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With concepts like the consumer revolution or the industrious revolution, the changing behaviour of private households in the 18th and early 19th centuries has become of great interest. The article suggests a new way to observe intentions and decisions, by utilizing a database of 850,000 classified ads from the Basel Avisblatt over a span of 116 years. Changes in food prices constantly altered the discretionary income of households, which forced budget-related decisions. By cross-correlating indicators of discretionary income with the changing number of different types of ads, patterns of utilizing the Avisblatt can be identified, and strategies to stabilize discretionary income deduced.

Linguistic variation is a feature that characterizes every natural language. In this paper, I focus on linguistic variation and its importance and its role in language change (LC). To determine its importance and role, one must distinguish between emergence and diffusion of variants because both dimensions provide different contributions to LC. The emergence and further development of new variants is a process that often (though not always) displays the form of a cycle, whereas the diffusion within a speech community often follows an S-curve form. Both dimensions are important for LC, but they relate to very different aspects. In this paper, I will treat variation with respect to its role in LC. Variation, in general, is a crucial factor in LC in two respects: First, it is the result of LC and second, it can trigger LC.

This paper offers a description and analysis of the clausal doubling construction, and contrasts it with predicate doubling based on their formal and verum-related properties. The study shows that the behavior of both patterns can be captured by extending the analysis of predicate doubling by Muñoz Pérez and Verdecchia (2022. Predicate doubling in Spanish: On how discourse may mimic syntactic movement. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 40(4). 1159–1200). Basically, both doubling constructions have the same structure, with a contrastive topic in the left periphery; they differ, however, in the nature of the constituents carrying this function. The proposal derives from this single factor all formal and interpretative differences between the constructions. Moreover, the paper provides evidence to distinguish these phenomena from other verum-marking strategies in Spanish.

The semantics of zero-derivation/conversion has attracted renewed interest both as a subject of description and as a means towards refined descriptions of the process. This paper takes the latter stance and compares which semantic categories occur in zero-derivation/conversion and in overt affixation in two languages with a different morphological model: English and Spanish. For attestation and distribution of the semantic categories, the paper relies on a stratified sample of denominal verbs collected from two comparable corpora: the British National Corpus and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual. The sample consists in sets of ca. 50 denominal verb-forming resources, one per affixation process, namely affixation by -ate, -(i)fy, -ize/-ise, -en, en- in English, a-…-ar, en-…-ar, -ear, -ecer, -(i)ficar, -izar in Spanish, and zero-derivation/conversion in both languages. The results are contrasted within and across affixes/processes, within each language and across the two languages for the adequacy of a description as zero-derivation or as conversion. Statistical analysis shows that the process/affixes form a cline with overlaps and closer associations between specific affixes/processes and semantic categories, but no clear divide between zero-derivation/conversion and the rest of processes as far as the semantic categories are concerned.

This paper investigates the sources of information and their quality as accessible to the government of the Federal Republic of Germany when trying to assess the situation of company funded pensions between 1949 and 1985 for the Company Pension Act of 1974. By taking a closer look at multiple government surveys as well as official statistics, the paper shows that the government only had very little access to verifiable and detailed information on the matter and relied largely on estimates. There were no coherent sources of information, and none were set up after the Act came into effect. The trend of a growing distribution and extent of corporate retirement plans from the late 1940s to the 1980s as seen in the government surveys is congruent with our findings. Furthermore, the Company Pension Act strengthened this already growing trend.

New digital methods are currently enhancing the historian’s toolbox fundamentally. This thematic issue is a collection of papers discussing case studies in the fields of digitization, optical character recognition, distant reading, text mining, network analysis, and historical geographical information systems. The papers discuss opportunities and limitations in the application of digital methods in historical studies and point out fields of future applications.

Current research on the long-term influence of ordoliberal and neoliberal ideas is hampered by an overly static and generalised picture of the Freiburg School. To address this gap, the paper analyses all articles published in ORDO, the flagship journal of the Freiburg School, between 1948 and 2014. This makes it possible to distinguish three phases of post-war ordoliberalism, to identify personal continuities and breaks, and to summarise thematic, methodological, and conceptual developments. Since the analysis utilises text mining methods, such as keyword identification and Topic Modeling, and validates the results of distant reading with close reading and external data, the paper also highlights some general methodological insights for using Digital Humanities in the historical sciences.

This paper will show that agreement cannot be considered a purely narrow-syntactic phenomenon, i.e., a phenomenon which cannot be given a functional-semantic explanation. It will show that person-number-gender (PNG-)affixes on verbs and adjectives are semantically interpretable even in languages such as English and Swedish, where they at first sight seem to be completely redundant. Several instances of so-called semantic agreement will reveal that these PNG-affixes convey important meanings not overtly marked by their co-referential DPs. In some cases, this even holds for the opposite case, i.e., that the PNG-affixes displaying grammatical agreement with their co-referential DPs also contribute with meanings not conveyed by the latter. Attempts to explain away semantic agreement by assuming there to be phonologically null determiners that give the DPs the same PNG-values as the agreement affixes will be refuted by data that show that the nouns often cannot be modified by such elements. Instead of being uninterpretable features that must be deleted before the derivation is sent to the semantic component, it will be shown that PNG-affixes on verbs and adjectives function like pronominal affixes, i.e., that they are arguments of the verbs and adjectives. They can either be anaphoric, in which case they can display semantic agreement, agreeing with the lexical semantics of the referent rather than with the PNG-values of the co-referential DP, or cataphoric, in which case they behave like formal-subject pronouns, signifying the PNG-value of the following logical DP subject.

