Newsletter

Vol. 11 No 2, Fall 1999
Society for Germanic Philology

Name Changes

The mail vote confirmed the informal poll taken at the annual general meeting of the SGP in April: members desire a new name for both the journal and the Society that will be more clearly indicative of current activities and direction. The name "Society for Germanic Linguistics" and the corresponding Journal of Germanic Linguistics received the strongest support. The membership will be asked for ratification of the choice for the Society at the time of the election to the Executive Committee for the year 2000, and the changeover for both names will take place in 2001.

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New Home for AJGLL

Discussions between the Society and Cambridge University Press regarding possible publication of the Society’s journal have been completed and we are on track for a partnership beginning in 2001. According to proposed arrange-ments, CUP will publish the rechristened journal, advertise for it, and provide funding for editorial assistance and other expenses. More good news: the funds from CUP will be supplemented by the German Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which will allow us to hire a graduate student as part-time editorial assistant. Finally, support from the Diebold foundation will provide additional funds for the editorial offices in Madison and Austin.

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Elections and Nominations

The spring election has brought some new faces to the Executive Committee of the SGP. Replacing Thomas Shannon as Vice-President is Anna Grotans of the Ohio State University, while Orrin Robinson of UCLA and Elly van Gelderen of the University of Arizona are taking over from Robert Fulk as members-at-large. Robert Fulk will continue on the Executive Committee as representative of the Discussion Group for Germanic Philology (MLA).

According to article VI, section 1 of the bylaws of the Society for Germanic Philology, an election committee shall be formed to solicit nominations and conduct elections for the Society's officers and members of the Executive Committee. The Executive Committee has appointed an election committee chaired by the Society's vice president, Anna Grotans. This year the office of president will be contested, as will two seats on the Executive Committee. Candidates for these offices must be willing and able (a) to attend GLAC so as to be present at the Society's Executive Committee meetings; and (b) to participate in the activities of the Society.

The committee is confident that there are a number of SGP members who would be willing to serve, if elected, and we hope that you will help us identify them. Your letter should indicate that your nominees have consented to having their names placed in nomination. Self-nominations are welcome.

Please send nominations by regular mail, email, or fax before November 15, 1999 to:

Anna Grotans
Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures
314 Cunz Hall
The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH 43210-1229

Email: grotans.1@osu.edu
Fax: (614) 292-8510

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Diebold Prizes for Graduate Student Papers at GLAC

We are thrilled to announce that, starting with GLAC 6, financial awards will be made annually for outstanding graduate student papers at the Society’s annual conference. These awards are made possible through the generous support of the Diebold Foundation. There will be up to two awards of $250.00 US each; a jury of three members appointed by the Executive Committee will judge conference papers submitted in writing within four weeks of the conference.

GLAC News

The Sixth Annual Germanic Linguistics Conference (GLAC 6) will take place April 28-30, 2000, in Milwaukee, cohosted by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Seiichi Suzuki and Geert Booij have agreed to appear as guest speakers, and one more confirmation is pending. The organizers have chosen the University Center for Continuing Education in downtown Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Center Holiday Inn as the conference venue. The room price at the Holiday Inn will be $79.00 US plus tax for one to four occupants, including parking.

Dates are set for GLAC 7 in Banff, hosted by the University of Calgary: April 28-30, 2001. Note a departure from our usual Friday-Sunday schedule: we will be meeting Saturday to Monday morning. The Calgary organizers hope you will all come anyway!

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GLAC 6 Call for Papers

Faculty and graduate students are invited to submit abstracts for 30-minute papers on any linguistic or philological aspect of any historic or modern Germanic language or dialect, including English (to 1500) and the extraterritorial varieties. Papers from a range of linguistic subfields, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, socio-linguistics, language acquisition, contact, and change, as well as differing theoretical approaches, are especially welcome.

Please send to the address below a one-page, 12-point font abstract that is headed only by the title of your paper, as well as a separate 3" x 5" index card with your name, institutional affiliation, mailing address, phone/fax numbers, email address, and the title of your paper. Submissions must be received by January 10, 2000. Notification of acceptance will be sent out by February 11, 2000.

