Word Order and Discourse Structure in the Early Modern Period

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Ulrike Demske
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 456973946

This project deals with the relationship between word order and discourse structure in Early New High German, which is systematically different from that in preceding or subsequent periods of German language history. On the basis of a broad corpus of texts from the 15th and 16th centuries, it is first shown that certain word order phenomena can be interpreted neither as relics of originally productive word order rules nor as Latinisms, but as expressions of discourse-structural factors. The narrative texts of the Early Modern Period are particularly suitable for an investigation of this connection, because the prose novel as a genre was newly emerging at this time and there were therefore no conventionalized narrative patterns. Since the linguistic standardization of the German language only gradually began, it can be assumed that the linguistic means used reflect a broad spectrum of early modern language usage. The increasing reduction in linguistic diversity can be seen in the study of novels from subsequent periods in the history of German. In the current project, the relationship between word order and discourse structure is examined focussing on two phenomena: (i) asymmetry of main and subordinate clauses and (ii) texting strategies at the left periphery of the sentence. In the fifteen-month extension of the project applied for here, the question of the influence of verbal inflection categories on the phenomena areas will be included as an additional parameter in the individual corpus studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants