in CY, with a basic description of allophonic distribution; (2) discussion of the possible external (Slavic) sources for CY * A version of this paper was presented at the Michigan-Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable, April 15-17, 1993, at the University of Michigan. For conference support, I thank the Melton Center for Jewish Studies, the Middle Eastern Studies Center, and the Department of Near Eastern, Judaic, and Hellenic Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University. I also wish to thank Greg Iverson, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, for comments and criticism on the conference paper; in the current version of the paper, I have attempted to address some of the issues raised. Responsibility for any mistakes, shortcomings, errors of omission or commission rests solely with the author. 1 See Bratkowsky's dissertation (1974) for survey of scholarship, discussion, and bibliography. Among the works cited by Bratkowsky which are relevant to the above point are M. Weinreich (1940:75), U. Weinreich 1952:361-362, note 7, Jakobson 1953:408-409, U. Weinreich 1958b:373374,389,407.
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palatalized vs. velarized /, comparing the relevant data in Y and Polish; (3) analysis of l-palatalization within the unified phonology of CY, focusing on several examples of problematic data. Analysis of /-palatalization, including the problematic data, will be from the framework of cyclic and lexical phonology, as developed by Kiparsky (1982), and elaborated in Booij & Rubach (1987). 1.1 Major Yiddish Dialects: An overview In Yiddish dialectology, the primary distinction made is between Western Yiddish (WY) and EY dialects.2 The former were spoken, for the most part, in areas of present-day Germany, Austria, Alsace, the Netherlands, Hungary and parts of western Slovakia. EY — spoken in Eastern Europe (and thence the Ashkenazic diaspora in the Americas, Palestine/Issrael, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere) — is further subclassified into three main dialects: Northeastern Yiddish (NEY; largely coterritorial with Lithuania, northeastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Belorussia, and parts of Ukraine), Southeastern Yiddish (SEY; largely coterritorial with Ukraine, Rumania, and Bessarabia; and Central Yiddish (CY; largely coterritorial with Polish). Additional 'problem areas' which merit special attention in Yiddish linguistic research include Courland, Western Latvia (see Weinreich 1923; Kalmanovitsh 1926; Jacobs 1994); West-Transcarpathian Yiddish (see Weinreich 1964); as well as the mixed NEY/SEY colonial region to the extreme southeast of the Ashkenazic home territory. A schematic Yiddish dialect map is given in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Major Yiddish dialects
2
For discussion of criteria for classification of Yiddish dialects, see Herzog (1965:1-6, 1992:10ff); Katz 1983:1020-1021).
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Since our current interest — palatality in Yiddish — relates to a feature acquired via contact with one or more Slavic languages, it is worth devoting a word to the geographical and historical relationship of Yiddish dialects to Slavic. In simplified form, it may be stated that WY was mostly coterritorial with non-Slavic languages (primarily, with German), while EY was largely coterritorial with one or more Slavic languages (though coterritorial with Baltic and Uralic in parts of the NEY territory, and with Romance in parts of the SEY territory). However, current geographical relationships do not necessarily imply historical ones (see U. Weinreich 1963). The locations of Jews, Germans, and Slavs have shifted over time. Thus, it is not enough merely to say that 20th-century Yiddish speakers of a certain location are coterritorial with Slavic language X, and therefore, in that variety of Yiddish, any and all linguistic features derived via contact with Slavic must have been acquired from X. If, indeed, the features under discussion do trace back to contact with Slavic, it may have been with speakers of another variety of Slavic, or may involve the Yiddish or Slavic speech of an earlier time. Possibly relevant is the subsequent migration of Jews, of Slavic speakers, or of both. Thus, a full discussion of Slavic influence in Yiddish must take into consideration the linguistic history of the languages involved, as well as the history of settlement patterns of the speech communities involved (see U. Weinreich 1963; Herzog 1965:235ff). The geographically easternmost Yiddish dialects, NEY and SEY, exhibit many more 'Slavic' features than do varieties of CY, in several areas of the grammar: phonology, syntax, etc. For example, whereas all EY dialects have phonemic /17 and /n7, only the easternmost of these have (regionally) phonemic /s'/, /t7, and /d'/ (U. Weinreich 1958). One way in which the heavier Slavic influence in the easternmost Yiddish dialects has been accounted for has been in terms of the history of settlement patterns: it is argued that the easternmost Ashkenazic areas were settled in an earlier wave of settlement from the west, while CY was influenced by a later migration of Ashkenazic Jews from German lands (see U. Weinreich 1963, Herzog 1965:235ff; King 1980). In this view, Yiddish speakers to the extreme east are seen as having been in direct contact with Slavic for a much longer time than have the CY speakers; therefore, heavier Slavic influence is to be expected. More recently, Wexler (1991) has suggested a view which fundamentally opposes the traditional view on the origins of Ashkenazic Jewry and of Yiddish (M. Weinreich 1980).3 In Wexler's view (1991), Yiddish arose to the east, via partial language shift by speakers of Judeo-Slavic to Germanic. Thus, in Wexler's view, the higher 'Slavic profile' in the easternmost Yiddish dialects represents linguistic conservatism rather than innova3 The traditional Weinreich view sees Yiddish arising on southwestern German lands approximately one thousand years ago, with subsequent and progressive migration eastward over the next several centuries.
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tion. Most recently, Louden (1993) discusses the heavier Slavic cast to the easternmost Yiddish dialects in terms of possible earlier creolization processes. Whatever the truth(s) of the matter may be, the apparent progressive 'Slavicization' of Yiddish dialects in the eastward sweep across the Ashkenazic map does suggest, however, a special linguistic topography4 which merits separate attention. 2. Palatalized consonants in Yiddish Ultimately, in a comprehensive phonological description of Yiddish, the distinction will have to be made between underlying (phonemic) palatalized consonants and palatalization processes in the synchronic phonology of Yiddish. The present paper is mainly concerned with synchronic phonological processes through which palatalized consonants (specifically, [l']) are derived from underlying non-palatalized consonants. However, by way of introduction, some mention of the phonemic status of palatalized consonants must be made. Weinreich (1958:373-374, 389,409; see also summary in Bratkowsky 1974:107109) discusses the status of palatalized consonants in EY. Phonemic /17 and /n'/ are found throughout EY dialects ; thus: mol pen
"time" — "pen" —
moľ pen'
"moth" "stump"
Additionally, we find EY regional /t'/, /d'/, /s'/ (in variants found in the easternmost areas; see Weinreich 1958). However, palatalized consonants are marginal in Yiddish phonology. Herzog (1992:39; see also U. Weinreich 1991:45-46) writes: It appears that in all of EY, and particularly in its eastern part, palatality functions as a distinctive articulatory feature. However, the functional load of the opposition between palatal and dental consonants is low, and it is almost impossible to find interdi alec tally valid minimal pairs with which to test it.
Palatalized consonants are readily found in Yiddish lexical items of Slavic origin (examples from U. Weinreich 1958), e.g., ťoxkon "to throb", zmen'o "handful", ľuľkə "tobacco pipe", moľ "moth", pen' "stump", etc. Furthermore, we find palatalized n' in a number of productive suffixes of Slavic origin as well: -n'u ,-n'ik, -n'ak, etc. At first glance, it could be argued that the palatalized consonants have entered into Yiddish only as indivisible parts of Slavic lexical wholes borrowed into Yiddish. However, the productiveness of palatalization is quickly seen in its extension to items of non-Slavic origin, as seen in the endearing forms of non-Slavic4
On the use of the term 'linguistic topography' — though in a somewhat different sense — see Chambers (1993) and Jacobs (1993).
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origin names, as in, e.g., dod'ә, pin'ә < non-palatalized roots dod-,pin- (cf. Hebrew/Aramaic [HA]-component origin names dovod, pinxos). Furthermore, as Weinreich (1958) notes, Yiddish has capitalized on palatalization to create "phonolog ical pseudo-Slavicisms", as seen in the following pairs of words which contain roots that trace originally from the German-component: < German component knakor "big shot" laxn "to laugh"
Whatever the level of consciousness may be about the 'Slavicness' of palatalization (see Stankiewicz 1964, summarized in Bratkowsky 1974:110-111), and whatever the marginality of palatalized consonants in Yiddish phonology, palatalized consonants are part of the phonology of Yiddish proper, and not merely lexicalized residue in borrowings. Thus, palatalized consonants in Yiddish may not merely be 'explained away' in terms of (plain, non-palatalized) consonant + y', where such a j is not motivated within the overall picture of (C)Y phonology. U. Weinreich (1958) provides examples of the opposition of "true palatals" / n' 1' / as opposed to dental consonant + j: man'ə "woman's name" vs. manjə "mania", kal'ə "spoiled, out of order" vs. italjo "Italy".5 In the following section, we will see that Y allophonic palatalized ľ is derived through processes integral to the nuts-and-bolts internal phonology of CY. 3. Types of I in (Central) Yiddish According to Bin-Nun (1973:339), three main phonetic types of / may be found across the Yiddish speech territory, with no more than two phonetic types found in any single speech variety. Different dialect areas are described as having one or other phonetic type of / as the basic version for that particular area. Thus, Herzog (1992:39) notes that large parts of the WY area, as well as parts of the SEY area are characterized as having a "light" (alveolar) /, whereas parts of the NEY area (Belorussia and Suwałk) and adjacent parts of the CY area are characterized as having a particularly "dark" (velarized) I (with the exception of the Courland subregion of NEY, which has a "light" /, attributed to Baltic German influence), and so on. However, Yiddish dialects also exhibit regular allophonic conditioning of / (see U. Weinreich 1991:45). Thus, Herzog (1992:39) writes:
5 Weinreich gives as well the consonants /t' d' s'/. Note: I use the single quote mark here to show palatalized consonant, consistent with the current paper. Weinreich (1958) uses IPA symbols.
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In every Yiddish dialect, the darkest /1/ appears to occur word-initially before the back vowels /u, o, a/, word-medially between back vowels, and word-finally after back vowels and in syllabic position after apical and dental consonants.
Our current focus is on the variants of l in CY, particularly the occurrence of CY palatalized ľ. Palatalized ľ is found across the Southern Yiddish (SY) region, encompassing the areas of both CY and SEY. However, palatalized ľ has not taken root as firmly in SEY phonology as it has in the phonology of CY (Weinreich 1953:124, 126-127; see Bratkowsky 1974:105 for summary). In the current paper we will therefore focus on the strong case: the integration of l' in CY phonology. For the moment, let us begin by saying that CY generally has two types of l — a basic, non-palatalized [1] (on phonetic variants of this, see below), and a palatalized [ľ]. 6 Basing our discussion on Bin-Nun's Retín Central Yiddish,7 we can say that, basically, palatalized [ľ] is found in the following environments: after or g, before front vowels, and after the high front vowel,8 as seen in the following examples from Bin-Nun (1973:340, 380-381, 391)9; A. ľ/{k,g} _ e.g.,: /gla:x/ [gl'a:x] "alike" (
ľ /_
V [+front] e.g.,: lefl [ľefu] ~ [ľeri] "spoon" C.