GLAC-6
Department of Foreign Languages & Linguistics
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413

 

For more information, please contact Gregory Iverson at iverson@uwm.edu, or visit the GLAC-6 website at www.uwm.edu/~iverson/GLAC6.html.

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AJGLL News

Issue 10.2 of the AJGLL was distributed in the spring of this year. 11.1 is currently in the proof stage, and 11.2 is in preparation. A complete index for Volumes 1-10 of the AJGLL has been prepared and will be included in 11.2. A copy will also be posted on the web.

The new editor, Mark Louden, will take over from Paul Roberge with Volume 12. The following people have agreed to serve on the Editorial Advisory Board for the new Journal of Germanic Linguistics:

Werner Abraham (U Groningen), Mary Blockley (U Texas-Austin), Geert Booij (U Amsterdam), Kate Burridge (La Trobe U), James Cathey (U Massachusetts), Harald Clahsen (U Essex), Michael Clyne (Monash U), Martin Durrell (U Manchester), Ludwig M. Eichinger (U Kiel), Jan Terje Faarlund (U Oslo), Barbara Fennell (U Aberdeen), Edward G. Fichtner (Queens College, CUNY), Evelyn S. Firchow (U Minnesota), R. D. Fulk (U Indiana), Elly van Gelderen (Arizona SU), Wayne Harbert (Cornell U), John A. Hawkins (U Southern California), Gregory Iverson (U Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Neil Jacobs (Ohio SU), Peter Jorgensen (U Georgia), Robert L. Kyes (U Michigan), Anatoly Liberman (U Minnesota), Donka Minkova (UCLA), Susan Olsen (U Leipzig), Amanda Pounder (U Calgary), Marga Reis (U Tübingen), Tomas Riad (U Stockholm), Orrin W. Robinson (Stanford U), Thomas F. Shannon (U California, Berkeley), Joseph B. Voyles (U Washington), Richard Wiese (U Marburg), Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel (Humboldt U).

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Table of Contents Vol. 11.2

ARTICLE

Studies in Runic Origins 2: From Gods to Men

TOM MARKEY

REPORT

The Loss of the Preterite as a European Areal Phenomenon and the Case of Afrikaans

WERNER ABRAHAM AND C. JAC CONRADIE

DISCUSSION NOTES

On Identifying Laryngeal Reflexes in Germanic

LEO CONNOLLY

A Reply to Professor Connolly’s "On Identifying Laryngeal Reflexes in Germanic"

JOSEPH VOYLES

REVIEWS

S. Suzuki, The metrical organization of Beowulf: Prototype and isomorphism

THOMAS CABLE

B. Donaldson, Dutch: A comprehensive grammar

ROBERT B. HOWELL

S. Bartke, Experimentelle Studien zur Flexion und Wortbildung

MARTIN DURRELL

A. Giorgi and F. Pianesi, Tense and aspect: From semantics to morphosyntax

PAUL PORTNER

Gabriele Diewald, Grammatikalisierung: Eine Einführung in Sein und Werden grammatischer Formen

CHRISTOPHER M. STEVENS

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Membership Dues

European members and North American members in temporary exile will be glad to hear that a bank account in the Society’s name has been set up to allow them to pay their membership dues more conveniently. The dues are as follows:

30 Euros Regular Membership

50 Euros Sustaining Membership

15 Euros Student Membership

Please make your payment to the following account:

Volksbank Freiburg
Routing Number (BLZ) 680 900 00
Account 25598202

Some members have inquired about paying dues through Visa or Mastercard. At present, this is not possible due to the high transaction costs the Society would incur. However, once CUP has taken over the publishing of the journal, credit-card payments will indeed be accepted.

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Member News

JOHN TE VELDE, Associate Professor of German at Oklahoma State University, spent January through June of 1999 on sabbatical in Berlin, where the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) acted as institutional host. He is working on a book on the role of Feature Matching in the derivation of coordinate structures with ellipsis. At ZAS he gave a presentation in May on the progress of his research, exchanged ideas, papers and data, and had discussions with Ewald Lang, Kerstin Schwabe, Chris Wilder, Alan Munn, Niina Zhang, Horst-Dieter Gazda, among others.

His sabbatical was supported by the Fulbright-Kommission, Bonn, a benefit that his family especially enjoyed ("cause otherwise they would have been stuck in Oklahoma!").

