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The present paper deals with the synchronic variation of plosive phonemes in the national varieties of German in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Our research task was to describe the full range of modifications of the plosives in the national varieties under investigation and to determine two conditional factors: 1) which modifications are due to positional and combinatorial conditions of sound realization; 2) which modifications can be taken to be typical of these national varieties of German. The data collected are based on the acoustic analysis of reproductive speech (a reading of a word list and short stories by Leonhard Thoma) of 12 German teachers (4 for each national variety) from Northern Germany, from the Vienna area and from the cantons of Aargau and Lucerne. Our results showed that national-specific modifications of the plosive phonemes are the frequent loss of tone by the lax plosives [b̥], [d̥], [g̊] in the speech of the German Swiss and Austrians, and a weakening until the complete loss of aspiration by the plosives [p] and [t] in the speech of Austrians.

This paper deals with, in a diachronic perspective, the Italian verb-noun compounds of the type portalettere and covers the time span that goes from the Origins well into the beginnings of the Twentieth century. On the basis of a rich dataset drawn from diachronic corpora and lexicographic sources, the article presents the history of this word-formation process, emphasizing the semantic and categorial nature of these compounds. The main claim is that the current semantic variability (person, instrument, event, period of time etc.) has always been available in the linguistic history of Italian as well as, to a minor extent, the categorial ambiguity by which VN compounds also function as adjectival modifiers. It is shown that this last function is much of a diachronic innovation. This paper, which stems from the theoretical premises of Construction Morphology, reveals that the productivity of the Construction [V-N]A|N is due to both the semantic and formal flexibility shown from the earliest attestations of the language, and to the productivity of some semi-specified subschemas, which have served as models for the creation of new VN compounds, especially over the past few decades.