ľ
6
/
V [ +front ] [ +high ]
_
On the phonemic status of ľ in CY, see below. For purposes of the current discussion, CY data will be taken from Bin-Nun's (1973) detailed discussion of his native Retín (Polish Rohatyn) dialect. 8 The palatalization of l before or after a (high) front vowel is found in other dialects as well, notably NEY (Bin-Nun 1973:340). 9 Bin-Nun's vowel transcription system differs slightly from the one employed in the current paper; the major difference concerns the symbol used for the basic unstressed vowel, where I will employ the schwa symbol for purposes of general consistency with the rest of the current paper. 7
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e.g.,: mi:l [mi:ľ] "mill", tsailn [tsaiľn] "to count" When / does not undergo palatalization, it is realized as a dark /, as a heavily labialized/velarized ł, or even as semivowel/glide w ; thus, underlying /lozn/ emerges in the variants [lozn] ~ [łozn] ~ [wozn] "let" (Bin-Nun 1973:339). When syllabic, the [w] allophone of non-palatalized / is realized as vowel [u]: /himl/ [himu] "sky"; /lefl/ [ľefu] "spoon" (on syllabic l', see below). In addition, CY ľ is found in words like ľaľko "doll", that is, presumably untriggered by a phonological rule of /-palatalization. In such instances we posit underlying phoneme /17, as opposed to the CY allophone [ľ] which is derived via synchronic palatalization of /1/→[ľ]. 4. Possible Polish source for variants of 1 in CY Bratkowsky (1974) devotes much of her discussion to consideration of a number of possible external (contact-induced) sources for palatalized consonants in Yiddish, including the participation/non-participation of Yiddish in the Eurasian Sprachbund. She discusses (1974:131-132), as well, a possible Rumanian source for (some occurrences of) Yiddish palatalized /'; this may be plausible for parts of the SEY area, though it would appear to be harder to justify this Rumanian source geographically for palatalized ľ in the CY area. It is reasonable to suggest that CY acquired l-palatalization via contact with Polish, for a number of reasons. First, CY is largely coterritorial with Polish. Second, both Polish 10 and CY seem to make a primary distinction between, on the one hand, a labialized/velarized ł, often realized as [w], and, on the other hand, a palatal or functionally/historically palatalized N. Third, both Polish and CY show a distribution between palatalized and non-palatalized / that is at least in part phonologically determined (in similar ways). However, CY /-palatalization is distinct from its Polish counterpart, and must be seen in the context of the phonology of (Central) Yiddish, rather than in terms of Polish phonology. A bit of historical digression concerning Polish laterals is necessary. Historically, two distinct lateral phonemes are posited for late Common Slavic: a palatal(ized) */17 versus plain */l/ (Shevelov 1964:488). This phonemic distinction carries over into the history of Polish. In the pre-documented history of Polish, the distinction was — as in late Common Slavic — between palatalized */17 and plain */l/. However, while 10 The following discussion refers to the general situation as regards palatalized vs. non-palatalized variants of I in Polish, as described in most normative grammars and phonological treatments of Polish; see, e.g., Kopczyński (1977), Brady (1975), Rubach (1984). Consideration of Polish dialectal variation in the realization of (historical) laterals would involve detailed discussion well beyond the current focus, and will thus not be discussed. Consideration of the historical develop ment is based on Stieber (1968).
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the basic phonemic distinction between the two laterals was maintained, there occurred a shift in their phonetic realizations. Earlier */1'/ came to be realized as plain /1/, while earlier plain */l/ came to be realized as dark, velarized /ł/ (Stieber 1968:75). Thus, earlier *l'as "forest", *l'os "fate, lot", *ľek "remedy" now show plain l in modern Polish las, los, lek, while earlier *la "paw", *lechtac "tickle", *los "moose" > modern łapa, łechtać, łos. Stieber (1968:64, 66) dates to the second half of the 16th century the depalatalization ("loss of softness") of the palatalized /17. Furthermore, the now dark /ł/ was already being realized as [w] (Stieber represents this with u) for at least some speakers and regions during the latter part of the 16th century as well. However, the realization of HI as [w] was neither universal nor instantaneous in all varieties of Polish; the spread of [w] has taken centuries; Stieber (1968:76) writes: The change ł>u spread enormously in the 19th and 20th century, and is nearing its completion today. Sometimes, in regions where 40 years ago one still said łazić, dół today even the old people usually say uazić, dou.
More recently, in a discussion of modern Educated Polish [EP], Kopczyński (1977:44) notes that "older speakers" have a dark, velarized [ł], as opposed to younger speakers' [w]. Thus, although synchronically we may speak of modern Educated Polish having a single lateral phoneme — /1/ (with main allophones [1] and [ľ]) — as opposed to a phoneme /w/ (orthographically <ł>), the change of Polish і > w has left behind considerable chronological, geographic, and sociolinguístic residue that is reflected in Polish phonology — and through ongoing borrowing, in CY phonology as well. In modern EP, l and ł may be viewed as separate phonemes, /1/ and /w/ (see Kopczyński 1977:45, note 18). Both /1/ and /ł/ can occur in otherwise identical environments: lek"remedy" vs. łechtać "to tickle" las [las] "forest" vs. łapa "paw". However, there is a synchronic restriction that ł may not occur before і or j . This is understandable diachronically in that modern lil developed originally as an allophone of older phoneme */l/ in non-palatal environments; before і and j , the older plain */l/ phoneme merged with the older */ľ/ phoneme. The main allophones of modern Polish /1/ (older */17) are (Kopczyński 1977:44): [ľ] before /і / or /j/: lis [ľis] "fox", lilia [1'il'ja] "purple"; elsewhere, /l/ is realized as an alveolar lateral [1]: las [las] "forest", los [los] "lot, fate", lek [lek] "remedy". 11 Thus, in modern Polish, the conditioned change of ł → I within paradigms is morphophonemic, as in, e.g., the masculine (virile) plural past tense, where past-tense marker ł → /, thus: (on) pisał 11 We ignore here the issue of the devoiced allophone [ 1 ] (syllabic /) in Polish, since this has no implications for the later discussion of CY /'.
/ PALATALIZATION IN CENTRAL YIDDISH
157
"he wrote", (ona) pisała "(she) wrote", (one) pisały "(they, female) wrote", but (oni) pisali "(they, male) wrote"; likewise, the locative singular of szkoła "school": w szkole "in (the) school". In CY, the '/-facts' are different from those in Polish. Although the case can be made that Y acquired ľ via contact with Polish, it is not the case that CY has merely borrowed — 'as is' — Polish dark ł (phonetically, [ł] or [w]) and Polish palatalized l'. First of all, palatalized is found in words from all components, and is not limited to lexical items of Slavic origin (e.g., [gil'gľ] < HA component, [gľa:x] < Gmc. component, etc.). Second, we find in CY realizations of l' which run counter to the Polish sources; these counter-forms are of two types. Compare the following examples from Central Yiddish and modern Polish. Central Yiddish l'aľkə Kl'ə skľat kľopət 1ә
Compare the palatalized l in CY ľaľko (vs. Polish lalka) with the non-palatalized l in CY lapo (vs. Polish łapa). At first glance it might be suggested merely that Polish-origin non-dark l is realized as CÝ /', while Polish-origin dark ł is realized as CY non-palatal l (variously, as [1], [ł], or [w]). If this were the extent of things, then the differences here between the CY and the Polish forms would merely be a matter of surface-phonetic realizations. It could be claimed, for example, that the (C)Y realizations merely reflect an earlier phonetic state of Polish at the time of the borrowing. In this view, then, the palatalized ľ in CY 1 2 kľamkə < Polish klamka would be expected, since Polish has here a non-dark l. However, CY kľopot and skľat have l' while Polish has dark ł (see also Bratkowsky 1974:131). Thus, /palatalization may be viewed as a productive rule in CY phonology. The phonologi cal cost for this is that we must distinguish between the CY ľ in ľaľko versus the CY l' in kľopot and skľat. In the former (ľaľko), we say that CY realizes light / in
12 Standard Yiddish shows /' for kľamko, ľaľko, as well as for many other words of Slavic origin with sequence ...kl... ; see U. Weinreich (1968). Thus, this may provide some further evidence about a more widespread phenomenon involving Yiddish contact with Polish (in several varieties and at various periods). However, from a cursory comparison of Polish and Standard Yiddish, it seems to me that the palatalization of / → l' after velar stop is considerably less consistent in StY than in CY (cf. StY sklad vs. CY skľat "warehouse"). This contextual palatalization seems for the most part limited to the Slavic component in StY, whereas the process has been generalized in the basic phonology of CY, which is the point of the current paper.
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Polish loans as [ľ]; this is not palatalization per se. (Note further that modern internationalisms in Yiddish more generally — not only in CY ֊ tend to realize borrowed /l as [ľ]: revoľutsyə "revolution", Veksikon "lexicon", etc.) In the latter (kl'opət and ski' at), we are dealing with a productive rule of palatalization in CY. Furthermore, from data in Bin-Nun (1973:391, and elsewhere), it is clear that the conditioning environments - ( 1 ) after velar stop, (2) before front vowel, (3) after high front vowel — which trigger l-palatalization in CY are Yiddish phonological environments, and not Polish ones. Thus, CY will have instances of hard l where Polish has soft ///', and vice versa. For example, Polish malina "raspberry" has palatalized [ľ] due to the following [i] vowel (a phonological rule of Polish), whereas (C)Y ləә has non-palatalized /, since the /l/ neither precedes nor follows a (high) front vowel. On the other hand, CY environment (3) — where / palatalizes following a (high) front vowel — is not sufficient for triggering /-palatalization in Polish; cf. CY → /mi:l/→ [mi:ľ] vs. Polish mówił "(he) spoke", mówiła "(she) spoke". 1 3 In summary, we can say the following. Y differs from Polish in its / facts. CY palatalized [ľ] shows regular phonological patterning within the phonology of CY proper (as opposed to reflecting solely the Polish phonological patterning). However, although the / facts differ in CY and Polish, the impetus or source for the course of development of the laterals in CY may be attributed to contact with Polish. This claim is supported in a number of ways: (1) the similarity of the (allo)phones in Polish and CY; (2) geographically and (3) historically, the Ashkenazic Jewish presence in Poland coincides with the presence both of earlier Polish */17 vs. */l/ , and of later /l/ vs. /ł/ (and the subsequent realization of /i/ as [w]). Yiddish-speaking Jews were thus in contact with Polish during an extended period of transition among Polish speakers as regards the laterals. Similar to the historical change ł > w in Educated Polish, the CY w allophone is seen as more recent, and possibly the result of contact with Polish (see Bin-Nun 1973:340). Furthermore, the developments in the Polish laterals must also be viewed in terms of a non-uniform development — phonological, dialectal, and sociolinguístic. Taken as a total inventory, the types of allophonic realizations of (the historical) laterals in Polish and in CY are quite similar, strongly suggesting a contact-induced influence on the part of Polish upon CY. Once the l vs. l' distinction became a part of the phonology of CY, however, the phonolog ical integration became systematic, extending throughout the language to words of HA and Germanic origin as well. Furthermore, the Y phonological rules concern13 In an abstract phonological analysis it could be argued that "(he) spoke" derives from underlying mówi + i (past tense) + i (masc). In this analysis, the masc, suffix is a non-palatalizing yer which blocks a change of i → /, and which is then deleted before reaching the final surface phonetic form; see Booij & Rubach (1987) for discussion and bibliography.