JEANNETTE DENTON is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Baylor University starting this fall. She will teach Old English, History of English, Introduction to Language and Linguistics, and related topics.

ELLY VAN GELDEREN has published two articles of interest to the membership. "Bound Pronouns and Non-Local Anaphors" will appear in Reflexives and Reciprocals, ed. by Z. Frajzyngier, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 187-225. "Structures of Tense and Aspect" appeared in Linguistic Analysis 27.3-4 (1997): 138-165.

Please send Member News items to Carlee Arnett at carnett@u.arizona.edu.

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Job Opening

The University of Wisconsin, Madison, is seeking applications for a tenure-track Assistant or tenured Associate Professor position in the field of Germanic Linguistics, beginning August 2000. Duties include research and teaching interest in Germanic Linguistics with emphasis on syntactic theory. Must be able to teach German language. Must teach two courses per semester. Ph.D., teaching experience and native or near-native fluency in German required. Knowledge of Yiddish or another Germanic language in addition to German and English desirable.

Interviews may take place at the MLA Convention in December. To ensure full consideration, send letter of application, CV, and dossier by December 1, 1999, to Prof. Marc Silberman, University of Wisconsin Department of German, 818 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Dr., Madison, WI 53706. AA/EOE. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply. NOTE: Unless confidentiality is requested in writing, information regarding the applicants must be released upon request. Finalists cannot be guaranteed confidentiality.

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Call for Submissions: Stauffenburg Series on Germanic Linguistics

Die bereits mehr als 50 Bände umfassende Reihe versteht sich als Werkstatt zur systematischen Erfor-schung der deutschen Grammatik. Die Studien präsentieren in Monographien und gelegentlich in thematisch gebündelten Sammelbänden grundlegende Arbei-ten zur germanistischen Linguistik. Das Profil der Reihe insgesamt ist durch Ausgewogenheit zwischen Tiefe und Breite bestimmt. Als Beitrag zur Klärung theoretischer Annahmen hat darin die gründliche empirische Bestandsaufnahme ebenso ihren Platz wie die detaillierte Analyse einzelner Phänomene im typologischen oder diachronischen Vergleich und wie die faktenbasierte Diskussion konkur-rierender Modelle.

Die Studien wenden sich an Forschende, Lehrende und Lernende in der germanistischen Linguistik des In- und Auslands. Sie zielen auf die datengestützte Erprobung und Diskus-sion von grammatiktheoretischen Ansätzen, bieten Grundlagen für komparative oder kontrastive Analysen und liefern Hintergrundwissen für die praktische Arbeit mit Deutsch als Fremdsprache.

Die Herausgeber ermutigen zum Einreichen von deutschen oder englischen Manuskripten, die eine weiterführende Sicht auf die Struktur des Deutschen eröffnen und die Vertiefung von Einsichten in die deutsche Grammatik mit der aktuellen Ausein-andersetzung um theoretische Positionen verbinden.

Wenn Sie ein Manuskript einreichen möchten, dann wenden Sie Sich bitte an:

Gert Webelhuth
Department of Linguistics
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3155
webelhuth@unc.edu

Herausgegeben von Werner Abraham (Groningen), Winfried Boeder (Oldenburg), Peter Eisenberg (Potsdam), Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen (Oslo), Hubert Haider (Salzburg), Ewald Lang (Berlin), Jacques Lerot (Louvain-la-Neuve), Vladimir P. Nedjalkov (St. Petersburg), Susan Olsen (Leipzig), Gert Webelhuth (Chapel Hill)

Second International Conference in Contrastive Semantics & Pragmatics SIC-CSP 2000, Newnham College, Cambridge, UK, September 11-13, 2000.

The conference aims at bringing together various aspects of research in semantics and pragmatics, based on, or otherwise pertaining to, linguistic constructions from at least two different languages.

Papers are invited that contribute to research on semantic and pragmatic theory, the interface between semantics and pragmatics, as well as more em-pirically based presentations that report on the evidence from collected data in a contrastive linguistic perspective. The organizers also welcome papers on the methodology and typology of contrastive studies with special reference to semantics and pragmatics.

Submission deadline: April 30, 2000. Visit the conference web site at: http://www.newn.cam.ac.uk/SIC-CSP2000

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