Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Robert B. Howell, or Rob, studied at Stanford and Cornell, and then went on to Madison, Wisconsin in 1984, where he taught and researched various Germanic languages.The volume Investigating West Germanic Languages comprises an introduction by the editors, Jennifer Hendriks and B. Richard Page, and thirteen chapters dedicated to Rob Howell and his notable achievements in linguistics.The introduction gives a concise overview of Rob's publications, which cover topics in the historical linguistics of early Germanic, such as historical phonology, as well as analyses of early modern Dutch with a focus on the development of urban vernaculars within a migration-based koineization approach.The thirteen chapters are divided into four parts that recall the themes of Rob's career: 'Linguistic structure and change', 'Migration, contact, and change', 'Vernacular sources and change', and 'Historical sociolinguistics: Past, present, and future'.The first part of the volume, with the relatively general title 'Linguistic structure and change', comprises four chapters.B. Richard Page revisits homorganic lengthening, as in Old English climban > Middle English clīmb.He shows, on the basis of careful philological work on the Ormulum, a twelfth-century text from Lincolnshire, that this type of lengthening was regular and more common than often assumed, occurring in a range of phonetic environments.Page concludes that homorganic lengthening was far from a restricted phenomenon but a regular sound change instead.The next chapter, by John D. Sundquist, also comprises careful philological work.The author focusses on punctuation in a new fragment of the Heliand, discovered in Leipzig in 2006, in order to establish the relationship between this manuscript and other manuscripts of the same text.The analysis, which includes the distinction between metrical and syntactic breaks and a set of additional clues, leads the author to the conclusion that this new fragment is closest to an already known manuscript kept in Berlin (previously in Prague).Sarah M. B. Fagan discusses the semantics and the grammatical status of the German form -frei, as in alkoholfrei 'free from alcohol', arguing that it is an adjective (and that alkoholfrei is therefore a compound), and not a suffix or suffixoida category the author rejects altogether.The proposed analysis seems to imply that -frei is the head of the compound.In the
Author: Gijsbert Rutten
Institution: Leiden University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,712
OpenAlex ID: W7102400500