159
I PALATALIZATION IN CENTRAL YIDDISH
ing the realization of laterals even violated the expected (from a Slavic/Polish perspective) realizations in the Slavic (here, Polish) component in Yiddish, providing sure evidence of the integration of l-palatalization into the unified phonology of CY. It is even possible that the development of ľ (and to a lesser degree, n'; see U. Weinreich 1958; Bratkowsky 1974; Herzog 1992) after the velar stops and g in CY was reinforced by another development in the history of Polish, whereby the two vowels >՛ ([i]) and e — when following or g — emerge as і and ie, resp ectively 14 This is seen from a comparison of Polish nouns and adjectives which end in root consonant other than k/g versus those with k/g: Adjectives: masc.sg. nom.:grub-y "fat" vs. neut. sg. nom.: grub- vs. Nouns: fem. pl. nom.: torb-y "bags" vs.
dług-i "long" dług-ie
(ł→i) (e → ie )
kaczk-i "ducks" (ł→ і)
Thus, the velar stops k/g have had a palatalizing effect on a following or e in Polish. In (C)Y, however, k/g do not show (a tendency toward) a palatalizing effect; thus, CY /gejbn/ "to give" → [gejbm], not **[g'ejbm].15 It may be the case, however, that the abstraction of a more generalized rule of Y k/g + l palatalization — found not only where historically 'predictable', i.e., in words which have /kl/ in modern Polish (e.g., Polish klamka, (C)Y kľamkə), but also in words which have í in modern Polish (e.g., Polish skład, CY skľat) — was reinforced by the 'palatalizing effects' of k/g in Polish forms like kaczki, długi, długie, etc. 5. The lexical phonology of l-palatalization in CY This section offers an analysis of CY /-palatalization within the framework of lexical phonology, as developed by Kiparsky (1982) and further developed by Booij & Rubach (1987).16 In the earlier model, a distinction is made between cyclic rules 14 The sequence /ke/'is found in newer loanwords, e.g., kemping "camping", kempingować "to camp" , kelner "waiter", keczup "ketchup". 15 Colonial German, on the other hand, does show the results of palatalization of g / e here: dja:n "to give"; see U. Weinreich 1958. 16 In the discussion I will be focusing on the interaction of three rules: (1) posttonic reduction of vowels, (2) schwa deletion, and (3) /-palatalization. It will be readily shown that all three rules are — in the lexical framework — necessarily postcyclic lexical rules. However, as pointed out by an anonymous reader (to whom I express my thanks for this and other comments), since all three of these rules are postcyclic lexical rules (and thus, not subject to thornier problems of cyclic ordering), the three rules could be easily handled by any basic generative-type approach as well. Thus, it should be stated clearly that while the present paper uses the lexical framework to handle anaylsis of the phenomena under condersideration, it is not claimed that the lexical approach offers a unique contribution to our understanding of these specific problems. For other problems in Yiddish phonology, the lexical approach does indeed permit special insights; see Jacobs (1992/forthcoming),
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and postlexical rules. Cyclic rules are lexical, in that they may apply after each new round of word-level morphology. Postlexical rules apply beyond the word level, only after the syntax has applied. In the refined model (1987), a further distinction is made within the lexical phonology between cyclic phonological rules, and postcyclic — but still lexical — phonological rules. The class of postlexical rules, applying after the syntax, is retained in the refined model. The reader is referred to Booij & Rubach (1987) for explication of the refined model. An example of the utility of the lexical phonological approach for the description of Yiddish has been shown elsewhere, in an analysis of a rule of d-epenthesis as it interacts with first- and second-degree diminutive formation (see Jacobs 1992/forthcoming). Basically, 1st and 2nd-degree noun diminutives in most varieties of Yiddish are formed through suffixation of / and ә/ә, respectively, 17 as in, e.g., tiš "table" (base form) — tiši (1st diminutive) — tišələ (2nd diminutive). In the framework of lexical phonology, both 1st and 2nd-degree diminutive formation (IDF and 2DF) are cyclic rules. 2DF necessarily applies at a cycle after the one in which IDF has applied (see Jacobs 1992/forthcoming). This is seen, for example, in instances where an epenthetic d is regularly inserted between a noun-final and the lst-diminutive suffix /: pen + /→pendl "little pen". The epenthetic d remains in 2nddiminutive forms, thus: pendolo, even though the conditioning environment — adjacent n and / — is no longer present. In the cyclic analysis of the problem, the d is inserted in the first cycle after IDF, and is simply not deleted in the second cycle where 2DF occurs. Other examples are provided (in the above-mentioned paper) showing the effectiveness of the lexical approach for problems in Yiddish phonology. In the following discussion I will posit a rule of /-palatalization in CY, and argue on purely formal grounds — i.e., on how the types of rules (cyclic, postcyclic, and postlexical) are defined within the Booij & Rubach version of lexical phonology — that CY /-palatalization must be seen as a postcyclic rule. This is supported by two immediate observations we can make about the data. First, /-palatalization applies both within morphemes and across morpheme boundaries. Some examples of /-palatalization within morphemes are as follows:18 /klajn/ /klopot/ /sklad/
[kl'ajn] [kl'opət] [skľat]
"small" "anger" "warehouse"
and next paragraph, below. 17 The retention of some vowel color in the latter in CY — DLƏ in some CYdialects and eh in others — reflects the earlier presence of an r in the 2nd dim. suffix: * -әr1ә; see Bin-Nun 1973:249, and Jacobs 1990:82. 18 The following discussion will concentrate on l-palatalization after k/g; the process occurs much less consistently in contact with (high) front vowels.
I PALATALIZATION IN CENTRAL YIDDISH
/gilgi:l/ /šoki/ + /әn/
161
[giľ gľ] "metamorphosis" [šokľ (+ ә)] "to shake"
It could be suggested that the palatalized [ľ] which follows a or g within the same morpheme is merely underlying palatal phoneme /17, like that found in, e.g., I'al'kə "doll", rather than a palatalized [ľ] which has arisen through application of CY /palatalization. Due to the structure of Yiddish, it is indeed difficult to find examples where a single morpheme will show alternation between forms with adjacent k/g and /, and forms with an interceding vowel between the k/g and the /. The HA component in Yiddish is our best bet for finding such C- vs. C-V-C alternations within a single morpheme. The word gil'gl' is one such example (since the morpheme in the plural shows the interceding vowel: CY /gilgiil + ə/); however, the underlying /i:/ vowel of the second syllable possibly contaminates the data, making this a less than ideal example. A better example is found in StY kehv - klovom "vicious dog-s". BinNun (1973:380) gives his Retín CY variant of the expression "despicable scoundrel": kejləf šebəkľuvəm ( < Tiberian Hebrew [ΤΗ] :lev šebbixh:vi:m , literally, "dog that is among dogs"). The CY singular kejləf has non-palatalized [1], while the plural kl'uvəm shows palatalized [ľ] since it now follows the k. Thus, the case can be made that CY /-palatalization applies morpheme-internally in the synchronic phonology of CY.19 The l-palatalization occurs as well across morpheme boundaries, as when the first diminutive suffix -l is added to a noun ending in or g; thus:20 + l pekl [pekl'] "little pack" ring+ l ringl [riηgľ] "little ring" Thus, by definition within the revised version of lexical phonology, CY /palatalization cannot be a cyclic rule, since it applies both within and across morpheme boundaries. Second, CY /-palatalization must be seen as postcyclic rather than postlexical because the rule does not apply across word boundaries, nor after application of the
19 Diachronically, one could argue as well that l-palatalization is present in CY forms where Polish has /kł/ and the CY borrowing shows /kl'/, as in, for example, CY [skl'at] "warehouse" versus Polish skład. From this diachronic perspective, words such as CY [kl'amkə] "doorknob" are posited as containing underlying /17; cf. Polish klamka. Further supporting this view is the fact that where CY has contextually palatalized [ľ] after or g, StY will show plain /; thus: CY [skl'at] vs. StY [sklad]. 20 Nouns ending in a consonant which does not trigger l-palatalization show the [u] variant of /1/; thus: tiš+l > tiši [tišu] "little table"; stuit + I > štejtl [ štejtu] "market town".
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syntax. Thus, Bin-Nun (1973:340) notes that CY /-palatalization is not found in the compounds: avek # lojfn "away" "to run"
→
[aveklojfm]
([...kl...])
tsQrik "back"
→
[tsәriklajgη]
([...kl...])
# lajgn "to lay"
CY l-palatalization also does not apply across word boundaries after the syntax (not discussed in Bin-Nun 1973): (ix) šik langə bri:v → "(I) send long letters" vs. di klangən "the sounds"
→
[...šiklarjgo...]
([...kl...])
[di kľarjgon]
([...kľ...])
Therefore, on purely formal grounds we can conclude that CY l-palatalization can be neither cyclic nor postlexical, and must therefore be postcyclic. Of interest to our immediate and future goal of understanding the role of palatality and palatalization in the overall phonology of Yiddish is an insight into the way CY /palatalization interacts with some other rules of Yiddish phonology. Specifically, I will now consider briefly the interaction of the postcyclic rule of CY /-palatalization with three synchronic phonological rules of Yiddish: post-tonic reduction (PTR), schwa deletion (SD), and first- and second-degree diminutive formation (1DF and 2DF). I will begin with consideration of PTR and SD, which have been described in general terms in Jacobs (1984/1990).21 I will now bring discussion of PTR and SD into the context of cyclic and lexical phonology. PTR applies within morphemes, reducing a posttonic monophthong or diphthong to schwa: thus, the underlying posttonic full vowel/diphthong in, e.g., CY /xávajr/ (/aj/) "friend", /xili:k/ (/i:/) "distinction", /míšpu:t/ (/u:/) "trial, judgment", /xú:si:d/ (/і:/) "Hasid" is realized on the phonetic surface as [ә]: [xávər], [ilә], [míšpət], [xú:sət].22 The phonemic identity of the underlying full vowel/diphthong is posited based on the non-reduced occurrences of the vowel within a paradigm; thus, the CY
21
See also Katz 1982, 1993, and Lowenstamm 1978, 1979 for discussion of posttonic reduction. 22 See also Katz 1993.
