Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (12)
- Part of a Book (2)
- Conference Proceeding (2)
- Review (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (18)
Keywords
- Frühneuhochdeutsch (18) (remove)
Institute
This paper deals with complex prefix-particle structures like aberkennen in German. First, it presents a scheme to analyse these double complex words from a synchronic point of view. Second, it is shown for words with ab-, that this type of word formation is typical for Middle and Early Modern High German and reasons for the decrease are discussed.
"Du bist mir Apollo", "Du bist mir Helena" : "Figuren" der Liebe im frühneuhochdeutschen Prosaroman
(1991)
Die folgende Untersuchung gilt zwei in Handlungssituierung, Erzählgestus und Entwicklung der Romantechnik durchaus unterschiedlichen, obschon in nicht allzu großer zeitlicher Distanz entstandenen Modellen, die jedoch miteinander verbindet (...), daß sie unter je verschiedenen sozialen Bedingungen beide das Nichtfunktionieren von Liebesbeziehungen aufzeigen (...). Gemeint sind Jörg Wickrams „schöne Histori / von sorglichem anfang vnd außgang der brinnenden Libe / vier Personen betreffend“ (...) [sowie die] Erzählung von der „brünstige(n) Liebe [...] Camilli und Emilie“, deren deutscher Nachdruck rund dreißig Jahre später anzusetzen ist (...).
Recent work on argument selection couched in a lexical decomposition approach (Ehrich & Rapp 2000) postulates different linking properties for verbs and nouns, challenging current views on argument inheritance. In this paper, I show that the different behavior with respect to verbal and nominal linking observed for Present-Day German does not carry over to ung-nominals in Early New High German. Deverbal nouns and corresponding verbs rather behave alike with respect to argument linking. I shall argue that this change is motivated by the growing rift between ung-nominals and their verbal bases both focussing on different parts oftheir lexicosemantic structure in Present-Day German. Evidence for the verb-like behavior of ung-nominals in Early New High German comes from the regular meaning relation between verbs and corresponding derived nouns, the actional properties of event-denoting nouns, and the patterning of ung-nominals with nominalized infinitives. Even their syntactic behavior reflects the verbal character of ung-nominals during that period of the German language. The diachronic facts can be accounted for in a straightforward way once we adopt a lexical decomposition approach to argument selection.
This paper investigates the spelling of compound nouns in a corpus comprised of Early New High German protocols of witch trials from the 16th and 17th century. Previous studies on the spelling of compound nouns in printed texts have found that scribes increasingly write compound nouns as one word during the 16th century. However, this paper will show that there is still much variation in handwritten texts from that time. The study focusses on identifying factors that lead scribes to write compound nouns either as one word or two, such as linking elements and the use of upper case letters. I will argue that while there is more variation in the spelling of compound nouns in the handwritten corpus than in printed texts, there still is a strong tendency to line up the boundaries of the graphemic and syntactic words.
This paper takes as its starting point several statements by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on the role of the German language in literary and scholarly life during Leibniz's era. The languages of scholarship were Latin and French, and Leibniz himself published in both these languages. German was the language of practical life. Viewed from this perspective, it was almost inevitable that medieval and early modern medicine - not in the sense of academic theory, but as a practical activity - developed its own fully-fledged specialist language, which was largely based on the vernacular. In her studies of the language of historical medicine, Lenka Vaňková has shown how such vernacular language was (and potentially still is) able to function in specialist domains
This paper studies the morphological productivity of German N+N compounding patterns from a diachronic perspective. It argues that the productivity of compounds increases due to syntactic influence from genitive constructions ("improper compounds") in Early New High German. Both quantitative and qualitative productivity measures are adapted from derivational morphology and tested on compound data from the Mainz Corpus of (Early) New High German (1500–1710).
This paper investigates the information-structural characteristics of extraposed subjects in Early New High German (ENHG). Based on new quantitative data from a parsed corpus of ENHG, I will argue that unlike objects, subjects in ENHG have two motivations for extraposing. First, subjects may extrapose in order to receive narrow focus, which is the pattern Bies (1996) has shown for object extraposition in ENHG. Secondly, however, subjects may extrapose in order to receive a default sentence accent, which is most visible in the case of presentational constructions. This motivation does not affect objects, which may achieve the same prosodic goal without having to extrapose. The study has two major consequences: (1) subject extraposition in ENHG demonstrates that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic structure and information structural effect (cf. Féry 2007); and (2) the overall phenomenon of DP extraposition in ENHG fits into a broader set of crosslinguistic focus phenomena which demonstrate a subject-object asymmetry (cf. Hartmann and Zimmermann 2007, Skopeteas and Fanselow 2010), raising important questions about the relationship between argument structure and information structural notions.
Im Folgenden versuche ich auf einige relevante Triebkräfte aufmerksam zu machen, die in den Mischungsprozessen in den Inselmundarten der frühneuhochdeutschen Zeit in Mähren wirksam wurden. In diesem Zusammenhang ist noch darauf hinzuweisen, was bereits implizit angedeutet wurde, dass sich die Tendenzen zur Mischung in Mähren auch deswegen etwas anders gestalten als im Binnenland, weil es sich um eine Sprachinselproblematik handelt. […] Vorausschicken möchte ich allerdings noch zwei Bemerkungen: 1. Ich konzentriere mich mehr auf die Triebkräfte der Mischung als auf das – wenn auch sprachtheoretisch sehr wichtige, so doch sehr komplizierte – Verhältnis zwischen der Mischung und dem Sprachausgleich und 2. stehen in meinen Ausführungen mehr sprachexterne als sprachinterne Motivationen im Vordergrund.
The Early New High German period is characterized by the reduction of the former four-stage ablaut system (e. g. werfen inf. - warf pret.sg. - wurfen pret. pl. - geworfen past part.) into a three-stage system (werfen- warf-geworfen), involving the loss of the number distinction in the preterite. In earlier approaches this development has been analyzed as being triggered by the functional discrepancy between three tenses and four ablaut stages, or, as put forward by natural morphologists, by the adaptation of the strong verb system to the more natural weak verb pattern. This paper rejects these hypotheses and argues that the development is best attributed to the growing stem allomorphy in the verbal system (due to phonological changes) and the remarkable decrease in the token frequency of verbs in the preterite, which lead to the loss of the least relevant category distinction, i. e. number.