This paper combines experimental, theoretical and quantitative approaches to syntactic microvariation. The empirical goal is to clarify the situation with respect to wh-doubling (also: wh-copying) in varieties of German and Dutch. With a large-scale survey in the German and Dutch language areas we sought to establish which speakers allow wh-doubling, which speakers allow right-complexity, i.e., configurations in which the lower copy of the wh-dependency is more complex that the higher one, and which speakers allow left-complexity, i.e., the reverse, with a more complex higher copy. We also wanted to know whether there are associations between these properties, to identify groups of speakers and dialects. We found three types of grammars: (i) a grammar that allows both wh-doubling and right- and left-complexity, (ii) a grammar that allows wh-doubling and has a strong preference for right-complexity over left-complexity, and (iii) a grammar that does not allow any wh-doubling configuration. This shows that there is a clear limit to variation in this domain. Grammars with a preference for left-complexity do not exist. We then point out the consequences of these findings for the copy theory of movement, and for analyses that enrich this theory with the option of partial deletion.

This paper aims to explain recent empirical findings on subjunctive II formation in the Bavarian dialects of Austria from both functional and formal perspectives. For this purpose, the explanatory power of the functional principles of natural morphology (NM) is compared with the formal framework of constructional morphology (CxM). It is argued that the two approaches complement each other. Thus, it is shown that the key concepts of NM (constructional iconicity, uniformity and transparency) can easily be adapted in terms of CxM. These adjustments are needed to explain the ongoing changes in subjunctive II formation in the Bavarian dialects of Austria. This is due to the well-documented shift towards the use of periphrastic constructions (with the täte- and würde-auxiliary) that are located at the interface between morphology and syntax.

By examining the horizontal and vertical, international knowledge and technology transfer of specific industrial water-treatment-technologies, this paper reflects on their interaction with beer production. Against the background of the discrepancy between the importance of narratives on naturalness and originality in relation to brewing water and the industrial mass production in its historicity, an insight into a largely invisible but nevertheless fundamentally important technology will be given.

The paper outlines the basics of data collection, analysis and visualization under the frame-based approach to lexical typology and illustrates its methodology using the data of cross-linguistic research on verbs of falling. The framework reveals several challenges to semantic map modelling that usually escape researchers’ attention. These are: (1) principles of establishing lexical comparative concepts; (2) the effective ways of visualization for the opposition between direct and figurative meanings of lexical items; (3) the problem of the borderlines between semantic fields, which seem to be very subtle. These problems are discussed in detail in the paper, as well as possible theoretical decisions and semantic modelling techniques that could overcome these bottlenecks.

Recent research in economic history has found that mortgage debt in relation to GDP has taken off in the historical long run (“great mortgaging”), as growing banking assets have been redirected into mortgage credit. This paper maps the parallel long-run investment history of private (life) insurance as the much overlooked second pillar of the financial system. Drawing on in-depth studies of the US and Germany, it finds that a “great de-mortgaging” took place in insurers’ portfolios, with mortgages falling from up to 90 percent in the 19th century to below 5 percent today in favor of fixed-income securities. A parallel shift to secondary mortgage bonds has hardly offset this decline, while direct real estate remained largely a residual investment class. Banks’ great mortgaging is thus partly an institutional substitution effect. The paper sees insurers’ asset shift itself as mainly driven by long-run changes in capital demand and competition with banks and pension funds. It extends these findings to other long-term institutional investors and other OECD countries in the historical long run.

Verum focus has long been analysed as part of information structure, being accounted for within a theory of focus as generation of alternatives on a polarity value. Recently, however, this view has been challenged, with some authors arguing for a separation between verum and focus. The empirical debate focuses on two types of strategies: either verum is marked identically to focus (e.g., pitch accent in German, English) or through a dedicated strategy (e.g., dedicated markers in Gitksan, Bura, South Marghi). On the basis of the second type, it has been argued that the link between focus and verum is only superficial, with verum instead arising from a lexical operator VERUM. In this paper, we provide evidence in support of the traditional link between truth marking and focus, using original field data on the morphosyntactic expression of information structure in 11 Bantu (Niger-Congo) languages. By working from function to form, we show that these languages use a variety of grammatical strategies for truth expression, strategies that are used elsewhere in the information structural system for backgrounding. In this way, verum is not directly marked by focal accent but marked indirectly via backgrounding, which we formulate as the Backgrounding and Underspecification Thesis (BUT). On the basis of this Bantu evidence, we add a third type of strategy to the typology, where verum is marked indirectly via backgrounding. We use this updated typology to argue in favour of maintaining a conceptual link between verum, polarity focus, and predicated-centred focus more broadly.