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plural forms of the above nouns (where, historically, stress has shifted; see Jacobs 1990; Katz 1982): xavàjrəm, xili:ә, mišpú:təm, xsí.'dəm. In terms of lexical phonology, PTR is a postcyclic rule. If PTR were cyclic, the reduction of posttonic vowel to schwa would occur during the first cycle (here, the singular). However, there would then be no way of correctly restoring the appropriate full vowel/diphthong in the plural forms, which are created in the second cycle, as seen in Table 1. Table 1 : PTR as a cyclic rule Cycle 1 PTR Cycle 2 Pluralization
/xávajr/ [xávər]
/xili:k/ [ilә]
**xávər] əm **xílək]
/míšpu:t/ [rníšpət]
/xú:si:d/ [xú:sət]
**míšpət] **xú:səd]
Thus, applying PTR as a cyclic rule would yield the incorrect (here, CY) plural forms **әә, **ilәkәm, **gànəfəm, **xû:sədəm. If PTR is a postcyclic rule, applying only after all WFRs, pluralization, etc., then the underlying full vowel/diphthong remains available to surface in the plural: xavajrom, ili:ә, g anuvə, xsí: dəm. 2 3 Now consider the rule of schwa deletion — SD. 2 4 Basically, a posttonic schwa is deleted when it is preceded by a consonant 25 and followed by sonorants /n/ or /l/ and a word boundary; 26 thus: StY tato "father", zejdə "grandfather" + oblique marker n → tatn, zejdn (CY tatn, zajdn).27 Optionally, a consonant may follow the /n/ and precede the word boundary; thus: dem tatns "father's". 23
On the issue of differences in the location of the underlying stress in these singular-plural pairs, see Jacobs 1990:128ff; Katz 1982, 1993. The shift of stress is seen as a historical rule; however, a way could fairly easily be concocted to make this a 'synchronic' rule of Yiddish phonology. The point relevant to the present discussion, however, is that PTR is a regular rule in synchronic Yiddish phonology, and that PTR may not be cyclic. 24 In Jacobs (1990:92ff) the rule was formulated as Lexical Schwa Deletion. The discussion of the schwa deletion rule in the present paper represents a revision/expansion of the earlier LSD formulated. 25 SD is blocked when the consonant is a like sonorant, i.e., where nasal + nasal, or liquid + liquid would result; thus, there is no SD in mamon "mother" (oblique sg.), or moxalol (zajn) "to desecrate". Furthermore, SD is not blocked in instances of Ion, but is blocked when the I is preceded by a consonant; thus: SD applies in /falon/ → [faln] "to fall", but does not apply in /handlon/ → [handbn] "trade, deal". The latter has to do with syllabification rules; see Jacobs (1992/forthcoming). 26 On the non-participation of /r/ in schwa deletion, see Jacobs (1992/forthcoming). 27 On preservation of the schwa in the oblique form of personal names, e.g.: mojšə + n "Moyshe", tato + n "Daddy", zejdo + n "Grandpa" → mojšən, tatən, zejdən, see Jacobs 1990:94, note 3.
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Consider now occurrences of SD in adjectives derived from the past participle of strong verbs (which thus contain the nasal suffix).28 The StY base adjective ongəšribn "written" (phonetically, [orjgošribm]) is underlyingly on + go + šrib + on. The schwa in the final syllable is deleted by regular application of SD. In inflected forms of this adjective — and thus, in a cycle later than the one in which the base form of the derived adjective was created — the schwa resurfaces: on + gə + šrib + ә + ә → ongošribono. If SD were a cyclic rule, there would be no way to restore the deleted schwa, since there is no general rule which inserts a schwa / C_nV, whether across morpheme boundaries, as in nud + і "pest, bore" (not **nud- ә nik), or morpheme-internally, as in lign + әr "liar" (not ** lig-ә-әr ). SD is therefore a postcyclic rule. Furthermore, the postcyclic rule of PTR feeds SD, offering further evidence that SD is a postcyclic rule. Thus, CY /xazu:n/ "cantor," /ma:xu:l/ "taste treat" undergo SD to [xázn], [má:xl] only after application of the postcyclic rule of PTR: /xazu:n/, /ma:xu:l/ -* */zә/, */:ә1/ (by PTR) - [xázn], [má:xl] (by SD). Furthermore, SD may also be ruled out as a postlexical rule, since it does not occur after application of the syntax. If SD were a postlexical rule, the underlying schwa (preceding the nasal) of the derived adjective /ongəšribən/ would not be deleted in the phrase StY ix hob ongošrib{o}n a briv "I wrote a letter". Here, at the surface-phonetic level, we find bn# a,29 that is, SD has applied to the derived adjective, even though a vowel now follows the nasal. Thus, the introduction of a following vowel after application of the syntax has no effect on SD, while a similar introduction of a vowel through the cyclic phonology — as seen in the inflected form of the derived adjective ongošribon — has had a bleeding effect on SD. Now let us consider the interaction of CY l-palatalization with PTR and SD. All the three rules are postcyclic lexical rules, occurring in the order: (1) PTR, (2) SD, (3) /-palatalization. As shown above, PTR feeds SD. SD, in turn, feeds /palatalization; thus, presumably (not attested in Bin-Nun):
PTR SD /-palatalization
/míšku:l/ míškəl miški miški'
"(prosodic) meter" (plural: CY miškü:ləm)
Finally, consider again 1st and 2nd-degree noun diminutives, as outlined above (based on Jacobs 1992/forthcoming). As concerns (1st and 2nd) DF and CY /palatalization, note that while palatalized ľ is found in l st-degree diminutives, e.g.,
28 See Jacobs 1990:97ff. 29 The surface realization of this cluster is [bm].
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pekľ "small pack", riηgl "small ring", a plain / is found in the 2nd diminutives alə,riηgalə(Bin-Nun 1973:340). Both 1DF and 2DF are cyclic rules. If CY /palatalization were a cyclic rule, then the palatalized ľ created in the first cycle in pekľ, riηgľ would somehow have to be depalatalized in the second cycle, to obtain the 2nd diminutives pekDlə, riηgalə (otherwise, with no such depalatalization, **pekuľo, **rfygaľo would obtain). However, such a depalatalization rule would presumably depalatalize the /17 in, e.g., ľaľkə, ľuľkə, revoľutsjə, as well, to **lalkә, *lulkə, **revolutsjə, something which does not occur. Thus, further evidence is provided that CY /-palatalization is a postcyclic lexical rule, rather than a cyclic rule. Table 2 (facing page) summarizes the arguments made in this section of the paper, showing the derivation of a number of forms which have surface-phonetic adjacent klg + I , but which have differing phonological environments. The word ľaľko is included only to keep the table honest and not allow in a depalatalization rule. 6.
Conclusion In this paper I have attempted to show the ways in which a contact-induced (via contact with Polish) feature — palatalized ľ — has gone beyond the limited contexts of borrowing, and become integrated into the basic nuts-and-bolts phonology of CY. To this end, both diachronic and synchronic issues were dealt with. A rule of CY /palatalization was posited, using the revised model of lexical phonology as the theoretical framework for description. Furthermore, the full degree of integration of /-palatalization into the synchronic phonology of CY is seen in the interaction of this rule with other CY phonological rules. More generally, it is hoped that — whatever the ultimate 'truth' of the analysis of the data offered in this paper — we have moved a step forward toward an understanding of the role of palatality in Yiddish phonology.
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NEIL G. JACOBS
Table 2. CY k/g + l Pre-cyclic/underlying l' a1'kg klajn Cycle 1 lDF Cycle 2 2DF Cl'al'bJg) Postcyclic Rules PTR SD kl'ajn I-pal. Postlexical rules (Syntax-determined word
misku:l
misbl mi§kl mi§k1'
pak
avekl [lojfnl
[sikl [langg
pekl
-------------
----------
peblg
-------------
----------
pek1' , peblg
order)
Surface phonetic forms I'al'b kl'ajn mi§kl'
pekl' , pekglg
aveklojfn
§iklangg
aveklojfn
sikklangg
REFERENCES Bin-Nun, Jechiel. 1973. Jiddisch und die deutschen MUlldarten unter besonderer Berucksichtigung des ostgalizischen liddisch. Tlibingen: Max Niemeyer. Booij, Geert, & Jerzy· Rubach. 1987. "Postcyclic versus Postlexical Rules in Lexical Phonology". Linguistic Inquiry 18.1-44. Bratkowsky, Joan. 1974. Sharpness in Yiddish: A fifth riddle in bilingual dialectology. PhD. dissertation, Indiana Univ.; Bloomington. Chambers, Jack. 1993. "Dialect Topography: An introduction". Unpubl. ms., updated from a paper presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Atlantic Provinces Linguistic Association, at the Univ. of Moncton, Nov. 7, 1992. Herzog, Marvin. 1965. The Yiddish language ill northern Poland: Its geography and history. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. - - - . 1992. Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry. Vol. 1: Historical & theoretical foundations. [Editors Marvin Herzog, Uriel Weimeich, & Vera Baviskar.] Tlibingen: Max Niemeyer. Jacobs, Neil. 1990. Economy in Yiddish Vocalism: A study in the interplay of Hebrew and non-Hebrew components. Hac'Tassowitz: Wiesbaden. [= Revised
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from the 1984 Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation: Economy in Yiddish vocalismi The case of Central Yiddish.] . 1992/forthcoming. "Diminutive Formation in Yiddish: A syllable-based account". Paper presented to the 3rd Annual Berkeley-Michigan Germanic Linguistics Roundtable, April 1992. To appear in: Insights in Germanic Linguistics ed. by Irmengard Rauch & Gerald Carr. [Trends in Linguistics: Studies & Monographs.] Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. —. 1993. "Linguistic geography and phonological instability: Vowel length in East-Central Yiddish". Paper presented at Methods VIII: International Conference on Dialectology, August 3-7, 1993, Univ. of Victoria, Victoria, B.C. . 1994. "Structure, standardization, and diglossia: The case of Courland Yiddish". Insiders and Outsiders: German-Jewish, Yiddish and German literature and culture in contact ed. by Dagmar C. G. Lorenz & Gabriele Weinberger, 89-99. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press. Jakobson, R. 1953. "Der yidisher klangen-bashtand in farglaykh mitn slavishn arum". Yidishe shprakh 13,70-83. Kalmanovitsh, Zelig. 1926. "Der yidisher dialekt in kurland". Filologishe shriftn fun Yivo 1.161-188. Vilne. Katz, Dovid. 1983. "Zur Dialektologie des Jiddischen". Dialektologie: ein Handbuch zur deutschen und allgemeinen Dialektforschung ed. by W. Besch, U. Knoop, W. Putschke, H.E. Wiegand, 2.1018-1041. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. -. 1993. "The Phonology of Ashkenazic". Hebrew in Ashkenaz, ed. by Lewis Glinert 46-87. New York & Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. King, Robert D. 1980. "The history of final devoicing in Yiddish". The Field of Yiddish: Studies in language, folklore, and literature. Fourth Collection, ed. by Marvin Herzog, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Dan Miron, & Ruth Wisse, with the assistance of Alan Huffman, 371-430. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues. Kiparsky, Paul. 1982. "From cyclic to lexical phonology", The Structure of Phonological Representations. Part 1, ed. by H. van der Hulst & N. Smith, 131-176. Dordrecht: Foris. Kopczyński, Andrzej. 1977. Polish and American English consonant phonemes: A contrastive study. Warsaw: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe. Louden, Mark. 1993. "Is Yiddish a creole language? The influence of Slavic speakers and languages on its genesis and development". Paper presented to the International Conference on Pidgin & Creole Languages. Amsterdam: Univ. of Amsterdam. July, 1993.
