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4 Germanic Languages I 4 GERMANIC LANGUAGES I. GERMAN STUDIES Language and LinguistiCS Alan Scott, University of Nottingham and Marc Pierce, University of Texas at Austin 1. General A major work which appeared towards the end of the review year is Ulrich Ammon, Die Stellung der deutschen Sprache in der Welt, Berlin, de Gruyter, xviii + 1296 pp. Assessing the global position of the German language and its recent history, A. views the position of German in the context of a global constellation of competing languages, examining unique features and congruities in such areas as business, science, diplomacy, linguistics, word art, the media, and foreign language instruction. The perennial debate as to whether the German language is in decline is the subject of Sprachverfall. Dynamik-Wandel-Variation, ed. Albrecht Plewnia and Andreas Witt, Berlin, de Gruyter, viii + 371 pp., which contains contributions from many prominent scholars, both from Germany and elsewhere. The volume has two principal foci, namely providing a comprehensive analysis of the discourse on perceived language decline, and offering a sociolinguistic perspective on the processes underlying the public debate on the topic. Chapters include Wini Davies and Nils Langer, ‘Die Sprachnormfrage im Deutschunterricht: das Dilemma der Lehrenden’ (299–321) and Martin Durrell, ‘Mit der Sprache ging es immer schon bergab Dynamik, Wandel und Variation aus sprachhistorischer Perspektive’ (11–31). A new and insightful contribution to another long-standing debate surrounding the German language, namely the extent to which Martin Luther can be considered to be the Schöpfer of the New High German written language, is made by Werner Besch, Luther und die deutsche Sprache. 500 Jahre deutsche Sprachgeschichte im Lichte der neueren Forschung, Berlin, Schmidt, 181 pp. Another excellent work on Luther is Friedhelm Debus, ‘Über Martin Luthers Bedeutung in sprachlicher und literarischer Perspektive’, Sprachwissenschaft, 39:425–43. Both Besch and Debus conclude that, despite Luther’s linguistic creativity, his decisive literary achievements, and his historical importance, that a conception of him as the Schöpfer of the New High German written language would not be justified. Albrecht Greule, Deutsches Gewässernamenbuch: Etymologie der Gewässernamen und der zugehörigen Gebiets-, Siedlungs- und Flurnamen, Berlin, de Gruyter, 800 pp., is an important publication in which the German names of lakes, rivers and associated place names are analysed from a linguistic perspective and presented comprehensively and with careful and copious etymological information. A further study of topographical names is Jacqueline Reber, Strukturen und Muster in der Namenwelt: Quantitative und qualitative Untersuchungen zum Toponymenbestand der beiden Solothurner Amteien Dorneck-Thierstein und Oltgen-Gösgen, Tübingen, Francke, 294 pp., which links structures and patterns in names to the corresponding topographical and historical events. An intriguing study of family names is Fernande Krier, 338 German Studies ‘Flektierte Familiennamen im Luxemburgischen’, Dialectologia et Geolinguistica, 22:5–15, which shows that family names are inflected considerably more in Luxemburgish than in standard German. Several introductions to Germanic linguistics also appeared: Albert Busch and Oliver Stenschke, Germanistische Linguistik: Eine Einführung, 3rd edn, Tübingen, Narr, 271 pp; Elke Hentschel and Theo Harden, Einführung in die germanistische Linguistik, Frankfurt, Lang, 238 pp; and Katrin Lindner, Einführung in die germanistische Linguistik, Munich, Beck, 320 pp. 2. Phonetics and Phonology Tracy Alan Hall continues his considerable work in German phonology with ‘The Phonology of Westphalian German Glides’, JGL, 26:323–60, in which he argues that onglides in this dialect are located in syllable nuclei, not syllable onsets, and are underlyingly short vowels which become glides via syllabification; and with ‘Alveopalatalization in Central German as Markedness Reduction’, TPS, 112:143–66, which focuses on the merger of the voiceless palatal and postalveolar fricatives into voiceless alveolopalatal fricatives in some Central German varieties. Hall links this change to a reduction of segmental markedness. Frank Zimmerer, Mathias Scharinger, and Henning Reetz, ‘Phonological and Morphological Constraints on German /t/-Deletions’, JPh, 45:64–75, note that /t/-deletion can be morphologically constrained in English, and explore this possibility for German, using a corpus constructed of novel verb forms. They conclude that /t/-deletion in German may be conditioned by both phonological and morphological factors, and that phonology can sometimes override morphology. Ulrike Domahs, Ingo Plag, and Rebecca Carroll, ‘Word Stress Assignment in German, English, and Dutch: Quantity-sensitivity and Extrametricality Revisited’, JCGL, 17:59–96, contend that, although the patterns of word stress in these three languages are all very similar, and that stress assignment in these three languages is connected to syllable weight, these connections differ slightly in all three languages. The German syllable also plays a role in John R. Rennison, ‘On Vowel Harmony and Vowel Reduction. Some Observations on Canonical Shapes of Disyllabic Nouns in Yukuben, Mòoré and German’, pp. 37–56 of The Form of Structure, the Structure of Form: Essays in Honor of Jean Lowenstamm, ed. Sabrina Bendjaballah et al, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 384 pp. A number of papers address prosody and first or second language acquisition, in both the L2 and the L1. Mary Grantham O’Brien, Carrie Jackson, and Christine E. Gardner, ‘Cross- Linguistic Differences in Prosodic Cues to Syntactic Disambiguation in German and English’, Applied Psycholinguistics, 35: 27–70, argue that English-German and German-English L2 learners used prosody for disambiguation in both English and German, albeit without using all of the cues to disambiguation available to them from their L1. Ineke Mennen, Felix Schaeffler, and Catherine Dickie, ‘Second Language Acquisition of Pitch Range in German Learners of English’, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 36:303–29, contend that female German L2 learners of English generally produce acceptable pitch range values, and that deviations from such values were position-sensitive. Laura E. de Ruiter, ‘How German Children use Intonation to Signal Information Status in Narrative Discourse’, JCL, 41:1015–61, looks at intonation in five- and seven- year-olds whose L1 is German, and argues that intonation in their German closely resembles intonation in adult varieties of German in some respects, but differs when used to structure narration. Another study of German intonation is Caterina Petrone and Oliver Niebuhr, ‘On the Intonation of German Intonation Questions: The Role of the Prenuclear Region’, LSp, 57:108–46. German phonetics is also the subject of works including T. B. Roettger et al., ‘Assessing .
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