The synchrony, diachrony, and anachrony of Sievers’s Law in Gothic

Sievers’s Law in Germanic refers to the realization of yod + vowel sequences as nonvocalic after light syllables (*V̆CjV), but vocalic after heavy syllables (*V̄CijV, *VCCijV). The resulting allomorphy has left important traces in the nominal and verbal inflection of Old English and other older Germanic languages, but in Gothic, phonologically the most archaic Germanic language, SL is widely assumed to have still been a synchronic phonological process. Recent studies have analyzed SL in terms of syllable structure or “prosodic optimization”, setting up repair rules or constraints to generate the attested outcomes. However, it is argued from the existence of variant forms and widespread occurrence of superheavy syllables that SL was in fact no longer part of the synchronic grammar of Gothic, and that the relevant alternations were morphologically conditioned just as in the other Germanic languages. This finding not only contributes to our understanding of Gothic phonology, but highlights the importance of clearly distinguishing synchrony from diachrony and taking full account of variation, loanwords, and other often overlooked evidence in premodern languages.

Ronald I. Kim ’96 is Associate Professor in the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. His research interests include the historical linguistics of Indo-European and Semitic as well as language typology, sociolinguistics, language contact, and dialectology. He is author of two monographs and over 80 articles dealing with all aspects of Indo-European linguistics, and has held research grants from the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic and Polish National Science Centre. Kim is also coeditor of the journal Indo-European Linguistics and editor of several volumes, including Uriel Weinreich’s Languages in Contact (2011), Diachronic Perspectives on Suppletion (2019), and Hrozný and Hittite: The First Hundred Years (2019).

This lecture is sponsored by the Program in Linguistics and the Department of Classics. Lunch will be provided.