Sprachausbau im Sprachkontakt: Syntaktischer Wandel im Altschwedischen
Abstract
Das Schwedische wird im Spätmittelalter zur Schriftsprache ausgebaut und zwar in einer mehrsprachigen Gesellschaft, in der Latein und Niederdeutsch einen prägenden Einfluss haben. Zugleich ist im Schwedischen dieser Zeit erheblicher Sprachwandel zu beobachten. Welche Rolle spielt der Sprachkontakt zum Lateinischen für die syntaktische Entwicklung des Altschwedischen? Wie wirken sich die kommunikativen Rahmenbedingungen der Schriftlichkeit im Wandel aus? Wie interagieren beide Faktoren miteinander? Wie lässt sich diese komplexe sprachliche Situation aus der Perspektive moderner kontakt- und soziolinguistischer sowie sprachtheoretischer Modelle erfassen? Diese Studie behandelt solche Fragen einerseits in einer theoretischen Diskussion des Sprachausbaus im Altschwedischen, andererseits in einer detaillierten quantitativen und qualitativen Analyse syntaktischer Sprachwandelphänomene auf der Basis eines eigens erstellten digitalen Korpus altschwedischer Texte mit syntaktischer Annotation.
... For a comprehensive discussion and analysis of syntactic innovations in Written Old Swedish see Höder (2010). herited system of Old Swedish is still quite intact around 1300, though slowly giving way to a more agglutinative system as found in Modern Swedish. ...
... love, which is the highest of all virtues' (Bir 149) The emergence of pronominal relativisers can be interpreted as an instance of grammatical replication (Höder 2010: 218ff.), presumably reinforced by the increasingly common practice of formally equivalent translation from Latin sources (cf. ...
... Quantitative analyses show that appositive relative clauses in Latin sources are usually rendered as pronominal relative clauses in Old Swedish translations (Höder 2010: 216f.) ...
Language contact phenomena are often described with reference to their effect on the monolingual systems of the varieties involved, both in historical and in contact linguistics. This contribution argues that an essentially multilingual perspective on these phenomena is more adequate. Bilingual speakers in stable bilingual groups create a common system for all their languages, incorporating both interlingual links and language -unspecified elements along with language-specific structures. In a construction grammar analysis, such systems as well as changes within this type of system can be conceptualised as interlingual constructional networks, which are established, stored, and processed in exactly the same way as monolingual grammars.
... Generell ist jedoch nicht mit einer produktiven Dreisprachigkeit der Bevölkerung zu rechnen, sondern – je nach Herkunft, sozialem Status und Bildungsstand – mit einer unterschiedlich ausgeprägten produktiven und rezeptiven Kompetenz in den allochthonen Sprachen neben der Beherrschung der schwedischen Volkssprache (vgl. Braunmüller 2005, Höder 2010: 28ff.). ...
... Zur Semantik und zum Wandel der altschwedischen Subjunktionen vgl. auch Höder (2010: 139ff.) sowie Kotcheva (2002). ...
„Subordination“, ein grundlegender Begriff für syntaktische Fragestellungen, wird häufig ohne genaue Definition gebraucht. Dieser Beitrag zeigt Möglichkeiten einer Operationalisierung für die Analyse eines altschwedischen Korpus. Dabei erlauben die gewählten Merkmale eine Annäherung an die Komplexität möglicher Subordinationstypen und -grade. Berücksichtigt werden sowohl strukturelle Eigenschaften der Nebensätze selbst als auch die hierarchischen Relationen zu den in Frage kommenden Matrixsätzen. In einer detaillierten Untersuchung auf dieser Grundlage zeigt sich die altschwedische Subordination dabei als sehr heterogenes Phänomen, dem ein dichotomer Subordinationsbegriff nicht gerecht wird.
... During this period, a range of (mainly syntactic) constructions were replicated from the Latin model, which resulted in the emergence of innovative structural patterns in the written variety of Old Swedish (clause-linking strategies, subjunction inventories, relative clause types, and more; cf. Höder 2009Höder , 2010Höder and Zeevaert 2008; for the role of translation in such replication processes, see Kranich, Becher and Höder 2011). Most of these innovations were restricted to (or at least specifically dominant in) the written language, a restriction that is still perceivable in today's Swedish, where such constructions are either archaic or stylistically marked as more or less formal and thus avoided in everyday spoken language. ...
