Designed as a contribution to contrastive linguistics, the present volume brings up-to-date the comparison of German with its closest neighbour, Dutch, and other Germanic relatives like English, Afrikaans, and the Scandinavian languages. It takes its inspiration from the idea of a "Germanic Sandwich", i.e. the hypothesis that sets of genetically related languages diverge in systematic ways in diverse domains of the linguistic system. Its contributions set out to test this approach against new phenomena or data from synchronic, diachronic and, for the first time in a Sandwich-related volume, psycholinguistic perspectives. With topics ranging from nickname formation to the IPP (aka 'Ersatzinfinitiv'), from the grammaticalisation of the definite article to /s/-retraction, and from the role of verb-second order in the acquisition of L2 English to the psycholinguistics of gender, the volume appeals to students and specialists in modern and historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, translation studies, language pedagogy and cognitive science, providing a wealth of fresh insights into the relationships of German with its closest relatives while highlighting the potential inherent in the integration of different methodological traditions Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction - German and Dutch in contrast: synchronic, diachronic and psycholinguistic perspectives -- Nickname formation in West Germanic: German Jessi and Thomson meet Dutch Jess and Tommie and English J-Bo and Tommo -- Analogues of the way-construction in German and Dutch: another Germanic sandwich? -- Lice in the fur of our language? German irrelevance particles between Dutch and English -- IPP in Afrikaans: a corpus-based investigation and a comparison with Dutch and German -- The grammaticalisation of definite articles in German, Dutch, and English: a microtypological approach -- A diachronic contrastive study of sentence-internal capitalisation in Dutch and German -- Middle High German and modern Flemish s‑retraction in /rs/-clusters -- The role of verb-second word order for L1 German, Dutch and Norwegian L2 English learners: a grammar competition analysis -- Syntactic or semantic gender agreement in Dutch, German and German learner Dutch: a speeded grammaticality judgement task -- Subtle differences, rigorous implications: German and Dutch representation of tense-aspect features in SLA research of Spanish -- Food for psycholinguistic thought on gender in Dutch and German: a literature review on L1 and L2 production and processing
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