Two types of analyses of verum can be distinguished: either it is decomposed into focus and a focused verum element or it is a single, non-decomposable specialized lexical element which operates on discourse conditions. This paper argues for the former by investigating adverbs like tatsächlich, echt, wirklich in German that overtly realize a truth related predicate by illustrating the parallel between verb-verum and these adverbs for which their lexical contribution and the contribution of focus can be distinguished. It is shown, however, that this predicate does not encode polarity but factuality, which is analyzed in terms of a modal object. The syntactic location is determined to be between polarity and speaker-oriented categories. Other effects regarding commitment and evidentiality come as a by-product of highlighting factuality.

In this paper we investigate how verum is realized in Xhosa and Zulu, two Southern Bantu languages belonging to the Nguni group. The data for our study were collected through interviews with native speakers who were prompted to produce sentences in discourse contexts that typically license utterances with verum. We found that the main grammatical strategy for the expression of verum in Xhosa and Zulu involves the removal of phrasal constituents from the focus domain (the VP). This leaves the verb as the sole remaining focus host, and allows auxiliary features of the verb, such as polarity, to be marked as focus. Consequently, we analyse verum in Xhosa and Zulu as polarity focus, which is expressed indirectly, via the backgrounding of potentially focusable phrasal material. We also examined the prosodic properties of verum utterances in Xhosa. Based on findings from previous studies on Nguni intonation, we expected to observe lengthening of the penultimate vowels of phrase-final verbs and utterance-final words in our data. However, contrary to expectation, we did not find evidence of penultimate vowel lengthening in Xhosa sentences with verum, a (preliminary) result which suggests that the expression of verum may have an effect on prosody in Nguni languages.

For most Quechuan languages, the discourse enclitic =mi has been described as a (contrastive) focus marker and/or as a marker of direct evidentiality. In this paper, I argue that these claims do not seem to apply to Conchucos Quechua (Ancash, Peru). To challenge the association between =mi and focus, I offer a quantitative analysis that strongly suggests that this connection is not categorical in nature. To contest the association between =mi and direct evidentiality, I offer a qualitative analysis based on a question-under-discussion (QUD) model of discourse structure, using naturalistic data. I will argue that this enclitic is better characterised as an assertion operator, whose function is to bring closure to the current QUD (be it explicit or implicit). In this sense, the use of =mi is reminiscent of what has been called verum in the literature, and I thus explore how this characterisation fits within this discussion.

Verum has been attested in declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives. In this paper, we show that whether-exclamatives, a subtype of exclamatives, also qualify as a verum strategy, thus showing that the phenomenon ranges across all sentence moods. Motivation stems from the discourse properties of our data and the pragmatic contrast between whether-exclamatives and plain assertions. Furthermore, we argue that whether-exclamatives are illocutionarily defined as a coordination of assertion and excl, the illocutionary force of exclamatives. Assembling the formal tools for exclamatives, verum, and speech act coordination, we provide an analysis of verum in this complex hybrid speech act.

Over two decades from 1949 until the resumption of the diplomatic relations between these two countries in 1972, West German companies never gave up on the Chinese market despite substantial difficulties caused by Cold War frictions. This paper exams the payment transactions and terms of credits for financing industrial projects between the PRC and West German companies.

In German, the social gender of the human referent matches the grammatical gender of the noun and pronoun in many cases. Nevertheless, those categories can also differ from each other. The indefinite pronoun jemand ‘someone’ prototypically exhibits masculine grammatical gender irrespective of its concrete referents. This paper addresses a special phenomenon that can occur with jemand, namely, the conceptual agreement of relative pronouns, i.e., the occurrence of feminine target forms that refer to the masculine indefinite pronoun jemand (Sie ist jemand, die gerne Kaffee trinkt ‘She is someonem, whof likes to drink coffee’). Based on two empirical analyses that examine the phenomenon from different methodological perspectives, this article will demonstrate that the marked phenomenon is comparatively rare, but does occur nevertheless. The phenomenon cannot be fully explained by the loss of the genericity of indefinite pronouns. In fact, either semantic or pragmatic explanations can be applied. This phenomenon can especially be observed in specific types of contexts (or constructions) that lack the prototypical feature of indefinite pronouns: indefinite reference. Jemand increasingly seems to be emerging in non-prototypical contexts for indefinite pronouns, which to some extent override the morphosyntactic features of the (relevant) part of speech. This occurrence is a semantic explanation for conceptual agreement forms. Pragmatic explanations for variation in agreement forms can be applied in prototypical contexts of indefinite pronouns, for example when an effort to use gender-sensitive language is made. Based on the phenomenon of conceptual agreement, this article thus explores the functions and properties in the periphery of indefinite pronouns as a part of speech.

This paper argues that indexation markers (i.e., argument-indexing agreement markers and/or pronouns) show a wider range of formal mismatches across languages than the exponents of other inflectional categories. These mismatches are defined in terms of mixed behavior with respect to different criteria of wordhood. The mismatches that the indexation markers (or “indexes”) show include extrametricality with respect to reduplication and “mobility” in that they can occur in different slots of otherwise identical word forms. Other indexes can freely occur on either member of a phrase-level construction or behave like full-fledged affixes in one context but like full-fledged words in another. The claim that the range of these traits is extraordinary is based on a larger project, (Zingler, Tim. 2020. Wordhood issues: Typology and grammaticalization. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico PhD dissertation), which in addition to indexes investigates mismatches among case, definiteness, and tense markers. The explanations offered for this behavior primarily rely on the manner in which reference is established in discourse and on the different diachronic pathways for which these usage patterns pave the way. Another major conclusion is that the indexes described here constitute a formally heterogeneous set that cannot be easily subsumed under the label of “clitics.”

