Volume 143, Issue 1

The present study investigates the multiple reflexes of historical  + [sk] clusters in Low German (Westphalian/Northern Low German) dialects. Original descriptions of over thirty varieties of those dialects spoken between the end of the 19 th century to the present day reveal that there are a number of realizations of [sk] (e. g. [sk], [sx], [sç], [ʃx], [ʃç], [s]), whose occurrence depends on both the position within a word (initial, medial, final) and geography (the location of the dialect within a broad region in northwest Germany). The synchronic patterns are argued to reflect a series of diachronic stages: The change from any one of those stages to the next is shown to involve either the emergence of a new sound change (rule addition) or the extension of a preexisting change to a new context (rule generalization). A secondary goal of the present contribution is to show how the treatment of Low German sheds light on the change from historical  + [sk] to [ʃ] in High German. In particular, it is argued – contrary to the position taken by the overwhelming majority of Germanicists – that the High German change involved the coalescence of two sounds into one without any intermediate stages.

The German dative case from genealogic and diachronic perspective. A language-change study about the third case. The dative case belongs to the so-called syncretistic cases, i. e., it encodes multiple functions inherited from the Indo-European cases locative, instrumental, ablative and dative. The paper aims to show the emergence of diverse case functions formally encoded by the dative case from a common base which is assumed to have the locative semantics. The decisive point was, according to the hypothesis, the development of the directional function towards the object or away from it. The addressee dative arose as a result of a specific reanalysis of movement semantics. The so-called dative of subject emerged from reanalysis of the subject-related experiencer function.