Linguistische Berichte Heft 182

Within PPs, German has two pronominalization strategies: regular NP pronominalization (für ihn, ,for him') and R-pronoun insertion (da-für, ,for it'). The goal of this paper is to give a new account of the conditions under which R-pronoun insertion is obligatory, optional, and impossible. The main idea is that R-pronoun insertion is a repair (last resort) strategy that arises in order to solve what I call the „Wackemagel-Ross dilemma": If PP-intemal unstressed NP pronouns must move to the Wackemagel position but cannot do so because of a PP barrier, a language may resort to a repair form da that satisfies both constraints vacuously, by violating a selection requirement. Since the analysis depends on violable and ranked constraints, it is developed within optimality theory. Evidence from synchronic (Northern German varieties) and diachronic (German, English) variation is shown to corroborate the approach.

This paper deals with forensic linguistic anonymous authorship analysis (AAA) administered in an authentic extortion case in Gennany. Its focus is on some empirical methodological generalizations and the extreme amount of care necessary in stating such generalizations.

The German and Swedish systems of person denominations display fundamental differences. While in Swedish - similar to English - a systematic neutralization of sex has taken place (e.g. Swed. lärare 'male and female teacher'), German has moved in the opposite direction by applying sex-specifying splittings (der/die Lehrer/in). In its attempt at sex neutralization, Swedish has not only rigorously abolished the word formation suffixes of female person denominations, - ska and inna, respectively, but also neutralized both male denominations with-man and female denominations with -ska: köpman 'male and female merchant' - sjuksköterska 'female and male nurse'. The latter is a rather seldom phenomenon from a crosslinguistic perspective. Unlike English, Swedish still preserves a two-class gender system. German has even retained a three-class gender system. In this article, the synchronic and diachronic differences between Swedish and German person denominations are analyzed. In order to explain these, both language-intemal reasons (e.g. the complex grammatical gender, sex, and social gender) and language-extemal reasons (e.g. the different social and political conditions) are examined.

In the present paper, we argue that colloquial German has a fully grammaticalized article which simultaneously expresses definite type reference and indefinite token reference. Apart from semantically justifying the article son as appropriate in clearly delineated contexts, we also provide evidence for its entirely regular status based on facts of cross-paradigmatic coherence, information structural effects, and co-occurence restrictions with other articles. A survey of translational equivalents in other languages uncovers similar phenomena and supports the general claim.