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Lowenstamm, Jean. 1978. "Yiddish diphthongs". Paper presented to the 9th annual meeting of the North Eastern Linguistic Society (NELS), New York, 10-12 Nov., 1978. . 1979. Topics in syllabic phonology. Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst. Shevelov, George. 1965. A prehistory of Slavic: The Historical Phonology of Common Slavic. New York, Morningside Heights: Columbia Univ. Press. [Published in Germany, 1964 by Carl Winter, Heidelberg.] Stankiewicz, Edward. 1964. "Problems of emotive language". Approaches to Semiotics ed. by Thomas Sebeok et al, 239-276. The Hague: Mouton. Stieber, Zdzisław. 1968. The phonological development of Polish. Translated by Elias J. Schwartz; foreword by Edward Stankiewicz. Michigan Slavic Materials 8. Ann Arbor: Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures. Weinreich, Max. 1923. "Dos kurlender yidish". Shtaplen: Fir etyudn tsu der yidisher shprakhvisnshaft un liter aturgeshikhte, 193-240. Berlin: Vostok. . 1940. "Yidish". Algemeyne entsiklopedye 6.23-90. New York: CYCO. . 1980. History of the Yiddish Language. Chicago & London: Univ. of Chicago Press. [Partial translation by Shlomo Noble & Joshua A. Fishman of M. Vaynraykh, 1973, Geshikhte fun der yidisher shprakh: bagrifn, faktn, metodn. New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.] Weinreich, Uriel. 1952. "Sabesdiker losn in Yiddish: A problem of linguistic affinity". Word 10:2/3.360-377. . 1953. "Di klangike struktur fun a podolyer reydenish". Yidishe shprakh 13.121-131. . 1958. "Yiddish and Colonial German in Eastern Europe: The differential impact of Slavic". American Contributions to the fourth International Congress of Slavicists, Moscow, September 1958, 369-421. 's Gravenhage: Mouton. [Reprinted as separate offprint by Mouton, 's Gravenhage, 1958.] . 1963. "Four riddles in bilingual dialectology". American Contributions to the Fifth International Conference of Linguistics, 335-359. The Hague: Mouton. . 1964. "Western traits in Transcarpathian Yiddish". For Max Weinreich. Studies in Jewish Languages, Literature, & Society ed. by Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Alexander Erlich, Rachel Erlich, & Joshua A. Fishman, 245-264. The Hague: Mouton. . 1991. "Rosheprokim fun a deskriptiver yidisher dialektologye". Yivobleter, Naye serye 1,9-68. Wexler, Paul. 1991. "Yiddish —the fifteenth Slavic language". International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 91. 9-150.
PHONOLOGY, ORTHOGRAPHY AND THE UMLAUT PUZZLE DAVID L. FERTIG State University of New York, Buffalo
1. Introduction In this paper I will look critically at some proposed phonological solutions to what might be called 'the umlaut puzzle', or the old question of why orthographic indication of umlaut — other than that of short-α — does not appear in German until long after the conditioning factors that presumably caused it had disappeared. I will focus on the work of Twaddell (1938) and Voyles (1976:19-26; 1977; 1991; 1992a; 1992b:79-85,212-214), paying particular attention to their assumptions about the relationship between phonology and orthography. 2. Twaddell Twaddell believed that the umlaut puzzle could be solved with basic structuralist principles. American structuralism tells us that as long as two sounds are in complementary distribution and are phonetically similar, they are merely allophones of the same phoneme. In the case of a conditioned split, the crucial moment of sound change — for the structuralist — is when the two new sounds created by the split cease to be in complementary distribution. This often happens because of loss or neutralization of the factors conditioning the split. At this moment, what was previously an allophonic alternation becomes phonemic and it is at this point, according to Twaddell, that we would expect the alternation to come to be represented in writing. Twaddell makes two separate points here: 1. that the phonologically significant moment in a conditioned split is the moment when the difference between the two new sounds becomes phonemicized; and 2. that unless other factors interfere, people tend to write phonemes, i.e., that allophonic differences are not represented in writing, while phonemic contrasts are.
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Applying this theory to umlaut, we find, according to Twaddell, that in OHG the conditioning factors for umlaut (i, î, and j in weakly stressed syllables) were still present. Thus, umlaut was merely an allophonic alternation at this stage, and we would not expect it to be represented in writing. Indeed, Twaddell remarks (1938:180) that it would have been nothing but "orthographic pedantry" for an OHG scribe to have represented non-primary umlaut. We would expect umlaut to start being represented in writing after the weakening of unstressed vowels which occurred in the transition from OHG to MHG, and this, according to Twaddell, is precisely what we find.i 2.1 The Reception of Twaddell Most scholars dealing with German umlaut take a position on Twaddell's article. Much more often than not, they praise it. Both Moulton (1961:20 fn.l) and Russ (1977:216) refer to it as "bahnbrechend". Penzi (1983:132) calls it "the decisive break-through" in explaining umlaut, and Keller (1978:160) sees it as the beginning of "one of the finest achievements of American linguists", or in Koekkoek's words "die Glanzleistung der amerikanischen historischen Phonologie auf dem Gebiet der Germanistik" (1958; cf. also Capek 1983 and Szulc 1987:82-87). On the other hand, a number of scholars, such as Rooth (1940-41:112-117), Kratz (1960), Schweikle (1964:204-9), Erdmann (1972), and more recently Liberman (1991), Voyles (1977; 1991; 1992a; 1992b) and Iverson, Salmons & Davis (1994) have pointed out a number of very serious problems with Twaddell's account. One of the points most often made is that the picture of OHG and MHG textual reality which Twaddell paints in his article bears no resemblance to what we find when we actually look at the manuscripts. Twaddell gives us the impression that the conditioning factors for umlaut were still present — with no important exceptions — in OHG; in addition, he implies that as soon as most of these conditioning factors had disappeared (in other words, by early MHG times) we find more or less consistent marking of non-primary umlaut in the manuscripts. Neither of these impressions is accurate. 2.1.1 The phonemic status of umlaut in OHG. It is well known that many OHG manuscripts show no trace of post-consonantal j (Braune & Eggers 1987:110-113), which was of course one of the conditioning factors for umlaut. Twaddell was aware of this fact, but claimed that it only affected a small number of words, and that umlaut was thus, at most, marginally phonemic in OHG times (1938:179-180). Critics of
1 Since the subject of this paper is non-primary umlaut, I will not deal with Twaddell's very interesting discussion of primary umlaut in OHG.
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Twaddell have pointed out that it was actually quite a large number of words that were affected by the loss of y' - all the class-1 weak verbs, as well as oll ja- and jostem nouns and adjectives (Kratz 1960:466-467) — and they note moreover that strict structuralist theory requkes distinctions to be either phonemic or allophonic and does not allow for any middle ground (Russ 1977:218; King 1969:97). Twaddelľs followers have also recognized these points and have emended the theory according ly, admitting that non-primary umlaut was indeed phonemic in OHG (Penzl 1969:556; 1975:89; Antonsen 1964:194; Sonderegger 1979:304; Russ 1977:218; Voyles 1991:164; 1992a:367-368). Some try to attribute the lack of orthographic representa tion to factors such as the "relatively low functional load" (Kyes 1967:672; Moulton 1961:26) of the umlaut/non-umlaut contrast, while others simply acknowledge that phonemic distinctions do not necessarily get represented in writing (Penzl 1949:234; 1983:133; cf. also Buccini 1992:200-204). 2.1.2 Orthographic representation of umlaut in MHG and ENHG. In early MHG, orthographic representation of umlaut is very inconsistent in all regions, contrary to what Twaddell implies in his article. In Upper German, we do find the consistency increasing in the course of the MHG period (Bahder 1890:201; Sonderegger 1979:309; Paul/Moser/Schröbler 1969:19), but in Central German (and East Franconian) we find virtually no umlaut marking for the mid and high vowels throughout the MHG and the first half of the ENHG period (Bahder 1890:38, 50, 201; Paul/Moser/Schröbler 1969:45, 129; Weinhold 1883:70; Moser 1929:26-27). Luther, for example, rarely marks umlaut in his manuscripts, and in the first printed edition of his New Testament translation, there is not a single umlaut mark (Bahder 1890:54, 57, 208). In Nuremberg, we also find a virtually complete absence of umlaut marking for mid and high vowels until about 1500, and for a long while after that the Nuremberg writers and printers are very inconsistent (Bahder 1890: 31, 33, 206). To make matters worse, the presence of what appear to be umlaut marks in a text does not necessarily mean anything, since many writers and printers put diacritics over their vowels for various (and sometimes mysterious) reasons (Paul/Moser/Schröbler 1969:19; Bahder 1890:205-208). Ultimately, it is not until after the end of the ENHG period — well into the 17th century — that we begin to find more or less consistent representation of umlaut in all parts of Germany (Sonderegger 1979:297; Bahder 1890:206-207). Surprisingly enough, Twaddell's followers are perfectly aware of the widespread absence of umlaut marking in this period (Penzl 1949:231; 1969:56; Moulton 1961:28), but they give no indication that they see it as a problem for Twaddelľ s theory.
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It is instructive to look at the strategies employed by Twaddelľs defenders in the face of the kind of problems just discussed. First of all, as mentioned above, they abandon the strong hypothesis that people write phonemes in favor of the much weaker hypothesis that people do not write allophones (Penzl 1949:234; 1983:133). In other words, phonemic contrast is now seen as a necessary but not a sufficient condition for an orthographic distinction. In order to explain the gap of several centuries between the phonemicization of non-primary umlaut and its orthographic representation, the structuralists then appeal to factors such as the conservatism of writing systems (Moulton 1961:27-28) and the lack of availability of symbols for front rounded vowels in the Latin alphabet (Penzl 1983:133; Keller 1978:162). These arguments are perfectly fine, but it is now these factors which must account for the late appearance of orthographic marking of non-primary umlaut. Allophones and phonemes no longer play any role at all. Furthermore, these are precisely the same factors that the pre-structuralists had appealed to in trying to solve the umlaut puzzle. Twaddell himself begins his article by rejecting such arguments in order to create an apparent need for his new theory: Another suggested answer is the argument that the Latin alphabet did not supply the required symbols. But the MHG scribes were able to invent symbols; and they knew the same Latin alphabet as the OHG scribes, so far as the number of symbols is concerned. If the Latin alphabet was inadequate in the 9th century, it was similarly inadequate in the 13th; if new symbols were invented in the 13th, they could have been invented in the 9th. (1938:178)
It is ironic to find Penzl and others using the same kinds of arguments to defend Twaddelľs theory that Twaddell himself is here rejecting. Twaddelľs critics and his defenders agree that Twaddell was wrong on two counts: the phonemic status of non-primary umlaut in OHG and the necessity of orthographic marking of phonemic distinctions. The two sides disagree sharply, however, on just how damaging these issues are for Twaddell. His defenders are right to emphasize that if we abandon Twaddelľs strong hypothesis about the connection between phonemic contrast and orthography, then the textual evidence is not incompatible with his phonological theory of umlaut. They fail to mention, however, that Twaddelľs article is an EMPIRICAL argument for his phonological theory. He is claiming that the textual evidence, i.e., the late appearance of ortho graphic marking of non-primary umlaut, SUPPORTS his theory over other theories. In other words, he is claiming that his theory offers a solution to the umlaut puzzle. On this point he is clearly wrong. Apparently, Twaddelľs followers find his phonological account of umlaut so appealing that they are unconcerned with the issue of the validity of the empirical
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arguments that he originally offered in support of that account. For the purposes of this paper, however, that issue is obviously the only one that matters. I am not addressing the question of the phonological correctness of phonemic theory. I am only asking whether that theory makes any contribution to a solution of the umlaut puzzle, and the answer to that question is clearly 'no'. 3. Voyles For the moment it appears as if Twadell's work offers little or no help in dealing with the umlaut puzzle. I consider at this point the work of one of his strongest and most recent critics: Joseph Voyles. Virtually all recent accounts of umlaut assume that both primary and non-primary umlaut had their origins as phonological processes conditioned by the presence of an i(:) or j in a following weakly stressed syllable. It follows from this assumption that non-primary umlaut must have been present phonetically in early OHG (Penzl 1975:72; Sonderegger 1979:304; Paul/Moser/Schröbler 1969:40; King 1969:94; Twaddell 1938:177; Robinson 1975:20 n.4). Many nineteenth-century scholars did not make this assumption, however (cf. Antonsen 1964:178fn.5). Karl Weinhold, for example, contended (1883:9-10) that only primary umlaut had any direct phonological basis, while non-primary umlaut (with the possible exception of long and short u) would have to be attributed to analogy. He was forced to adopt this view because he took the manuscript spellings at face value. Recently, this early approach to umlaut has been revived by Voyles (1977; 1991; 1992a; 1992b:79-85, 212-214).2 Like Weinhold, Voyles believes that the textual evidence must be taken at face value, arguing that "the fact that there is absolutely no orthographic designation of any i-umlaut besides Id from /a/ in any Old High German text before 1000 AD indicate[s] that the other purportedly umlauted vowels such as [Ö] or [Ü] simply did not exist before that time" (1991:162; 1992a: 367). Naturally, Voyles must also follow Weinhold in seeing non-primary umlaut as an essentially analogical process that had its beginnings in MHG or late OHG times (1991: 183-184), although Voyles does not use the term "analogy", but talks rather of "morphosyntactic and phonological expansion" of rules.