In this paper, we present the results of an experiment investigating the effect of different narrative situations on the availability of locally prominent protagonists as anchor for Free Indirect Discourse (FID). We created items in three conditions: condition A featured a neutral third-person narrator, condition B a homodiegetic first-person narrator and condition C a prominent, evaluative third-person narrator. Participants read several short text segments all ending with FID and were asked to rate the acceptability of the FID sentence. The results revealed that condition B received significantly lower ratings than the other two conditions, whereas there was no significant difference between conditions A and C. An additional study, in which participants had to choose if the thought expressed by FID belonged to the narrator or the protagonist, showed that there was a strong tendency to choose the protagonist as perspectival center in all three conditions. The results from Exp. 1 prove that while the presence of a homodiegetic first-person narrator strongly constrains a locally prominent protagonist’s availability as anchor for FID, it is not similarly affected by the presence of a globally prominent third-person narrator. This further confirms that narrative texts possess an inherent potential for multiperspectivity.

In this paper, we investigate the German word formation pattern X-Wort within the theoretical framework of discourse morphology. For this purpose, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic analyses are combined on the basis of the German reference corpus. It is shown that the word formation pattern is productive and extremely frequent. However, the meaning of the word formation product is not always clear, since only two X-Wörter (N-Wort and F-Wort) can be considered lexicalized. Instead of word meanings acquired through the formation, a common function of the X-Wörter can be identified: they are used in metalinguistic discourses to avoid and mask certain terms. In this context, X-Wörter differ with respect to the motivation of avoidance: (i) racist terms, (ii) vulgar terms, and (iii) politically and superstitiously explosive words are avoided and masked. Thus, X-Wörter are part of euphemistic language. As such, their use can also be enregistered, and acquire a social-symbolic function, which indicates moral-ethical ideas of the speaker or writer. Consequently, we describe the word formation pattern as a form-meaning/function-pair whose morphological structure perfectly fits its communicative needs to avoid and mask specific words in discourses.

This paper considers the commitments we make by our linguistic choices, and the things we are committed to by our uses of language; it also considers how these commitments can be avoided.

Against the backdrop of the societal differentiation of literacy, the paper investigates spelling variation in digital written communication beyond the binary paradigm of standard and nonstandard. To this end, the paper proposes a formal classification of digital spelling variants and then focuses on the socio-communicative functions of these variants in usage. Theoretically grounded in the notions of register and social indexicality, the paper discusses how spelling variants are metapragmatically ordered by social actors and deployed in text-messaging interactions in order to indicate interpretive context. To investigate these phenomena holistically, the paper furthermore presents a tripartite research framework that addresses digital writing regarding its I) structural variants, II) communicative practice, and III) reflexive awareness. Afterwards, this methodological approach is applied empirically. This is done based on a data set that includes samples of everyday literacy by 23 German adolescents: informal WhatsApp texting, on the one hand, formal school essays on the other. The exemplary analyses focus on phonostylistic spellings (e. g. elisions such as instead of ) and graphostylistic spellings (e. g. graphemic substitutions such as instead of ) in these WhatsApp interactions, reconstructing the metapragmatic status of standard orthography in digital writing. By combining structure-oriented, interactional, and ethnographic perspectives, the paper seeks a disciplinary dialogue by relating concepts of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology not only to research fields of media linguistics but also to research on writing systems.

This paper presents a method which we are developing to explore graphemic variation in large historical corpora of German. Historical corpora provide an amount of data at the level of graphemics which cannot be handled exhaustively using common methods of manual evaluation. To deal with this challenge, we apply methods from computational linguistics to pave the way for a broad-coverage graph(em)ic analysis of large historical corpora. In this paper, we show how our approach can be applied to the Reference Corpus of Middle High German. Illustrating our method and linguistic analysis, we present findings from our investigations into diatopic and/or diachronic variation as documented in 13th and 14th century charters (Urkunden) from the corpus.

In essence, typologies of writing systems seek to classify the world’s diverse writing systems in principled ways. However, against backdrops of early, misguided assumptions (Gelb 1969 [1952]) and stubborn term confusions, most proposals have focused primarily on the dominant levels of representational mapping (i. e., morphemic, syllabic, or phonemic), despite their shortcomings as idealizations (Joyce 2016, forthcoming; Joyce and Borgwaldt 2011; Meletis 2018). In advocating for exploring a more diverse range of criteria, either as alternatives or complementary factors, this paper outlines a promising framework for organizing typology criteria (Meletis 2018; 2020), which consists of three broad categories; namely, (a) linguistic fit, (b) processing fit and (c) sociocultural fit. Linguistic fit concerns the match between a language and its writing system and, thus, relates closely to the traditional criterion of representational mapping. Processing fit pertains to the physiological and cognitive aspects of a writing system, such as word spacing. Finally, sociocultural fit addresses the communicative and social functions of writing systems, such as implementing orthographic reforms. In singling out a particular parameter from each category, the paper illustrates its potential application as a typology criterion with cross-linguistic observations from the German (GWS) and the Japanese writing systems (JWS).

