Fulk’s Comparative Grammar offers an overview of and bibliographical guide to the study of the phonology and the inflectional morphology of the earliest Germanic languages, with particular attention to Gothic, Old Norse / Icelandic, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German, along with some attention to the more sparsely attested languages. The sounds and inflections of the oldest Germanic languages are compared, with a view to reconstructing the forms they took in Proto-Germanic and comparing those reconstructed forms with what is known of the Indo-European protolanguage. Students will find the book an informative introduction and a bibliographically instructive point of departure for intensive research in the numerous issues that remain profoundly contested in early Germanic language history.
The book examines the word order of two Old Germanic languages, Old English and Old High German, using a corpus containing samples of three text types: poetry, original prose and translated prose. Thanks to this methodology, it is possible to compare word order patterns in Old English and Old High German, eliminating differences which may be due to stylistic or technical reasons (rhythm, rhyme, Latin influences), as well as to see to what extent text type determines word order and to check whether this phenomenon is universal (triggering similar behaviour in both analysed languages). The book also disproves the hypothesis of the West Germanic syntax, presenting data which show that the word order of the two languages started to diversify already during the Old English/High German period, i. e. before the 11th century AD.
A concise and insightful guide to the study of Old High German, a predecessor language to modern German. This book is an ideal introduction for students of German language and culture, or anyone interested in the history of the Germanic peoples. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
This book is the first comprehensive corpus study of element order in Old English and Old High German, which brings to light numerous differences between these two closely related languages. The study’s innovative approach relies on translated texts, which allows the authors to tackle the problem of the apparent incomparability of OE and OHG textual records and to identify the areas of OE and OHG syntax potentially influenced by the Latin source texts. This is especially important from the point of view of OE research, where Latin is rarely considered to be a significant variable. The book’s profile and content is of direct interest to historical linguists working on OE and/or OHG (and Old Germanic languages in general), but it can also greatly benefit several other groups of researchers: scholars applying corpus methods to the study of dead languages, historical linguists generally, linguists researching element order as well as specialists in translation studies.
Based on the quantitative analysis of a large corpus of Old and Middle High German prose texts, this volume provides a first extensive overview on the syntactic properties of coordination structures featuring the coordinators inti/und and joh in Old and Middle High German and discusses potential analyses in a generative framework. After introducing the main properties of coordination structures in Modern Standard German in Chapters 1 and 2, the results of the corpus study are presented in Chapters 3-6. Chapter 3 focuses on the coordinators inti/und and joh, showing that coordination structures with both coordinators already exhibit the same characteristic types of ellipsis as well as the same parallelism of the conjuncts as their Modern Standard German counterparts. Chapters 4-6 each discuss one major aspect of diachronic change: verbal agreement with conjoined subject-NPs (Chapter 4), the conditions regarding the omission of referential subject-pronouns in clausal or verbal coordination structures (Chapter 5) and so-called ‘inversion after und’ (Chapter 6). The volume thus provides a deeper understanding of the syntax of coordination structures in both a synchronic and diachronic perspective for researchers and students.
This accessible introductory reference source surveys the linguistic and cultural background of the earliest known Germanic languages and examines their similarities and differences. The Languages covered include:Gothic Old Norse Old SaxonOld English Old Low Franconian Old High German Written in a lively style, each chapter opens with a brief cultural history of the people who used the language, followed by selected authentic and translated texts and an examination of particular areas including grammar, pronunciation, lexis, dialect variation and borrowing, textual transmission, analogy and drift.
Contents: Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk: PALC 2007: Where are we now? - Paul Rayson/Dawn Archer/Alistair Baron/Nicholas Smith: Travelling through time with corpus annotation software - Eugene H. Casad: Parsing texts and compiling a dictionary with shoebox - Belinda Maia/Rui Silva/Anabela Barreiro/Cecília Fróis: 'N-grams in search of theories' - Piotr Pęzik/Jung-jae Kim/Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann: MedEvi - A permuted concordancer for the biomedical domain - Patrick Hanks: Why the «word sense disambiguation problem» can't be solved, and what should be done instead - Rafał
This volume presents the first comprehensive generative account of the historical syntax of German. Leading scholars in the field survey a range of topics and offer new insights into multiple central aspects of clause structure and word order, including verb placement, adverbial connectives, pronominal syntax, and information-structural factors.
This volume focuses on the grammaticalization of the definite article in German. It contains eight empirically-based papers which examine individual stages of the grammaticalization path from its beginnings as a demonstrative to the definite article and beyond. Focusing on cognitive, pragmatic, semantic and syntactic factors, the contributions not only address the development from pragmatic to semantic definiteness, but also deal with functional and formal changes starting as soon as the linguistic unit has acquired the function of marking semantic definiteness. Based on corpora spanning the entire history of the German language, from Old High German (750-1050) to present-day German, the analyses challenge the traditional linear model of grammaticalization and provide alternative pathways. What all the contributions have in common is the idea that the main grammaticalization path is accompanied or crossed by several side roads which lead to different destinations such as preposition-article-clitics, generic usages or onymic articles.