2
Voyles does not mention Weinhold or other nineteenth century scholars, however, and is apparently unaware of the similarity of their views to his own.
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3.1 Problems with Voyles's account There are a number of serious problems with Voyles's theory. I will first briefly point out a number of flaws in his evidence and arguments and then turn to fundamental problems with the theory itself.3 3.1.1 'Diachronic dilemmas'. Voyles lists a number of dilemmas for what he calls "the standard theory", by which he means Twaddell's theory. Some of these represent true problems for that theory, but his so-called "diachronic dilemma", which Voyles himself considers the most crucial of all (1991:189-190), consists of two arguments that simply evaporate under closer scrutiny. The first of these involves the words suchen, glauben, and raufen. Voyles points out that all three of these words were originally class-1 (j-class) weak verbs and should thus have umlaut (at least in the present) in modern German. He argues that the fact that non-primary umlaut "occurs only sporadically" in this class of verbs, while primary umlaut shows complete regularity here, presents serious problems for the standard theory. The fact is, however, that all the words that Voyles lists as problematic do undergo regular umlaut in Central German dialects, and several more words, not all of which are class-1 verbs, can be added to the list: e.g., erlauben, Haupt, rufen, Taufe, and taufen. In all of these words, it is the non-umlauted (Upper-German) form that has been adopted into the standard, whereas in üben, ersäufen, betäuben, stäube?!, (sich) bäumen, räumen, säumen, träumen and zäumen the Central German form (with umlaut) has won out. Many scholars have speculated as to why these words do not show umlaut in Upper German, with some seeing straightforward phonetic conditioning, i.e., MHG u, uo and ou do not undergo umlaut in Upper German before labials and velars (Paul/Moser/Schröbler 1969:44; 1956:252-253; Bahder 1890:11, 31, 57, 65, 202, 216-221; Weinhold 1883:119, 134), while others present evidence to suggest that the words originally had umlaut in these dialects and later lost it (Kranzmayer 1956:43-44; Antonsen 1969; Lüssy 1983:1084-1085; cf. also Buccini 1992:250-254). In any case, the apparently "sporadic" occurrence of non-primary umlaut in class-1 weak verbs in Modern Standard German simply results from the fact that the standard has adopted forms from different dialects (Schirmunski 1962:203; Buccini 1992:68-69). This can hardly be characterized as a dilemma for the standard theory.
3 Voyles presented the outline of his theory of umlaut in the seventies (1976; 1977). Criticism of his theory in that early form focused largely on Voyles's simplistic view of the relationship between phonology and orthography (Simmler 1978; Tops 1978; Antonsen 1979). In his recent work (1991; 1992a; 1992b), Voyles is much more specific about the details of his theory, making it possible to offer a more thorough critique.
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Voyles's second "diachronic dilemma" involves Dutch. He points out that modern Dutch shows evidence of umlaut of short a > e, but none of any other vowels. 4 He then notes that Kyes (1967) has argued, along Twaddellian lines, that there must have been umlauted versions of all umlautable vowels in Old Low Franconian (OLF). Thus, Voyles claims, Twaddell's theory forces us to believe that Dutch originally had umlaut phonemes of all vowels, but then lost them all except /e/ from /a/. Voyles implies that it would be more reasonable to assume that Dutch never had non-primary umlaut in the first place. Contrary to what Voyles is implying, however, there is nothing in Twaddell's theory that would ever lead anyone to assume umlaut for some stage of a language when it is neither attested for that stage nor for any later stage. Kyes posited nonprimary umlaut for OLF precisely because its modern descendants, the Limburgic dialects, do have umlaut of all umlautable vowels (Kyes 1967:667-668; Goossens 1962; Buccini 1988:65; 1992:16-17). No one has suggested that the ancestor of Modern Standard Dutch (which is virtually unattested for the "Old" period) ever had non-primary umlaut (Goossens 1974:36-37; Robinson 1975:20 n.4, 27 n.5). 5 3.1.2 Fundamental problems with Voyles's approach. The kinds of flaws that I have just outlined obviously do not invalidate Voyles's approach. They merely weaken his argument for the necessity of rejecting the old approaches. There are some more fundamental problems, however, which in my opinion render Voyles's theory of non-primary umlaut completely untenable. 3.1.2.1 Theoretical problems. Voyles's theory of umlaut hinges crucially on the belief that the umlaut of all vowels other than short a was morphologically conditioned from its very inception. This belief is at odds with much recent work in phonological and morphological theory. Many linguists in fact reject the whole notion of "morphologically conditioned phonological rules", arguing that if a rule is morphologically conditioned then it is a morphological rule and not a phonological one (Anderson 1988a:181; 1988b:333-336; 1992:45-46, 224-225; Janda & Manandise 1984). Even among those linguists who still hold that some morphologically conditioned rules should be regarded as part of the phonology, there seems to be widespread agreement that a fundamental distinction has to be made between two types of phonological rules: those that can be subject to morphological
4 Actually there may be evidence of umlaut of short ü in Modern Standard Dutch as well, but that is not crucial to the argument here (Goossens 1974:36, 45-46; Buccini 1988:64-65, 77 n.7; 1992:18). 5 Concerning short see fn. 4. Note that long is invariably fronted in Modern Standard Dutch, thus making it impossible to say whether there was once conditioned umlaut here or not (Buccini 1988:65).
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conditioning and those that cannot. It is very clear that non-primary umlaut — at its inception — must have belonged in the latter category. There are two different theoretical approaches here that lead us to essentially the same conclusion. The first is presented in Janda & Manandise (1984) which rejects morphologically conditioned phonological rules. I will not try to summarize their theory, but one consequence of it is that there can be no rule that refers both to morphological categories and to non-distinctive phonological features. The umlaut rule — at its inception — must have referred to a non-distinctive phonological feature. Until the advent of non-primary umlaut, frontness and rounding of vowels were not independent in German. Mid and high back vowels were always rounded, while their front counterparts were always unrounded. It does not matter which of these features we take as distinctive. Clearly, one of them, either frontness or rounding, was non-distinctive in German until the appearance of non-primary umlaut (cf. Goldsmith 1990:298-304). It follows then that this rule could not have been subject to morphological conditioning. Lexical phonology (Kiparsky 1985; Mohanan 1986) will give us the same result, since the principle of Structure Preservation does not allow lexical rules to create new segment types, and lexical rules are the only kind that can have access to morphological information (Harris 1989:38-39; Kiparsky 1988:399).6 3.1.2.2 Empirical problems. I would not want to reject Voyles's theory based on theoretical considerations alone. The fact is, however, that there are a number of very serious empirical problems with his account as well. As Voyles (1991:183) points out, one of the necessary preconditions for his theory to work is that speakers must have been able to distinguish those categories in which umlaut did occur from those in which it did not. When we look at the morphological factors that Voyles believes to have triggered umlaut at the beginning of the MHG period, however, we see a number of word classes that had, by this time, totally fallen together with non-umlaut-triggering classes. The ¿-stem masculine nouns are perhaps the clearest example, though certainly not the only one. 7 This class of nouns, with the exception of a few members with short root syllables (von Kienle 1969:164-165; Braune/Eggers 1987:200), had become formally indistinguishable 6
Hock (1986:207-209) offers "some evidence which suggests that even morphologically motivated analogy can operate on allophones and/or create new phonemes." None of his examples is comparable to Voyles's account of umlaut, however, and none appears to violate Structure Preservation. Cf. also Hock (1986:46-47) and Malkiel (1968) on the general issue of morphological conditioning of sound change. 7 Voyles (1976) explicitly claims that "the morphological environments such as n-Class Weak Verb, i-Stem Noun, etc. [were] still necessary as classificatory features in the grammar of Middle High German". He offers neither evidence nor citations in support of this claim, however, and it does not appear in the more recent expositions of his theory.