Our paper investigates how zero-affixed verbal forms (specifically, denominal and deadjectival verbs) are processed by native speakers of Italian during visual word recognition. More specifically, we verify whether, and possibly to what extent, the processing of such forms differs from or resembles the processing of verbs resulting from two other productive word formation schemas in Italian, i. e., suffixation and parasynthesis. The interest of such a comparison lies in the fact that the three considered schemas behave similarly from a functional point of view, i. e.: i) they all change the category of the base, ii) they select the same base category (nouns and adjectives), and iii) they show similar semantic characteristics. However, this shared function is realized by means of different formal exponents (both overt and covert) which might imply different degrees of complexity. Crucially, suffixation and parasynthesis display an overt derivational marking, while zero-affixation obviously does not. On such premises, to verify whether the strength of connections between morphologically complex words and their bases is affected by the nature of the transcategorization marking (overt vs vs covert) or whether other factors play a more determining role, we conducted a psycholinguistic experiment involving a lexical decision task combined with the masked priming paradigm, which allows focusing on such relations in the mental lexicon. Results indicate that the processing of zero-affixed verbs resembles that of suffixed but differs from that of parasynthetic forms. We interpret such results discussing the possibility that the perception of a morphological relationship might depend less on the overtness of the marking, and more on the overall derivational complexity of the morphological process.

In this paper we bring evidence from English and Italian deverbal zero nominals (to climb > the climb-Ø N) that zero is a possible spell-out of a nominalizer otherwise overtly instantiated in suffixed nominals (examin-ation ). We argue in favor of a Distributed Morphology approach, a separationist theory that recognizes and easily implements zero morphology with underlying syntax-semantics. Abstracting away from other theoretical trends and their foundational reasons to refrain from using zero suffixes, we address three properties that have been argued to fundamentally distinguish zero nominals from overtly suffixed nominals, with the implication that they instantiate a different word formation process: i) realization of verbal argument structure, ii) possibility of embedding verbalizing suffixes, and iii) semantic transparency in relation to the verb. By means of corpus data and two manually collected datasets of 561 English and 174 Italian zero nominals based on lexicographic information, we bring solid evidence against these claims, by arguing that: i) a great proportion of zero nominals do realize verbal argument structure, ii) the zero affix may embed verbalizing affixes within the limits of the selectional restrictions it independently imposes on its base, and iii) zero nominals present the same patterns of polysemy that suffixed nominals display. However, we show that zero nominals also present some idiosyncrasies to the extent that not all of them express compositional event readings with argument structure, a matter that deserves further research within the frame of their competition with suffixed nominals.

In this paper, we examine Modern Greek adjectives with the negative prefix α- [a] (also called alpha privative) which are derived from nouns. These formations display formal and semantic properties that cannot be attributed to any overt element of the structure. Following a bottom-up approach, we revisit the question of whether zero morphemes are useful in the realm of derivational morphology. We argue for a zero derivational suffix that accounts for the lexical category and the inflectional properties of the formation and in combination with the negative prefix a- gives a privative reading. As this zero suffix attributes the basic properties of the formations, but it is not part of the overt structure, we raise the question of whether derivational structures can also be exocentric. Many scholars have claimed that exocentricity is a property pertinent only to compounds. However, we argue that there is no reason why the presence of zero morphemes and the notion of exocentricity should be excluded from derivational morphology.

This paper discusses a theory of conversion (zero derivation) in terms of phrasal spellout. In this approach, there are no zero morphemes. Instead, the ‘silent’ meaning components are pronounced cumulatively within overt morphemes. As an empirical case, we discuss adjective/verb ambiguity as in narrow. As verbs, these roots have both an inchoative and a causative sense. Following Ramchand (2008), we assume that such deadjectival causatives contain three parts: the adjective denoting a state, a change-of-state component proc, and a causative component init. Adopting a Nanosyntax approach, we propose that verbs like narrow spell out a complex node with all these abstract heads. The ambiguity between the inchoative, causative and adjective falls out as a consequence of the Superset Principle (Starke 2009), which states that a lexical entry can spell out any subtree it contains. Since both the inchoative sense and the adjective sense correspond to proper parts of the causative one, we derive these readings without the need to postulate zeroes. We show how these assumptions allow us to capture a broad range of patterns, focussing mainly on English and Czech.

In this paper we offer an overview of the linguistic phenomena that have traditionally been handled by means of zero affixes and of the theoretical debate around the advantages and disadvantages of employing such null morphemes in theoretical modeling. While the advantage of positing zero affixes is straightforward from an empirical perspective (see inflectional syncretism and affixless category change, among others), their theoretical legitimacy has been controversially debated for several decades. In this overview, we present the main problems that have been brought forward against zero affixation and some of the mechanisms that have been proposed as an alternative. Finally, we show how the different articles in our edited collection contribute to this debate by addressing the following three research questions: (1) How do current theories of derivational morphology deal with linguistic phenomena that seem to involve zero affixes? (2) How do zero derivational affixes compare with their “overt analogues” (i. e. overt derivational affixes)? (3) What insights can we obtain from language-specific properties, typological generalizations and/or larger data-oriented studies on the question whether zero affixation is necessary in derivational morphology?

