Date of Award
Spring 2026
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
Linguistics
First Advisor
Kurt Goblirsch
Abstract
Reflexes of Proto-Germanic *ga- occur across a wide range of lexical environments in the early Germanic languages. In some of these languages, this breadth of participation creates the impression that the prefix is ‘promiscuous’, appearing throughout the lexicon with few apparent restrictions. The central question raised by this observation is whether the prefix’s apparent promiscuity reflects genuine distributional breadth within the lexicon or whether it masks an underlying distributional organization that has not yet been systematically identified.
This dissertation investigates the shape and structure of the distribution of reflexes of Proto-Germanic *ga- across the lexica of seven early Germanic languages, examining the prefix through its distributional participation in the lexicon rather than through semantic interpretation.
To evaluate this distribution, the study employs lexicon-wide datasets and a reproducible computational pipeline integrating philological data, algorithmic detection, structured human review, and layered statistical analysis. These procedures are organized within the LAYERED DISTRIBUTIONAL EVALUATION FRAMEWORK (LDEF), introduced in this study, which combines descriptive, inferential, conditional, and predictive methods to distinguish simple lexical presence from systematic proportional concentration within the lexicon.
The analyses reveal that the reflexes of PGmc. *ga- do not participate uniformly across the lexicon. Instead, the prefix exhibits a consistent pattern of verb-centered proportional concentration across the languages examined.
By establishing the distributional shape of *ga- participation across the early Germanic lexicon, this study provides a controlled empirical baseline for evaluating semantic interpretations of the prefix. More broadly, it demonstrates how lexicon-wide distributional analysis can be integrated with philological data and computational modeling to investigate historical morphological systems.
Rights
© 2026, Price L. Lassahn-Worrell
Recommended Citation
Lassahn-Worrell, P. L.(2026). Promiscuous Germanic *ga-: The Distribution and Organization of a Problematic Prefix. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8881