2. Summary of Contents.

Although papers focusing on diachronic issues in Germanic typology are in the minority, there are still three contributions addressing historical typological topics in German. In his essay, “What happened to English?,” John H. McWhorter goes to great lengths to show that inflectional morphology represents perhaps only the tip of the iceberg with regard to the historical Germanic grammatical properties that English has shed in the course of its development. The aim of his paper is to argue that the difference between English and its sister languages comprises a much larger array of features than merely loss of inflection or a “tendency toward analyticity,” and that the larger awareness that English has moved toward a “different typology” than its relatives is “traceable to a causal factor rather than being a random ‘uninteresting’ development” (p. 56). By incorporating various examples of grammatical constructions (such as inherent reflexives, external possessor marking, grammatical gender marking on determiners, derivational morphology paradigms, etc.) from most of the Germanic languages, McWhorter attempts to draw support for his hypothesis that English, in comparison with related languages, tends to be significantly less “overspecified” semantically and less “complexified” syntactically. This paper counters the much discussed claim that the grammar of modern English was solely shaped by external linguistic forces (for instance, Scandinavian and Romance) to become some sort of creolization of these external sources and Anglo-Saxon. McWhorter's presentation of the historical data challenges such a proposal; the morphological syncretism—as a consequence of functional changes—is already present in the source languages of Early Modern English documents.

The other two essays centering on diachronic issues consist of a response and its rejoinder. Bridget Drinka's essay, “Präteritumschwund: Evidence for areal diffusion,” makes the case that reduction and eventual elimination of the simple preterit in Southern German and several other western European languages was the result of the areal diffusion of innovative trends from Parisian French to contiguous languages and dialects. Such an analysis opposes Abraham and Conradie's (2001) proposal that the collapse of the simple preterit was primarily motivated by principles of parsing and discourse.

Drinka's Sprachbund-position is rebutted in detail by Werner Abraham in his rejoinder entitled “The European demise of the simple past and the emergence of the periphrastic perfect: Areal diffusion or natural, autonomous evolution under parsing facilitation?” Abraham supports the hypothesis that the diffusion of the analytic past forms in western European languages has a heterogeneous base.

Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson's essay, “Agree and agreement—evidence from Germanic,” surveys morphological agreement phenomena in the Germanic languages. In addition, Sigurðsson investigates Chomsky's (2000) notion of AGREE (Probe-Goal) in a recent instantiation of the minimalist program. Although descriptively adequate for some cases of morphological agreement, Sigurðsson finds that the Probe-Goal approach is not equipped to account for all morphological agreement paradigms in Germanic. The central claim of this paper is that Agree reduces to Merge.

Another contribution making a strong contribution to linguistic theory is Cedric Boeckx and Kleanthes Grohmann's “Left dislocation in Germanic.” Based largely on Grohmann's (2000, 2003) notion of ANTI-LOCALITY, Boeckx and Grohmann construct a unified movement-based approach to left dislocation structures that distinguishes them from hanging-topic left dislocation.

Jóhanna Barðdall's essay, “The semantics of the impersonal construction in Icelandic, German, and Faroese: Beyond thematic roles,” compares the semantics of verbal predicates selecting non-nominative (logical) subjects in Icelandic, German, and Faroese. After thorough investigation, Barðdall dismisses the view that case assignment is determined by thematic roles. Rather, the author maintains that the semantics of these predicates express “events” unrelated to internal experience. In the end, Barðdall argues that two levels of relations are necessary to properly account for the case marking of impersonal predicates in German: one involving the semantic relation between the (logical) subject and the predicate, and another profiling the emphatic relation between the speaker and his/her attitudes toward the content of the proposition.

Two other papers in this volume, Hartmut Czepluch's “Reflections on the form and function of passives in English and German” and Molly Diesing's “The upper functional domain in Yiddish,” also make references to the effects pragmatics can have on the functional and structural identity of natural clauses. Czepluch probes into the formal and functional differences between English and German with respect to passivization, and discusses the unequal distribution of passives in these two languages. Diesing's contribution examines the structure of the left periphery of natural clauses in Yiddish. Key data from verb-second constructions, wh-questions, and topicalization structures make a strong case for the claim that functional structures in natural clauses may vary cross-linguistically.

C. Jan Conradie's essay, “Verb sequence and placement: Afrikaans and Dutch compared,” addresses current changes underway in the placement of verbal elements in Afrikaans in comparison to Dutch. More specifically, Conradie seeks to explain the strong verb-final tendency found in Afrikaans in spite of grammatical changes over the last 350 years in the direction of a VO pattern similar to that of English.

In his essay, “Some remarks on the formal typology of pronouns in West Germanic,” László Molnárfi argues against the notion of structural deficiency in a formal typology of pronouns in West Germanic. After comparing the pronominal systems of Afrikaans and Dutch, he argues that the notion of structural deficiency in pronominals is based on discourse-functionality rather than Case. Furthermore, Molnárfi purports that deficient pronouns do not constitute a universal linguistic category.

Rolf Thieroff's essay, “The subjunctive mood in German and in the Germanic languages,” discusses the subjunctive mood, more specifically subjunctive 1, which is known for its function of reporting indirect discourse and optative mood meaning. Thieroff argues that with the exception of Icelandic, the subjunctive 1 is well on its way to being abolished in all Germanic languages. As a productive category, the subjunctive 2 also remains only in Icelandic. In all other Germanic languages, the subjective 2 tends to be replaced by the indicative, with the preterit tense remaining as it is.

3. Critical Analysis.

It is well established by this collection of essays that even in a family of closely related languages such as Germanic a great deal of structural and functional variation exists. An overall strength of this volume is the thoroughness with which each topic is treated and discussed. As far as scope is concerned, the only criticism I have to offer is the lack of mention of syntax-pragmatic interface conditions. Only three articles—Barðdall, Czelpuch, and Diesing—make explicit references to pragmatics. The topics of individual chapters range from the problems that have plagued linguistics for decades and those, like Thieroff's essay on the subjunctive, that have not yet received much attention in the literature. The diversity of the articles is an asset to this volume, but at the same time much more work needs to be done. Perhaps, this collection can best be understood as a “call to arms” for other scholars—working in functional as well as theoretical linguistics—to consider the rich diversity of natural phenomena to be found in the Germanic family. For example, Diesing's article brings to light many of the subtle, yet important differences in the structure of the left-periphery of Yiddish. What would be ideal is a continuation of this intra-Germanic research on the structure of the extended CP-layer (see, for example, Putnam 2006, chapter 4).

Concerning theoretical linguistics, one particular article, namely, Sigurðsson's “Agree and agreement—evidence from Germanic,” presents some very innovative and interesting ideas that are worthy of further pursuit on a larger scale. In particular, Sigurðsson's notion of replacing the long-held traditional Chomskian phrase structure rules with the notion of a Nucleus (that is, Head) and Edge (Specifier) configuration has the potential of bringing phrase structure closer to recent developments in clausal structure in terms of Chomsky 2006, which interprets the edge of strong phases (v*P and CP) as purely phonological domains. If symmetry is to exist (or to be maintained) between local phrase structures and larger ontological units such as phases, Sigurðsson's approach needs to be considered in a larger context.

4. Final Thoughts.

This collection of papers does an excellent job of exposing the rich variation of common functional and structural features in the Germanic family and how they are realized in the individual dialects, both diachronically and synchronically. The overall high quality of scholarship and thorough research of the individual essays makes this volume a valuable resource for linguists who research similar and/or related topics in Germanic linguistics.