Zero-affixes have been used in morphology within pre-generative analyses, lexicalist analyses and syntactic approaches to morphology. The (over)use of zero-affixes has also led to criticisms and to alternative approaches, both within lexicalist models and syntactic approaches to morphology. In this paper, on the basis of French, a mix of several syntactic approaches is proposed. Two problems for Borer’s Exo-Skeletal model, in which derivational zero-suffixes are dispensed with on the basis of English, are discussed. First, on the basis of V → N conversions in French an alternative to zero-suffixes is proposed. Second, the discussion of A/N parallel suffixes in French leads to the adoption of a second alternative to zero-suffixes. Both alternatives require an adaptation of the Exo-Skeletal model: the acceptance of mixed functional projections and suffixal roots in the model.

The term neoliberalism is a faithful companion of current public debates. It often serves as a proxy for what is allegedly wrong with society. The term is used to criticize a perceived commodification of spheres of human existence that used to be shielded from a purely economic logic. Recently, the term neoliberalism has become the object of historical research. Its roots have been traced back as far as 1947 or 1918. I argue in this paper that historians have taken a methodologically questionable approach, by departing from the blurry concept of neoliberalism as it is perceived today and trying to trace it back in time as far as possible. Such an approach leads to severe contradictions as economists labelled ex-post as neoliberals were often opposed to neoliberalism as it is currently defined. It is methodologically more sound and analytically more rewarding to start the conception of the term with the economists who self-identified as neoliberals. This approach leads to a more coherent concept of neoliberalism that is better suited for further research and provides a clearer understanding of the history of economic thought in the interwar period and the first postwar years.

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue on international lending of last resort. Starting from debates about rescue operations and unconventional policies of major central banks in the contexts of the Global Financial Crisis and the European Debt Crisis, it draws attention to recurring controversies about trade-offs between averting critical contagion in financial markets and avoiding moral hazard. The need for international lending of last resort in strongly interconnected financial systems is more than ever evident, but there is no clear consensus on how to manage it. The contributions to this special issue put relevant issues in historical and theoretical perspectives.

This article examines the research literature on the economic aspects of the “Sino-Soviet Alliance”, which lasted from the end of the Chinese Civil war until the Sino-Soviet split (1949-1960/63). The Soviet and Eastern European contribution to China’s industrialization, called the “largest technology transfer in human history” by some, still awaits detailed examination. This article aims to structure the field as well as inspire future research. The included studies range from on-the-ground microstudies of engineers at specific industrial construction projects to macro-perspectives on economic exchange, trade and governmental negotiations. In contrast to classical Cold War perspectives, which assume a primacy of (geo-)politics, the paper builds on more recent studies, arguing that economic rationales mattered in both the split and the forging of the alliance. The literature review suggests that the room for manoeuvre of actors beyond the Kremlin and party leaderships has to be measured anew, and that the impact of the alliance on Eastern Europe awaits further research. Finally, the influence of the West with its technologies and world markets becomes visible when these apparently exclusive East-East relations are examined more closely.

Reinhart (1983) proposed that quantificational binding is subject to a surface c-command condition. Her claim has been widely accepted in the literature on the syntax-semantics interface. However, Barker (2012) presented systematic counterevidence against the c-command requirement from English. The current paper addresses the role of c-command constraints in the grammar of three phenomena in German: relative quantifier scope, quantificational binding, and negative polarity. The results of a large corpus study are presented that demonstrate empirically that scope of one quantifier over another, quantificational binding, and the licensing of negative polarity items in German are systematically possible in structural configurations where surface c-command cannot reasonably be assumed to obtain. Further corpus evidence is produced which shows that the non-c-commanding quantifiers in the examples typically occur in contexts where the set they quantify over is discourse-old or easy to accommodate. The overall picture that emerges from the empirical evidence is that topicality motivates wide scope, and scope rather than c-command licenses negative polarity items and bound pronouns.

In this paper we replicated two influential studies on gender-fair language that investigated how gender-fair language influences stereotype perception and recall of exemplars. We also updated the original studies to assess new forms of gender-fair language. A first set of studies replicated Gabriel et al. (2008) by eliciting gender proportion ratings for occupational nouns from adult German native speakers for word pairs, capital I forms and the asterisk. Results were mixed with effects mainly for female-biased nouns. Only the non-binary asterisk form (Lehrer*innen) showed an increase of women for male-biased nouns. A third study replicated Stahlberg and Sczesny’s (2001) naming study. Here, the number of women answers was higher than in the original study and increased when using gender-fair language with a larger increase for capital I forms (LehrerInnen) than for word pairs (Lehrer und Lehrerinnen). Overall, the effects of word pair forms were weaker than those of other forms of gender-fair language.