... 8 This semantic distinction is strikingly parallel to the tendency in Modern Swedish to differ-7 The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation (HaCOSSA) is a digital corpus of Old Swedish texts containing c. 150,000 words, compiled and annotated at the Collaborative Research Centre on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg (Project H3: Scandinavian syntax in a multilingual setting). The corpus and the annotation scheme have been described in Höder (2010), and a more detailed documentation will be published online via the Zentrum für Sprachkorpora in Hamburg in 2011. 8 Note that the corresponding English translations of such terms are often Latinate -this illustrates another possible strategy of differentiating concrete and metaphorical concepts, introduced by bilingual speakers. ...
Translations represent a specific type of language contact. A text is translated from a source language (SL) into a target language (TL) by a bilingual individual, and the product of this process can exhibit an impact of features of the SL on the TT — a phenomenon known as interference. If the same type of interference occurs repeatedly in translations from a SL, the new feature might not remain limited to translated texts. Under favourable circumstances, it might spread to monolingual text production, introducing innovations into non-translated texts produced in the TL.
The contribution addresses the problem of reconstructing the spoken language of the Old Swedish period (13th–16th c.) on the basis of written corpora. It proposes two approaches: an operational one (via identifying specifically written features) and an indirect one (via fictional orality).
Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967) was one of the founding fathers of both contact linguistics and sociolinguistics. Among his best-known works are his 1953 monograph "Languages in contact", his 1954 article "Is a structural dialectology possible?", and the seminal paper on "Empircal foundations for a theory of language change" (co-authored with William Labov and Marvin Herzog, published posthumously in 1968). Besides giving a brief biographical sketch, my contribution concentrates on two aspects that make Weinreich’s classical texts worth re-reading as well as relevant for my own work dealing with a construction grammar model for language contact phenomena. Firstly, there is no fundamental difference between language contact and dialect contact; both can be tackled with the same theoretical and analytical tools (in contrast to the later establishment of contact linguistics and sociolinguistics as rather autonomous subdisciplines). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Weinreich’s work emphasises the systematicity of language contact, both in its relation to the social parameters of the language contact situation and in the inter-systemic relations between the different languages involved, which are represented by diasystematic links.
Recent studies in typology and historical linguistics have yielded new insights into the geographical distribution and diffusion of linguistic phenomena. Within Europe, several linguistic areas of different types and sizes have been proposed and discussed, including a European area (Standard Average European, henceforth SAE). Such claims are largely based on the grammars of the respective standard languages. In this contribution, I argue that we need (a) to focus also on intralingual variation in order to fully understand both the synchronic facts and the diachronic processes behind the formation of linguistic areas, and (b) to systematically include non-standard dialects or varieties in areal linguistic studies in order to gain a more representative empirical basis. Moreover, we have to take (c) dialect convergence across language boundaries into account, which I consider to be an important contact linguistic process in the emergence of areal phenomena. This view is supported by three case studies on areal phenomena in Northern European languages and dialects, investigating non-standard verbal constructions, dialectal phonological features, and medium-specific syntactic traits.
The synchronic and diachronic variability of historical texts poses substantial difficulties in the annotation and analysis of historical corpora. One main problem is that ongoing language change and particularly grammaticalisation phenomena lead to syntactic ambiguity. This contribution shows how such issues are dealt with in the TEI-based Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation (HaCOSSA). The focus is on the development of strictly operational , explicitly defined, largely theory-neutral, language-specific and diachronic-ally broad annotation categories.
This book is an introduction to syntactic theory and analysis which can be used for both introductory and advanced courses in theoretical syntax. Offering an alternative to the standard generative view of the subject, it deals with the major issues in syntax with which all theories are concerned. It presents syntactic phenomena from a wide range of languages and introduces students to the major typological issues that syntactic theories must address. A generous number of exercises is included, which provide practice with the concepts introduced in the text and in addition expose the student to in-depth analysis of data from many languages. Each chapter contains suggestions for further reading which encompass work from many theoretical perspectives. A separate teaching guide is available.