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from the non-umlauting o-stems by early MHG times (von Kienle 1969:164-165). It may be that Voyles would like to push the date of umlaut back to a time when these classes were still distinct, but unfortunately this position is not tenable. Voyles's theory is that non-primary umlaut occurred at a time after the phonological conditioning factors for umlaut had been lost, but while the morphological classes that triggered umlaut were still distinct from those that did not. In this case, however, there could not have been any such time, since the only thing that had ever distinguished the α-stem from the i-stem masculine nouns in German was the quality of the unstressed vowel in the plural forms, and thus the reduction of unstressed vowels necessarily meant the falling together of the two classes. We find a similar problem when we turn to the issue of umlaut in individual lexical items. In his formulation of the umlaut rules for various stages of OHG, Voyles includes a rule which stipulates the occurrence of umlauted e from a in specific lexical items. These are words in which the original phonological conditioning factor for umlaut was part of a bisyllabic root, rather than a suffix or an ending. Examples include engel and esel. Voyles himself points out that "There can be of course no expansion of' this kind of umlaut in MHG (1991:184). But the fact is that we do find non-primary umlaut operating in isolated monomorphemic words. Where there was originally an і in the second syllable of such words, we find umlaut, as in übel (< OHG ubil), Beutel (< OHG butii), Mönch (< OHG munih), and Central German Heupt (< OHG houbit). Where there, was originally some other vowel in the second syllable, as in Vogel (< OHG fogai), Schaufel (< OHG scuvala) and Vogt (< OHG fogat) we find no umlaut. There are also a number of instances where Voyles himself recognized potential pitfalls for his theory and tried to get around them. One such case involves the -jostem feminine nouns, such as Brücke and Sünde. Voyles (1991:188) recognizes that this class of nouns had already become formally indistinguishable from the o-stem feminine nouns by early OHG times. This makes it very problematic for his theory to account for why the original jô-stems wind up with umlaut while the ô-stems do not. He offers two arguments. First of all, he points out that some jo-stems have nonumlauted variants in MHG. This point is completely irrelevant, since these words show precisely the same dialectal distribution of umlauted vs. non-umlauted variants that we find in other classes of words (see Section 3.1.1). Voyles's second argument is based on the fact that words from this class occasionally occur in OHG with endings from the feminine î(n)-stems, the class to which words like modern German Höhe belonged (Braune/Eggers 1987:196, 209-210). He contends that for purposes of umlaut, the nouns of this class behaved like î(n)-stems rather than jô-stems. In fact, however, the forms with î(n) endings are extremely rare. Of the 125
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occurrences of forms of sunta, 2 of brucka, 2 of wunna, and 1 of brunna listed in Heffner 1961, not a single one has an î(n) ending. Furthermore, Voyles includes Mücke in the list of words which he wants to explain in this way. Mücke, however, was not a strongy'ô-stem, like Brücke and Sünde, but rather a weak jôn-stem, a class for which I know of no evidence whatsoever of î(n)-stem forms. One final problem for Voyles's account involves the preterite subjunctive and the second singular preterite indicative of strong verbs. This is a perfect test case for his theory, since it is a morphological class which originally had an inflectional i(:), but where the extension of a rule from primary umlaut is not possible, since short a does not occur in the third ablaut grade of any strong verb class. The fact that non-primary umlaut does occur in this class would seem to present a serious problem for Voyles's theory. Voyles is aware of this. The solution he suggests is that in this case the f s in the pret. subj. survived longer than others (in all forms except the first and third singular) because they were originally long and were followed by a consonant. These /'s were then able to trigger umlaut phonologically in early MHG, and this umlaut was then extended analogically to the first and third singular subjunctive as well as to the second singular indicative (1991:184,185-6). I am reminded in this context of Weinhold's answer to such difficulties. Recall that he also believed that non-primary umlaut arose by morphological conditioning in the early MHG period, but faced with all the evidence he was forced to adopt the rather curious view that the extension of umlaut to vowels other than short-α occurred "im ganzen freilich mit richtigem Gefühl für den geschichtlichen Standort des /"(1883:23-4). 3.1.2.3. 'The orthographic dilemma'. The argument that Voyles (1991:161-164) emphasizes most strongly is that non-primary umlaut could not have been present phonetically or phonologically in OHG because if it had been, there would be some orthographic indication of it. The total lack of such marking is, according to Voyles, proof positive that there was no umlaut. Is it really true that there is no marking of non-primary umlaut in OHG? Aside from the often-discussed occasional digraphs and other spellings that could be taken as indication of umlaut, there is another sense in which one could argue that umlaut was in fact very often marked in OHG, and this point brings us back to Twaddell (1938:178): If the phonetic environment is orthographically indicated, the phonetic representative of U (either [y] or [u]) is automatically indicated. When the OHG scribe wrote uxi, the OHG reader had to pronounce the vowel as [y], for the written symbol in this ֊xi environment had to be interpreted as indicating the fronted variety of U.
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179
This is really Twaddell's basic observation, and I would contend that it is absolutely correct. Note that this observation does not have anything to do with phonology. It only concerns orthography. Twaddell is responding to those who ask why non-primary umlaut was never marked in OHG by pointing out that it WAS quite often marked. It was marked perfectly adequately by the і in the following syllable, just as the difference between the vowels in Modern English bit and bite is marked perfectly adequately by the "silent e\ This kind of orthographic diacritic is, I think, not rare in the written languages of the world. If we focus on this orthographic observation of Twaddell's and forget about the phonological interpretation he tries to give to it, then we have, for one thing, a response to Voyles's question of why umlaut was never marked in OHG. We may also have here a small part of a solution to the umlaut puzzle. 4.
Conclusions So where do we stand in our attempts to solve the umlaut puzzle? For the most part, the puzzle is still unsolved. This is partly because both Twaddell and Voyles (and many others) have focused exclusively on OHG, whereas the MHG and ENHG data are equally problematic for anyone attempting a purely phonological explanation. The true solution may lie partially or entirely in the conservatism of writing systems and the inadequacy of the Latin alphabet.8 Still, several potential phonological factors deserve consideration. One obvious possibility is that there may have been variation between umlauted and non-umlauted vowels in medieval German. There is in fact some evidence from MHG rhymes that seems to indicate that umlauted and nonumlauted forms were in variation (Bahder 1890:201-202; Weinhold 1883:358 and n.l), and some variation is still found in modern dialects (Bahder 1890:221). Another often-mentioned possibility is that the phonetic difference between the umlauted and the non-umlauted phonemes was originally very small (Paul/Moser /Schröbler 1969:40; Kratz 1960:472-473). Twaddell (1938:177) and others have criticized this view on the grounds that it seems improbable that a small phonetic difference would continue to grow after the conditioning factors had been lost, but some recent studies of sound change in progress could breath new life into this theory. Beginning with Labov, Yaeger & Steiner (1972:229-257), a number of studies (e.g., Di Paolo 1992; cf. also Labov, Karen & Miller 1991; Milroy 1992:151152, 154-160) have found that speakers consistently maintain tiny phonetic differences between historically distinct phonemes. The phonemes may appear to have merged, and native speakers may be convinced that they are identical, but 8
See van der Schalie 1973 for an in-depth discussion of these issues.
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spectrographic analysis shows that a consistent difference is being maintained. At any time the phonemes may begin diverging, until the difference between them is once again easily perceptible. Finally, at least two scholars (Hammerich 1955:25; Liberman 1991:132; cf. also Buccini 1992:36-44) have suggested that we totally abandon the conventional view of umlaut as a conditioned split, and see it instead as a compensatory process. According to this view, the umlauting of back vowels was caused by the weakening of unstressed і and j and thus did not begin until that weakening was well under way. If umlaut is viewed in this way, then the fact that the evidence for it is found mainly after the conditioning factors have been lost becomes less surprising, although the size of the gap, at least in Central German, would still require explana tion. All of these proposals have some merit, but if there is any lesson to be learned from the attempts of Twaddell and Voyles it is surely that we must not confuse the search for the phonological "truth" about umlaut with the search for a solution to the (orthographic) umlaut puzzle. The two may well be related, but there is no reason to assume that they are identical. REFERENCES Anderson, Stephen R. 1988a. "Morphological theory". Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey ed. by Frederick J. Newmeyer, vol. 1.146-191. New York & Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. . 1988b. "Morphological change". Ibid., 324-362. . 1992. A-Morphous Morphology. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 62. New York & Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Antonsen, Elmer. 1964. "Zum Umlaut im Deutschen". Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (Tübingen) 86.177-196. . 1969. "Zur Umlautfeindlichkeit des Oberdeutschen". Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 36.201-207. .1979. Review of Voyles ( 1977). JEGP 78.377-379. Bahder, Karl von. 1890. Grundlagen des neuhochdeutschen Lautsystems. Straßburg: Karl J. Trübner. Grammatik. 14th ed. by Hans Braune, Wilhelm. 1987. Althochdeutsche Eggers .Tübingen: Niemeyer. (1st ed., 1886.) Buccini, Anthony F. 1988. "Umlaut Alternation, Variation, and Dialect Contact: Reconditioning and deconditioning of umlaut in the prehistory of the Dutch
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dialects". Georgetown University Round Table on Languages & Linguistics ed. by Thomas J.Walsh, 63-80. . 1992. "The Development of Umlaut and the Dialectal Position of Dutch in Germanic". Unpub. doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, Cornell, NY. Capek, Michael J. 1983. "Phoneme Theory and Umlaut: A note on the creation of knowledge". Monatshefte 75.126-130. Di Paolo, Marianna. 1992. "Evidence for the Instability of a Low Back Vowel 'Merger'". Paper delivered at NWAVE 21, Ann Arbor, Mich. Erdmann, Peter. 1972. "Zur strukturalistischen Erklärung des i-Umlautes". Linguistics 78.16-24. Goldsmith, John A. 1990. Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Goossens, Jan. 1962. "Die gerundeten Palatalvokale im niederländischen Sprach raum". Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 29.312-328. . 1974. Historische Phonologie des Niederländischen. (= Sprachstrukturen A, 2). Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hammerich, L[ouis]. L. 1955. "Die germanische und die hochdeutsche Lautverschiebung". Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (Tübingen) 77.1-29. Harris, John. 1989. "Towards a lexical analysis of sound change in progress". Journal of Linguistics 25.35-56. Heffner, R-M. S. 1961. A Word-Index to the Texts of Steinmeyer Die kleineren althochdeutschen Sprachdenkmäler. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. Hock, Hans Henrich. 1986. Principles of Historical Linguistics. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Iverson, Gregory K., Joseph . Salmons & Garry W. Davis. 1994. "Blocking Environments in Old High German Umlaut". Folia Linguistica Historica 15.131-148. Janda, Richard D. & Esmeralda Manandise. 1984. "Zero Really Is Nothing: Basque evidence against '-morphemes' (and also against 'morphologically-conditioned phonological rules')". Proceedings of the First Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, September 28-30. Keller, R[udolf] E[rnst] 1978. The German Language. London: Faber & Faber. Kienle, Richard von. 1969. Historische Laut- und Formenlehre des Deutschen. 2nd ed. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer. and Generative Grammar. King, Robert D. 1969. Historical Linguistics Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
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Kiparsky, Paul. 1985. "Some consequences of Lexical Phonology". Phonology Yearbook 2.85-138. . 1988. "Phonological Change". Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey ed. by Frederick J. Newmeyer. I:363-415. New York & Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Koekkoek, Byron J. 1958. "Amerikanische Arbeiten zur Phonologie des Deutschen". Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 26.42-57. Kranzmayer, Eberhard. 1956. Historische Lautgeo graphie des gesamtbairischen Dialektraumes. Wien: Böhlau. Kratz, Henry. 1960. "The Phonemic Approach to Umlaut in Old High German and Old Norse". Journal of English and Germanic Philology 59.463-479. Kyes, Robert L. 1967. "The Evidence for /-Umlaut in Old Low Franconian". Language 43.666-673. Labov, William, Malcah Yaeger & Richard Steiner. 1972. A Quantitative Study of Sound Change in Progress. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey. Labov, William, Mark Karen & Corey Miller. 1991. "Near-mergers and the suspension of phonemic contrast". Language Variation and Change 333-74. Liberman, Anatoly. 1991. "Phonologization in Germanic: Umlauts and vowel shifts". Stæfcræft: Studies in Germanic linguistics ed. by Elmer H. Antonsen & Hans Henrich Hock, 125-137. Philadelphia & Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lüssy, Heinrich. 1983. "Umlautung in den deutschen Dialekten". Dialektologie. Ein Handbuch zur deutschen und allgemeinen Dialektforschung ed. by Werner Besch et al., II:1083-1088. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Malkiel, Yakov. 1968. "The Inflectional Paradigm as an Occasional Determinant of Sound Change". Directions for Historical Linguistics ed. by W.P. Lehmann & Yakov Malkiel, 21-64. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation & Change (= Language in Society, 19). Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Mohanan, K. P. 1986. The Theory of Lexical Phonology. Dordrecht: Reidel. Moser, Virgil. 1929. Frühneuhochdeutsche Grammatik. Vol. 1.1, (= Germanische Bibliothek, 1.1.7.1.1). Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Moulton, William G. 1961. "Zur Geschichte des deutschen Vokalsystems". Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache & Literatur 83.1-35, [Reprinted in Vorschläge für eine strukturaie Grammatik des Deutschen ed. by Hugo Steger, 480-517. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970]. Paul, Hermann. 1969. Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik. 20th ed. by Hugo Moser & Ingeborg Schröbler. Tübingen: Niemeyer. [1st ed., 1881.]
