The development of sentence internal capitalization of the first letter of nouns in German - a corpus-linguistic study of the interaction of cognitive-semantic and syntactic factors

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Renata Szczepaniak
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 228096696

The topic of our project is the development of sentence-internal capitalization of words (SIC) in German. From earlier studies we know that the decisive period for the extension of capital letters falls into Early New High German (ENHG) from 14th until 17th century. In our approach, we will explain this phenomenon by the interaction of cognitive-semantic and syntactic factors. Both dimensions will be systematically mapped on each other. The goal of the project is to show that the extension of the capital letters was motivated by cognitive-semantic categories such as animacy and individualization and took place according to semantic (degree of agentivity) and syntactic functions (subject, object, etc.). Although the development of SIC took place in different areas at different times, we assume that the same cognitive-semantic and syntactic principles were at work. That includes that the order of extensional phases is roughly the same. Hence, our approach does not necessarily rely on the standardizing role of individual chanceries, but rather foregrounds cognitive factors. We, thus, interpret the SIC from a grammaticalization perspective, as this process starts out with a pragmatic use of capital letters. In other words, we assume that initially capitalization has the function of emphasizing relevant information. It spreads over scalar semantic categories including animacy (animated > unanimated), individualization (definite > indefinite; singular > plural), agentivity (agent > patient), and syntactic categories (subject > object > adverbial). In the course of time, these factors more and more disappear and are substituted by a merely syntactic motivation, i.e. that the head of the nominal phrase is capitalized, independently of its meaning. Our hypotheses rely on a database consisting 56 ENHG protocols of interrogation of witches from 1570-1665.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants