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Human rights language is abstract and ahistorical because advocates intend human rights to be valid at all times and places. Yet the abstract universality of human rights discourse is a problem for historians, who seek to understand language in a particular time and place. Lora Wildenthal explores the tension between the universal and the historically specific by examining the language of human rights in West Germany between World War II and unification. In the aftermath of Nazism, genocide, and Allied occupation, and amid Cold War and national division, West Germans were especially obliged to confront issues of rights and international law.The Language of Human Rights in West Germanytraces the four most important purposes for which West Germans invoked human rights after World War II. Some human rights organizations and advocates sought to critically examine the Nazi past as a form of basic rights education. Others developed arguments for the rights of Germans-especially expellees-who were victims of the Allies. At the same time, human rights were construed in opposition to communism, especially with regard to East Germany. In the 1970s, several movements emerged to mobilize human rights on behalf of foreigners, both far away and inside West Germany. Wildenthal demonstrates that the language of human rights advocates, no matter how international its focus, can be understood more fully when situated in its domestic political context.

Complementizer agreement in minority and nonstandard West Germanic languages is well-known and frequently studied, but there is little agreement on its analysis. In this paper, I add to this debate by presenting novel and underdiscussed data from Frisian and Limburgian on intervention effects: what happens to complementizer agreement when the complementizer and the subject are separated by an intervening element. In Frisian, intervention leads to ungrammaticality, and in Limburgian, it leads to the realization of complementizer agreement between the intervener and the subject. These effects cannot be accounted for by existing Agree and PF analyses of complementizer agreement. Instead, I argue that the complementizer agreement morpheme is a clitic. Adopting the approach to clitic doubling of van Craenenbroeck and van Koppen (2008), I develop an analysis of complementizer agreement as clitic doubling. The intervention effects in Frisian and Limburgian follow from an interplay of the structural size of the clitic and restrictions on movement. Specifically, the ungrammaticality of intervention in Frisian is the result of competition between the clitic and the intervener for the same structural position, and the subject-internal realization of complementizer agreement in Limburgian is the result of movement of the clitic below the intervener.

This volume features five studies on newly emerging aspectual expressions in West Germanic languages.

In this paper, we apply an information-theoretic method proposed by Ryabko and Savina (therefore called the RS-method), based on the use of data compression, to recognize the individual author’s style of a writer across four languages from different language groups and families. In this paper, the presented method was used to study fiction texts in Russian (East Slavic group of languages of the Indo-European language family), Amharic (South Ethiosemitic group of the Semitic language family), Chinese (Sinitic group of the Sino-Tibetan language family) and English (West Germanic language group of the Indo-European language family). It was found that the amount of data necessary for recognizing an author’s style is almost the same for all four languages, i.e., the amount of data is invariant across different language groups. The results obtained are of interest to computer science, literary studies, linguistics and, in particular, computational linguistics.

A generalization that has emerged in the literature on verb clusters in West Germanic languages is that so-called 2-1-3 orders (where verb n selects verb n +1) are absent with core clustering verbs. In this paper we show that Dutch permits 2-1-3 order as an optional variant of the more widely acknowledged 1-2-3 order. The 2-1-3 order is subject to a range of restrictions involving the lexical items in the cluster, the morphological form of these items, whether other elements intervene, and where focus is placed. We argue that these restrictions are best understood if the 2-1-3 order is derived from an underlying 1-2-3 cluster through a post-syntactic inversion rule. This rule shares various properties with other inversion rules but cannot be reduced entirely to a familiar rule type.

We investigated how Central Swedish-speaking four to eleven-year-old children acquire the prosodic marking of narrow focus, compared to adult controls. Three measurements were analysed: placement of the prominence-marking high tone (prominence H), pitch range effects of the prominence H, and word duration. Subject-verb-object sentences were elicited in sentence-medial and sentence-final focus conditions via a semi-spontaneous elicitation task. The children largely performed in an adult-like manner already at four to five: they predominantly added prominence H to focal words and avoided this tone post-focally in both sentence-medial and sentence-final position. The placement or avoidance of prominence H had largely the same effects on pitch range for children and adults. Finally, the four to eight-year-olds also increased the duration of the focal word, similar to adults. Hence, Central Swedish-speaking children master the use of prosody for focus marking at an earlier age, compared to children acquiring a West Germanic language.