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Penzl, Herbert. 1949. "Umlaut and Secondary Umlaut in Old High German". Language 25.223-240. . 1969. Geschichtliche deutsche Lautlehre. Munich: Hueber. . 1983. "The Old High German i-Umlaut and the Models of Historical Sound-Change". Monatshefte 75.131-136. . 1975. Vom Urgermanischen zum Neuhochdeutschen. Berlin: Schmidt. Robinson, Orrin W. 1975. "Abstract Phonology and the History of Umlaut". Lingua 37.1-29. Rooth, Erik. 1940/41. "Zum z-Umlaut". Studia Neophilologica. 13.103-117. Russ, Charles V.J. 1977. "Die Entwicklung des Umlauts im Deutschen im Spiegel verschiedener linguistischer Theorien". Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (Tübingen) 99.213-240. Schirmunski, V[iktor]. M. 1962. Deutsche Mundartkunde. Berlin: Akademieverlag. Schweikle, Günther. 1964. "Akzent und Artikulation: Überlegungen zur ahd. Lautgeschichte". Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 86.197-265. Simmler, Franz. 1978. Review of Voyles (1976). Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (Tübingen) 100.263-271. Sonderegger, Stefan. 1979. Grundzüge deutscher Sprachgeschichte. Vol. 1. New York: de Gruyter. Phonologie des Deutschen. Szulc, Aleksander. 1987. Historische (Sprachstrukturen, 6). Tübingen: Niemeyer. Tops, Guy A. J. 1978. Review of Voyles (1976). Leuvense Bijdragen 67.191-194. Twaddell, W.F. 1938. "A Note on Old High German Umlaut". Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht 30.177-181. van der Schalie, Eric Jon. 1973. "High German /-Umlaut and Scribal Practice". Unpub. doctoral dissertation, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Voyles, Joseph B. 1976. The phonology of Old High German. (= Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, Beiheft 18.) Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. . 1977. "Old High German Umlaut". Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprach forschung 90.271-289. . 1991. "A History of OHG i-umlaut". Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 113.159-194. . 1992a. "On Old High German /-umlaut". On Germanic Linguistics : Issues and methods ed. by Irmengard Rauch, Gerald F. Carr & Robert L. Kyes, 365-377. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. . 1992b. Early Germanic Grammar. New York: Academic Press.
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Weinhold, Karl. 1883. Mittelhochdeutsche Ferdinand Schöningh.
Stative 17, 19-33 Strengthening [see 'Consonantal strength'] Structuralism 169-171 Structure Preserving Principle 10 SVO patterns 3 , 1 1 , 3 6 , 5 9 Syllabic resonants, long 105 Syllable Contact Law 105-108, 114 T. Tatian 86-87, 98 there 65-66 Topicalization 36-37, 44, 46-52, 54, 56-58,73,75 U. Umlaut Primary 140, 169-174, 180 Non-primary/secondary 170-180 Unaccusative 66, 69-77, 82 V. Variation 179 Verbal Phrase (VP) 1-2,4-7,9-12, 35-38,40-43,48,52,59,69,71, 73-77,81 Verschärfung 103-117 W. Weak verb system 171, 174
LANGUAGE INDEX
Arabic 11 Bulgarian 3, 12 Dutch 1,2,6-7, 11-12,39-42,55,59, 65-82, 115, 175 Franconian, Old Low 171, 175 French 2 German, Old High 85-89, 97-101, 121, 143, 170,172,177-179 Early New High 89, 101, 171, 179 Modern 1-12, 15-33, 35-60, 85, 90-97, 100-101, 174 Dialects Central 174 Bavarian (Viennese, Carinthian) 4, 5, 8,9 Alemannic (Montafon) 4 Germanic, Proto- & Early 103-116, 131, 133-134, 137-138, 140-142 Greek 5, 105, 109, 124, 126, 128, 130131, 139 Hungarian 12 Irish, Old 124-129,131-134 Latin 5, 85-89, 97-101, 105, 113, 116, 122-123, 125-126, 129-131, 139-141 Polish 150, 155-159, 169 Romance 14,22, 116 Russian 3 Sanskrit/Vedic 105,122-127,130-134 Slavic 1,3,4, 112, 149, 151-153, 157, 159 Yiddish, dialects 35-60,149-166
AUTHOR
INDEX
A. Abney,S.90 Abraham, W. 6, 7, 10,35,41 Aichinger, I. 45 Allard.F. 19-20,23,27-28,31 Anderson, S. 113, 116 Antonsen, E. 171-175 Archangeli,D. 111 B. Bach, E. 39 Bader,F. 126, 130 Bander,K. von 171, 174, 179 Bammesberger, A. 122 Barbier, I.71 Bauchhenss, G. 140 Bayer, J.7, 10-11 Bech,G. 16, 18,28 Bechtel.F. 103 Beekes,R.S.P. 104 Beeler.M. 125 Behaghel, O. 85-86, 88-89, 97, 99 Bennis, H. 68-70 Besten, . den 36, 66-68, 71, 76-77 Bhatt, . 90-91, 93-98, 100-101 Bierwisch, M. 39 Bin-Nun, J. 153-155, 158, 160-165 Booij,G. 150, 158-160 Boost, . 6 Bratkowsky, J. 149, 152-155, 158-159 Braune, W. 170, 176-177 Brünner, G. 19 Buccini, A. 171, 174-175, 180 Buck, CD. 143-144 Bugge, S.104
. Čapek, M. 170 Cardinaletti, Α. 2, 9, 47, 68-69, 73 Carr, . 86 Cathey, J. 104 Chambers, J. 152 Chomsky, Ν. 2, 7, 41, 47-53, 57, 72 Clements, G.N. 109, 111 Coates, J. 15-17,21,23,25,32 Coliinge, N. 103 Comrie, . 21 D. Davis, G. 170 de Vries, J. 139 de Saussure, F. 105 Di Paolo, M. 179 Diesing, M. 36-39, 40, 48, 50, 52-53, 55 Dimitrova-Vulchanova, M. 3 Drach, E. 6 E. Ebert, R. 88-89 Ehrman, M. 17 Erdmann, P. 170 Ernout,A. 130 F. Fullerton, L. 18-19, 21-22, 24, 32 G. Goldsmith, J. 175 Goossens, J. 175 Grewendorf, G. 47
190
INDEX
. Haegeman, L. 9, 52 Haftka, . 57 Hammerich, L. 104, 180 Harbert, W. 25,35,59,71,96 Harris, J. 176 Hayes, . 105 Heffner, R.-M. 178 Hellan, L. 3 Herzog, M. 150-153, 159 , . 36-39, 43, 48-49, 55, 57 Hirt, H. 104, 123, 138-139 Hoberg, U. 5 Hock, H. 113, 176 Hoekstra, J. 65 Hoekstra, T. 66-67 Höhle, T. 6,49 І. Iverson, G. 149, 170 J. Jacobs, N. 150, 152, 160, 162-165 Jaeggli,0.81 Jakobson, R. 149 Janda, R. 175-176 Jasanoff, J. 104-106 Joos, M. 17 . Kaisse, E. 104, 108-110, 116 Kalmanovitsh,Z. 150 Katz, D. 150, 162-163 Kayne, R. 2, 68,73 Keller, R. 170, 172 Kienle, R. Von 176-177 King, R. 151, 171, 173 Kiparsky,P. 111, 150, 159, 176 Kluge, F. 103 Koekkoek, . 170 Kögel, R. 104, 115 Kopczyński, Α. 155-156 Koster, J. 35 Kranzmayer, E. 174
Kratz, Η. 170-171, 179 Kratzer, Α. 17 Krause, W. 122 Kroch,Α. 43 Kuryłowicz, J. 105, 122 Kyes,R. 171, 175
L. Labov,W. 179 Laetz, H.G. 19,23-24,28,31-32 Leech, G. 17 Lehmann, W.P. 104-105, 112, 138, 142-144 Liberman,A. 170, 180 Lindeman, F. 105 Lockwood, W. 85,89 Louden, M. 152 Lowenstamm, J. 162 Lüdtke,H. 138 Lüssy, H. 174 Lyons, J. 15 M. Malkiel,Y. 176 Manandise,E. 175-176 Marchand, J. 104 Markey,T. 113 Maxwell, H. 18 Mayrhofer, M. 131 McCarthy, J. 109 Meid,W. 123, 131 Meillet,A. 129-130 Mikkola, J. 104 Milroy, J. 179 Mohanan, K. 176 Moser, V. 171, 174, 179 Moulton,W. 141, 170-172 Murray, R. 106 Ν. Niepokuj,M. 126 . Öhlschläger,G. 16-17
INDEX
Olsen, S.6 P. Palmer, F. 16-17, 19,22,28-32 Paul, H. 171, 174, 179 Penzl, H. 170-173 Perlmutter, D.68 Platzack,C.49-50 Poeppel,D.57 Pollack, J.-Y. 49, 51 Polome, E.C. 104, 113, 115, 137, 141 Prokosch, E. 105, 107, 112-113, 123124,138-139 Q. Quirk, R. 21-22, 24 R. Ramat, P. 138 Redder, Α. 19 Reed, . 104, 115 Rehbein, J. 6 Reichert, H. 137, 140 Reinwein, J. 32 Reuland, E. 7, 11 Rizzi, L. 2 , 4 8 , 5 8 , 8 1 Roberts, I. 68-69,73 Robinson, . 173, 175 Roe, H. 104 Rooth, E. 170 Rubach, J. 150, 155, 158-160 Russ, . 170-171 S . Safir, . 81 Sag, I. 43 Salmons, J. 103, 121, 138-139, 170 Santorini, B. 36-39, 48-49. 57 Schirmunski, V. 174 Schönfeld, M. 137, 139, 140 Schwartz, . 35-39, 45-46, 49, 56, 75 Schwarz, E. 137 Schweikle, G. 170 Seebold, E. 115
191
Shevelov, G. 156 Simmler, F. 174 Smith, H. 104 Sonderegger, S. 171, 173 Stankiewiecz, E. 153 Steiner, R. 179 Sternefeld, W. 47 Stieber, Z. 155-156 Streitberg, W. 123, 138 Suzuki, S. 104-107, 110, 112-115 Szemerényi, . 130-131 Szulc, Α. 170 T. Taraldsen,T. 11,50 te Velde, J. 39,43,59 Thiersch, . 35 Thurneysen,R. 124, 127, 132 Tops, G. 174 Toribio, A. 71,79-80 Trautmann, R. 103 Travis, L. 35, 40, 46-47, 68, 74, 100 Twaddell,F. 169-175, 178-180 V. Van der Schalie, E. 179 Vennemann,T. 106, 113, 138 Vikner, S. 35-37, 39, 45-46, 49, 56, 75 Voyles,J. 138-140, 169-180 W. Wackernagel, J. 10-12 Watkins, . 122, 124-125, 129, 132 Webelhuth, G . 3 9 , 4 3 , 5 9 Weinhold, . 171, 173-174, 178-179 Weinreich, M. 149-152 Weinreich, U. 149-154, 157, 159 Weisgerber, L. 137 Welke, . 15, 1 9 , 2 3 , 2 8 , 3 1 Wells, C.J. 137 Wexler, . 57 Wexler,P. 151 Williams, E.43
192
INDEX
Y. Yaeger,M. 179 Z. Zaenen, Α. 68 Zwart, J.-W. 35, 36, 41-42, 47-49, 54, 56,59,68,78