The paper investigates two related questions that concern the realization of plural morphology on nouns across languages. The first question is whether markedness in the sense of complexity in form goes hand in hand with complexity in meaning. In other words, since plural nouns are formally more complex than singular nouns, does that mean that they differ in interpretation? On the basis of experimental and theoretical investigations the claim is supported that plurals, although morphologically more complex than singulars, are semantically unmarked across languages. The second question is what regulates the presence of plural morphology in numeral-noun constructions across languages, in light of the proposal that plural appears on nouns in such constructions only if it is semantically unmarked. The paper offers an explanation of this distribution by adopting a dual system of agreement, which distinguishes between CONCORD and INDEX features. By looking at these two questions, the paper makes a contribution to the discussion of the relationship between semantic and morphological markedness.

This paper contributes to the typology of “active-stative” split intransitivity and middle voice with a detailed case study: it proceeds from a typological comparison of the two phenomena, which are usually treated apart, to an analysis of the Enets data and a discussion of its place in the typology of possible intransitive splits. Enets (Uralic, Samoyedic) has two classes of intransitive verbs, and each class uses its own cross-reference paradigm in all finite forms. The paper provides an account of the morphology of this intransitive split and its connection to the lexical aspect, followed by an overview of semantic composition of the two lexical classes; special attention is given to cases of class variation available for a dozen verbs. The research is based on the data of a fieldworkers’ corpus and thus also shows the advantages of a corpus-based approach to this phenomenon.

Traditionally, lexical typology has to a large extent been interested in lexical categorization of various cognitive domains (e. g., colour, perception, body), i. e., in how these are cut up by the most important words in a language, and in lexical motivation, or formal relatedness, i. e., in whether words for certain concepts are completely unrelated or related to others via polysemy or derivation (e. g., intransitive vs. transitive verbs, words for ‘day’ and ‘sun’, etc.). Grammatical behavior of words and morphosyntactic patterns as encoding meanings traditionally belong to grammatical typology. In this paper, I consider the domain of temperature and show how the close interaction between lexicon and grammar in the encoding of the temperature domain across languages calls for an integrated lexico-grammatical approach to these phenomena. As a useful tool for such an enterprise I suggest an elaborated semantic map comprising three layers – the layer specifying the words with the information on their mutual formal relations (i. e., whether they are identical, completely unrelated or related via derivation or inflection), their morphosyntactic properties (e. g., their part-of-speech affiliation, inflectional potential, etc.), and the constructions they occur in.

In this paper, we present an overview of the methods associated with semantic maps, focusing on current challenges and new avenues for research in this area, which are at the core of the contributions to this special issue. Among the fundamental questions are: (1) the validity of the basic assumption, namely, to what extent does coexpression reflect semantic similarity; (2) the central problem of identifying analytical primitives in the domain of semantics; (3) the methods of inference used for creating coexpression maps and the representation techniques (graph structure vs. Euclidean space) as well as their respective merits (including the goodness of fit of the models); and (4) the use of semantic maps to support diachronic and synchronic descriptions of individual languages. In order to illustrate and discuss key aspects, we conduct an experiment in the semantic field of emotions, for which we construct a classical semantic map based on the dataset of CLICS3.

The present paper discusses connectivity and proximity maps of causative constructions and combines them with different types of typological data. In the first case study, I show how one can create a connectivity map based on a parallel corpus. This allows us to solve many problems, such as incomplete descriptions, inconsistent terminology and the problem of determining the semantic nodes. The second part focuses on proximity maps based on Multidimensional Scaling and compares the most important semantic distinctions, which are inferred from a parallel corpus of film subtitles and from grammar descriptions. The results suggest that corpus-based maps of tokens are more sensitive to cultural and genre-related differences in the prominence of specific causation scenarios than maps based on constructional types, which are described in reference grammars. The grammar-based maps also reveal a less clear structure, which can be due to incomplete semantic descriptions in grammars. Therefore, each approach has its shortcomings, which researchers need to be aware of.

Departing from research on Westphalian leases between 1600 and 1900 the paper discusses the lease market of and price determination on three Westphalian estates. While economic history approaches suppose that leases can be seen as market relations and are therefore useful indicators to measure agricultural productivity, a more anthropological perspective emphasises the social relations between lessor (here: noble estate owner) and leaseholders. The choice of an adequate perspective has significant implications for research on agricultural productivity based on rents and leases. Our results indicate that the contractual arrangement of leasehold (well defined duration, announcement, auctions) was used to achieve the highest possible leases. However, at least until the 1830s, demand for leasehold land was rather low and leaseholders could benefit from a lack of competition. Price determination of leases resulted in rents below the Ricardian rent. Therefore, we argue that important assumptions of the established price approach, which uses leases as proxies for productivity, are not met and the analysis of agricultural productivity requires additional evidence on the leaseholder’s income and profit.

In 1933, the German government introduced the marriage loan for newlyweds, a policy aimed at increasing marriages and births as well as male employment, which entailed a work ban for the wife and sizeable credit deductions for children. This paper illustrates that the policy was rather ineffective based on a critical evaluation of the existing literature on the topic, how the policy was implemented in practice, as well as a correlation and interrupted time series analysis and consideration of the historical context of the period between 1925 and 1939. This result starkly contrasts to the substantial changes expected at the time of the introduction. In theory, only a small fraction of newlyweds was eligible for the loan. In practice, the development of marriages postintroduction significantly differed from the period prior to the policy, but causation is unclear. While births increased, this can be attributed to a combination of policies and the improved economic environment compared to the crisis years. The sharp decrease in unemployment probably resulted from the introduction of several targeted policies and embellishment of unemployment statistics.

