Newsletter

Col. 10 No 2, Fall 1998
Society for Germanic Philology

A Missive Concerning ...

The Forum for Germanic Language Studies
The FGLS is a loose grouping of people (mainly based in the UK and Ireland) with an interest in Germanic languages and linguistics. Meetings are held every two years - our inaugural meeting was held in Manchester in 1994, the 1996 meeting was held in York, and the 1998 meeting will be held at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK on 30-31 October 1998 [This meeting has been postponed. Please see new Call for Papers]. We have up to now received financial support for our meetings from the Goethe Institut, the Austrian Cultural Institute, and Pro Helvetia, which has enabled us to invite plenary speakers to our meetings from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. We have an e-mail discussion list which has extended our reach beyond the UK with subscribers in Germany and the USA. There has also been informal discussion with the SGP regarding possible future joint events. If you wish to be included on the email list, please mail Piklu Gupta at G.A.Gupta@selc.hull.ac.uk. The FGLS web page is to be found at
www.hull.ac.uk/german/gupta/fgls

Piklu Gupta

SGP Bylaws Approved

The revisions to the SGP bylaws as proposed by the Executive Committee in the Spring issue of the Newsletter were accepted unanimously by the membership.

News & Publications

Werner Abraham and Elly van Gelderen edited a collection of essays entitled German: Syntactic Problems. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997). Werner Abraham also published Linguistik der Uneigentlichen Rede. Linguistische Analysen an den Rändern der Sprache (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998).

Ellen Prince's article "On Kind-Sentences, Resumptive Pronouns, and Relative Clauses" appeared in Guy, Gregory et al. (eds.), Towards a Social Science of Language II: Social Inte-raction and Discourse Structures (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1997, p. 223-35).

Donka Minkova and Robert Stockwell published "Against the Emergence of the Nuclear Stress Rule in Middle English" in Fisiak, Jacek and Werner Winter (eds.) Studies in Middle English Linguistics (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997, p. 301-34); and "Old English Metrics and the Phonology of Resolution" NOWELE: North-Western European Language Evolution 31-32 (1997), p. 389-406. Thomas Shannon's article "Word Order Change in Dutch as Reflected in the Ulespieghel" appeared in the same issue of NOWELE (p. 361-88).

John te Velde received a Fulbright grant to work as a Senior Scholar at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissen-schaft in Berlin from January 15 to June 15, 1999.

Job Tracks

Carlee Arnett has joined the faculty at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she directs the basic language program and teaches undergraduate language, culture and literature courses. She continues her research in Cognitive Grammar.

Michael Getty finished his dissertation on the meter of Beowulf, and joins the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. He will be teaching courses in language and linguistics and supervising teaching assistants.

Kathryn Starkey joins the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She will be teaching Medieval Studies and continuing her research on word and image.

Germanic Philology and Linguistics at the MLAThis year's session "Topics in Germanic Philology" at the MLA in San Francisco, chaired by Robert D. Fulk, will feature the following presentations:
"Paralanguage: Evidence from Germanic" (Irmengard Rauch)
"On Reconstructing Germanic Gen-der" (Frederick Schwink)
"German Vowel Lengthening: A Case Study in Prosodic Change" (Richard Page).
Gregor Hens will present "What Drives Herbeck? Schizophrenia, Immediacy, and the Poetic Process" on a panel sponsored by the Division on Linguistic Approaches to Literature.

AJGLL

The Fall issue of the American Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Literatures (10.2) is in preparation and will feature the following papers and reviews:

T.L. Markey: "Studies in Runic origins I: Germanic *maÞl- /*mahl- and Etruscan meØlum"
D. Fertig: "The ge- prefix in Early New High German and the modern dialects"
J.M. Denton: "Phonetic perspectives on West Germanic consonant gemi-nation"
R.D. King and S.A. Beach: "On the origins of German uvular [R]: The Yiddish evidence"

M. Haspelmath, Indefinite pronouns. Reviewed by Molly Diesing.
G. Kaufmann, Varietätendynamik in Sprachkontaktsituationen: Attitüden und Sprachverhalten rußlanddeutscher Mennoniten in Mexiko und den USA. Reviewed by Ludwig M. Eichinger.
M. Konopka, Strittige Erscheinungen der deutschen Syntax im 18. Jahrhundert. Reviewed by Nils Langer.
F. van Coetsem, Towards a typology of lexical accent: "Stress accent" and "pitch accent" in a renewed per-spective. Reviewed by Tomas Riad.
P. M. Silva et al., eds., A dictionary of South African English on historical principles. Reviewed by Paul T. Roberge.