It is disputed whether Old Frisian should be grouped with the ‘Old’ Germanic languages or the ‘Middle’ Germanic ones. However, a divide in linguistic conservativity exists between earlier and later manuscripts, which also correlates with a conspicuous dialectal variation between East and West. One aspect related to this problem of periodisation that has not yet been studied is the system of adverbs of degree, even though differences have been observed between the Old and Middle West Germanic languages in this respect. Using data from two corpora, the present study documents the Old Frisian adverbial system. A link is found with Old English and Old Saxon through the presence of swīthe (‘strongly’), but the Old West Frisian system overall is comparable to Middle Dutch and Middle Low German, making it Middle. The Old East Frisian situation, however, remains less clear. An implication of this study is that adverbs of degree and their usage patterns are highly susceptible to language contact.

The Zuiderzee area in the Netherlands is a former inlet sea at the heart of the crossroads of three major regional languages. While these regional languages are largely distinct, previous work by the dialectologist Kloeke indicated similarities due to contact over water, notably the realisation of the Proto-West Germanic vowels *ā and *a. Using various dialectometric methods, we analysed the distribution of these vowels for 121 localities in this region. Specifically, we tried to determine the dialectal landscape more thoroughly, find instances that illustrate cultural diffusion and migration, and evaluate the overall relationship between distance over water and vowel variations. Using a Bayesian population genetic method, admixture, we distinguished nine linguistically explainable clusters, demonstrating its potential. Moreover, we found evidence of cultural diffusion conforming to the overall presence of three different regional languages. Additionally, we employed the so-called matrix method in linear-mixed effects regression to demonstrate that the geographic distance helped to explain the geographic patterns of vowel variation. The distance over water was as effective a measure as the distance over land. We expect this to be common in areas with a history of intensive and sustained shipping traffic.

A notoriously contested subarea of phonological typology is word-prosodic typology, which governs suprasegmental structure (such as tone, syllable structure and stress) at the word level. Within word-prosodic typology, it is widely recognized that some languages have so-called stress systems while others have lexical-tone systems. Other languages appear to have intermediate systems, with properties of both stress and lexically contrastive tone. Certain types of such intermediate systems are at the core of ongoing theoretical debates on the nature of word- prosodic systems, viz. language varieties with contrasts between two word tones that are restricted to the main-stressed syllables of a word, a phenomenon that is often descriptively referred to as tonal accent. In this paper, we aim to show that exploring tone-accent systems in detail has the potential to significantly contribute to word-prosodic typology, specifically concerning the foot as a tool for the analysis of syllable-internal prosodic contrasts. The phonology of tonal accent in Franconian (a variety of West Germanic spoken in parts of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) will be the main piece of evidence supporting our claims, with a focus on predictable interactions between segmental structure and accentuation. A central implication of our analysis is that tonal contrasts within syllables can sometimes derive from two types of feet being active in the same prosodic system. We support the Franconian evidence with analogous tone-segment interactions in Estonian and discuss the relevance of our claims in the broader context of word-prosodic typology.

Though rarely compared, Beowulf and Ruodlieb are two medieval epics composed by speakers of West Germanic languages that exhibit a shared sequence of folktale motifs. In both works, a young man considered unpromising in his youth seeks adventure abroad, serves a magnanimous foreign king well, and returns to his homeland with wealth and wisdom in his possession. In Ruodlieb, the king’s wisdom is imparted to the hero in the form of a speech of counsels with unmistakable folkloric analogues. In Beowulf, it is argued, the king delivers a speech that derives from the same folkloric traditions but reflects the poet’s radical alteration of his source materials. In the Beowulf poet’s hands, the motif of the sapiential parting gift is shorn of its folkloric and demotic qualities and imbued with epic and aristocratic qualities instead.