Real estate markets have been all but neglected by historical research. Following a workshop held in Bielefeld in September 2019, this volume seeks to contribute to a better understanding of their characteristics. The introduction starts out with a definition of some key concepts. It then summarizes the state of historical research and argues for a focus on the social and institutional embeddedness of real estate markets. The introduction also gives an outline of the individual papers and a brief summary of some overall findings.

This paper is about the compositional interpretation of adverbial clauses as introduced by insofern als (lit. ‘insofar as’) in German (= IAs); for example, Die Lösung ist insofern attraktiv, als sie günstig ist. (lit. ‘The solution is insofar attractive as it is cheap.’). I argue that IAs always contribute dimensional restrictions, but do so in two distinct structure-sensitive ways: IAs can be structurally integrated into their host clauses and, thus, dimensionally specify a lexical component of the matrix VP (= LIAs) (‘The solution is attractive in price.’); alternatively, they can be structurally non-integrated and, thus, provide a dimension against which the matrix sentence is evaluated holistically (= SIAs) (‘In light of the fact that the solution is cheap, one may say that it is attrac­tive.’). The proposal is supported by both syntactic and semantic-pragmatic evidence: (i) LIAs and SIAs are distinguished by independently motivated tests for structural (non)integration such as scope of negation and particles, focus-background structure, and variable binding. (ii) LIAs are sensitive to a lexically given multidimensional matrix predication. SIAs, by contrast, require that the embedded clause specify an objective justification for the truth of the matrix proposition as a whole. In particular, IAs are shown to not pass tests for subjectivity as discussed for finden (‘find’); for example, judge- dependency, resistance against denial, or, accessibility of a subjective attitude. The paper concludes by sketching a formal derivation of both readings. Accordingly, LIAs constrain the dimensional parameter of multidimensional lexical predications, while SIAs provide facts that de re justify the assertibility of predications for topic situations.

This paper analyses the increase in the use of the preterite in spoken Alemannic in south-western Germany. There are almost no recent studies that explore the preterite in Upper German because of the widespread hypothesis that there is no preterite in Upper German (except for the verb sein ‘to be’) due to the loss of the preterite in Upper German (Oberdeutscher Präteritumschwund). In contrast to this, I account for a language change in the timespan from 1974 to 2013 in which the preterite becomes more frequent in relation to the perfect and is now part of the spoken Alemannic in south-western Germany. To account for this, I use a combination of a real time and an apparent time analysis. Additionally, all verbs forming a preterite have a specific semantic value, i. e. an inherent meaning of state. This means they are durative (=the situation lasts for a certain period of time), atelic (=the situation has no terminal point at which the situation is complete) and non-dynamic (=the situation involves no change). Perfect forms on the other hand do not have this specific semantic value.

The present paper argues that all kinds of verbal and adjectival instantiations of past participles have a common core: a participial head associated with an argument structural effect, on the one hand, and an aspectual contribution, on the other. The former amounts to the suppression of an external argument (if present), which existentially binds the semantic role associated with this argument, and the latter renders simple event structures with change-of-state semantics (and only those) perfective. Based on these ingredients (and the contribution of the auxiliary have, if present), it is not just possible to account for how past participles elicit periphrastic passive as well as perfect configurations, but crucially also for their bare (i. e. auxiliaryless) occurrences in a range of distributions: stative passives, stative perfects, absolute clauses, pre- and postnominal occurrences, and adverbial clauses. These, in turn, differ in their properties on the basis of (a) the presence of a stativising PredP, (b) the availability of an adjectival head that triggers λ-abstraction of an internal argument, and (c) the complexity of the underlying verbal structure in terms of the availability of vP. This eventually allows for a ‘holistic’ approach to the flexibility of past participles that delineates a common core supplemented by distinct functional surroundings.

The use of punctuation in German incunabula is often described as arbitrary, irregular, and unsystematic (cf. Masalon 2014: 54–56). This concerns the inventory, frequency, and function of punctuation marks as well as pragmatic aspects such as how typesetters treated punctuation in their respective target texts. In this paper, punctuation is not seen as an independent linguistic subsystem, but as a means of text segmentation that – along with other measures (e. g. capital letters, pilcrows, and white space) – was used to structure a text with respect to its formal appearance, helping the reader to decode information. This case study is based on a corpus of German pamphlets written by the Bohemian astrologer Wenzel Faber and printed annually beginning in 1481 at various print shops, principally in Leipzig and Nuremberg. The analysis finds significant changes in the editions before and after 1490. These changes include an increasing consistency in the intensity of text segmentation, and a use of capital letters and punctuation marks developed from a polyfunctional to a monofunctional approach. Finally, different types of text segmentation are proposed, each characterized by a specific relationship between its frequency and its function. Despite this overall tendency, one must still take into account that typesetters followed individual punctuation practices in their search for suitable forms of text segmentation.