Volume 60, Issue 3

German and other languages of Europe have supercomposed tenses which are the result of a twofold application of the strategy that forms perfects. Based on their low frequency in the written registers, these constructions are considered marginal. In spoken German double perfects often compete with the pluperfect. But I argue that their use in literary German is motivated, so that double perfect constructions are indeed members of the tense inventory. Elsewhere in Europe, we find similar con-structions associated with rather specific (and similar) meanings, both where synthetic past tenses are on the decline and where they are preserved.

This paper investigates different means of expressing natural gender in personal terms, namely derivational suffixes, different inflectional classes, and the inflection of pronouns, adjectives, and determiners for grammatical gender in the history of Ger-man, English, and Swedish. These three languages were chosen as representatives of different routes of typological development among the Germanic languages. The major typological division, which can only in part be described in the classical terms of syntheticity vs. analyticity, separates English and Swedish on the one hand from German on the other. The differences in the expression of natural gender are related to these typological differences.

This paper is meant to demonstrate that agreement phenomena are by no means re-stricted to morpho-syntactic relations which connect separate words of an utterance to one another. It is shown that similar patterns can be observed also word-internally i.e. in a morphologically complex word, there are at least two slots in which fillers occur that encode the same or partially identical sets of grammatical categories. The paper adduces evidence from a variety of languages of different parts of the world whose morphological systems allow for word-internal agreement. Since the phenomenon is attested more often than expected, it deserves an in-depth treatment for which this contribution is paving the way.