LL-L "Morphology" 2003.09.30 (10) [E]

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From: Jan Strunk <strunkjan at hotmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Morphology" 2003.09.30 (04) [E]

Hello,

Alfred Brothers quite convincingly argued that such a reanalysis as I
described is not
that unlikely. I agree with all that he has written. And I can add
that the seemingly rare occurrence of a pronoun after the verb is actually
really very
common in actual German texts. We once did a small count on a German spoken
dialogue in a linguistics class and it turned out that more than half of the
sentences
were not in the "basic" order SVO.

> From: Alfred Brothers <alfredb at erols.com>
> Subject: LL-L "Morphology" 2003.09.29 (06) [E]
>
> Jan's assertion that the generally accepted explanation among Germanic
> linguists is that the assimilation of "wir" to these verbs did lead to
> the resulting "mir" form becoming the standard form even when preceding
> the verb in Central and Upper German dialects. (See below for the Low
> German/Low Saxon explanation.) Although it may seem to be a stretch at
> first, consider the following (which applies to High German dialects
only):
>
> 1) In inverted word order, if the pronoun is stressed, the m- remains.
> Ordinary _hamma_ becomes _hamMIR_, never _haamwiä_ as you point out
> happens in careful Hamburg Missingsch speech. This in itself reinforces
> the independence of the word. (Some rural Bavarian dialects can even use
> the pronoun twice, once before and once after:  _mia samma_ (wir sind).)
>
> 2) None of the South German dialects have a simple past tense form.
> Every sentence in the past must consist of a _hamma_ or _simma_ (or
> something similar) when inverted order is necessary. So these two verbs
> alone, in addition to some other rather common "-m" ending verbs such as
> _geem, leem, schreim, etc._, far outnumber the verbs whose endings might
> not cause the _wir_ to _mir_ shift.
>
> 3) Even dialects that have lost their final -n had it at some time in
> their history. So _habbe mir_ > _mir habbe_ (or _hawwe mir_, etc.) most
> likely arose after the _wir > mir_ shift took place. In addition, almost
> all southern dialects have special forms of _haben_, such as _han, hand,
> ham, hen, hend_, etc. These could easily have caused the shift. Forms
> you may hear today in areas where -n is dropped, such as _hawwe mir_,
> are usually half-dialect.
>
> 4) Once the sound of -MIR became strong enough to be felt as a separate
> word, false division of the verb from its subject was easy. It also
> happened in the second person plural in many south German dialects:
> _ihr_ frequently becomes _dihr_ based on forms like _hend ihr_.
> Pennsylvania German also recognizes _nihr_ as well as _dihr_ and _ihr_
> based on _henn ihr_.

Such false division also happens the other way round, i.e. that parts of a
clitic
pronoun are analyzed as belonging to the agreement suffix on the verb.
Bavarian "es saits" --> you(PL) are
Where the "-s" on the verb likely comes from frequent occurrences of
"sait es".

> In the back of my mind, there is something telling me that I also ran
> across this shift in one of the dialects of the Scandinavian languages,
> too, but I may be mistaken. It certainly wouldn't fit in the theory
> above, although there are always exceptions. If I ever locate it, I'll
> let you know.
Swedish "ni" (you.PL) come about in this way.
In older Swedish, the pronoun was just "i" like in Danish and the verb
had a nasal ending, for example "I kommen" --> You come.
At some stage, the segmentation was changed and the -n reanalysed as part
of the pronoun. This is probably related to the loss of verbal agreement
morphology in Swedish.

Kumpelmente!

Jan Strunk
strunk at linguistics.ruhr-uni-bochum.de

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