All books for review should be sent to the review editor:

Sarah M. B. Fagan
Department of German
528 Phillips Hall
The University of Iowa Iowa City, IA 52242

Perspectives On Argument Structure, 1999 Conference of the Texas Linguistics Society, University of Texas at Austin, March 5-7, 1999. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is October 16, 1998. For more information please see http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~tls/

The Fourth HIL Phonology Conference, organized by the Holland Institute of Linguistics, will take place on January 28-30, 1999 at Leiden University. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is October 1, 1998. Please see the conference website at

www.leidenuniv.nl/hil/confs/hilp4

Narrative in the Early Middle Ages, International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, May 6-9, 1999), International Medieval Congress (Leeds, July 12-15, 1999), Day Conference, Centre for Medieval Studies (York, Autumn 1999).

This project aims to explore the nature of narrative in texts used as sources for history by modern scholars of the Early Medieval West. The nature of narrative in the written texts of the Early Middle Ages is a subject of interest to scholars working across the disciplines of history and literature, and developments in theoretical approaches to narrative have made this a lively area for current scholarship.

Four types of written source will serve to focus the discussion: poetry (Latin and vernacular), charters, biographical writing (hagiography and royal lives) and historical writing (histories and chronicles). These include traditional narrative sources as well as literary texts and documents not generally considered in terms of narrative. The geographical range of the project includes the Continent, the British Isles and Scandinavia, while the chronological range extends from Late Antiquity to the Twelfth Century.

Several areas of inquiry suggest themselves as starting points, including:

• the power of a story expressed as a narrative, especially as linear narrative
• the textuality of history and the desire of scholars to know what actually happened),
• the integration of information gathered from narrative and non-narrative sources,
• narrative approaches to sources which do not have an obvious story.

The project consists of a session at Kalamazoo (May 1999), a day conference at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York (Autumn 1999, dates to be arranged) and, it is hoped, two sessions at Leeds (1999). Abstracts for Kalamazoo and Leeds must be received no later than September 25, 1998. Abstracts or more general expressions of interest in the day conference at York are also welcome. For more information please contact

Dr. Elizabeth Tyler
Centre for Medieval Studies
King's Manor, University of York
York Y01 2EP
Telephone: 01904 433915 or 433910
Fax: 01904 433918
E-mail: emt1@york.ac.uk

Sinn und Bedeutung 1998 -- The third annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Semantik will be held at the University of Leipzig, on December 11 - 13, 1998. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is September 15, 1998. Continuously updated information can be found at:

Archival Summer Course in Germany

The German Historical Institute Washington, DC, and the German Department University of Madison, Wisconsin will be offering a Summer Program consisting of courses in German handwriting and archives and archive tours (June 7-20, 1999).

This Summer Program is designed to introduce students to the German handwriting of previous centuries, expose them to a variety of German archives, familiarize them with major research topics in early modern German history, and encourage the exchange of ideas between young North American and German scholars. The main purpose is to assist participants in planning the course of their future research in Germany.

Participants will attend courses in German handwriting of various periods and in archival science at the Federal and State Archives in Koblenz. They will also visit a wide variety of archives, including business, media, church, city, and university archives. During the program, participants will be introduced to German archival organization and practice, and at each stop, archivists will discuss the history and use of their respective collections. Students will have brief occasion to explore finding aids and to meet individually with archivists. They will stay in Koblenz for the first week, travel from there to Bonn and Heidelberg and then continue to Cologne.

Ten North American graduate students will be selected to participate. The program will provide travel to Germany, transportation via rail to the various destinations, and accom-modations (double occupancy).

Candidates must be enrolled in a Ph.D. program. Preference will be given to those who have already chosen a dissertation topic that makes the consultation of German archives necessary. Successful candidates must

be fluent in German. For specific information about the program, contact:

Dr. Christof Mauch
The German Historical Institute
1607 New Hampshire Ave., N.W.
Washington, DC 20009

Applications consist of a cover letter, a detailed description of the dissertation project, and letter from the thesis advisor. Deadline for receipt of applications: December 1, 1998. Applicants will be notified by February 15, 1999.

Conference Reviews

Readers are invited to submit reports and reviews of conferences they have attended recently, for the benefit of those members who were unable to participate. If you would like to review a conference or a particular panel in the Spring issue of the Newsletter, please let us know by February 12, 1998. Among the meetings of particular interest to the readers of the Newsletter are:

• Modal Verbs in Germanic and Romance (Antwerp, Belgium, December 11-12, 1998)
• The 14th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (January 8-9, 1999, Lund, Sweden)
• Contrastive Linguistics and Trans-lation Studies (Leuven, Belgium, February 5-6, 1999)

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