This series of Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction. For "classic" linguistics there appears to be a need for a review of the state of the art which will provide a reference base for the rapid advances in research undertaken from a variety of theoretical standpoints, while in the more recent branches of communication science the handbooks will give researchers both an verview and orientation. To attain these objectives, the series will aim for a standard comparable to that of the leading handbooks in other disciplines, and to this end will strive for comprehensiveness, theoretical explicitness, reliable documentation of data and findings, and up-to-date methodology. The editors, both of the series and of the individual volumes, and the individual contributors, are committed to this aim. The languages of publication are English, German, and French. The main aim of the series is to provide an appropriate account of the state of the art in the various areas of linguistics and communication science covered by each of the various handbooks; however no inflexible pre-set limits will be imposed on the scope of each volume. The series is open-ended, and can thus take account of further developments in the field. This conception, coupled with the necessity of allowing adequate time for each volume to be prepared with the necessary care, means that there is no set time-table for the publication of the whole series. Each volume will be a self-contained work, complete in itself. The order in which the handbooks are published does not imply any rank ordering, but is determined by the way in which the series is organized; the editor of the whole series enlist a competent editor for each individual volume. Once the principal editor for a volume has been found, he or she then has a completely free hand in the choice of co-editors and contributors. The editors plan each volume independently of the others, being governed only by general formal principles. The series editor only intervene where questions of delineation between individual volumes are concerned. It is felt that this (modus operandi) is best suited to achieving the objectives of the series, namely to give a competent account of the present state of knowledge and of the perception of the problems in the area covered by each volume. © 2002 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. All rights reserved.
This article examines urban ordinances of the 13th-16th centuries written in Middle Low German. The focus is on complex constructions with conditional semantics, which are constitutive for the urban ordinances in the period under study. It is shown that under the assumption of a coordination-subordination-continuum a more differentiated analysis of subordinated constructions becomes possible. It is argued that the observable syntactic change is essentially due to the fact that the ordinances are no longer read out publicly.
Introduction: internal and external factors in change It is true, I think, that in what might be called the dominant tradition in historical linguistics, it has been assumed that languages change within themselves as part of their nature as languages. The ‘external’ agency of speaker/listeners and the influence of ‘society’ in language change have tended to be seen as secondary and, sometimes, as not relevant at all. Roger Lass has been a prominent, but balanced, defender of the traditional view. He has correctly pointed out (1980: 120) that in the tradition, it has been assumed that it is languages that change and not (necessarily) speakers who change languages. More recently (1990: 370), he has commented that language change is not something that speakers ‘do’ to their language, and that ‘endogenous change is part of the nature of the beast’ (1997: 208). He has also (largely correctly) suggested in various publications that speaker-based explanations have been unsatisfactory because of the attribution to speakers of qualities that they may not actually have. In some such accounts the speakers appealed to are disembodied abstractions who can be made to ‘do’ almost anything the researcher wants them to. Much more generally, however, the idea of endogenous or internally triggered change is so deeply embedded in our subject that it feeds into what can be called the discourse of historical linguistics. In this discourse, individual languages are typically presented as changing within themselves rather than being changed through the agency of speaker/listeners. © Cambridge University Press 2004 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Sprachen verändern sich im Laufe der Zeit. Gerade der Lautwandel ist
seit dem 19. Jahrhundert in der historischen Linguistik intensiv erforscht
worden. Wir verfügen deshalb heute über enorme Kenntnisse in der
Lautgeschichte einzelner Sprachen. Aber wie können lautliche Verände-
rungen adäquat beschrieben werden? Wodurch werden sie ausgelöst?
Wie laufen sie im Detail ab? Welche Rolle spielen dabei inner- und
außersprachliche Faktoren? Kann Lautwandel erklärt werden, und wenn
ja, wie? Bei solchen Fragen bestehen noch immer erhebliche Differenzen
zwischen Vertretern unterschiedlicher Theorien, eine Synthese ist derzeit
nicht in Sicht.
Der Autor vertritt den Standpunkt, dass einander widersprechende The-
orien nicht einfach koexistieren können, sondern miteinander konkurrie-
ren. Es muss also ein Vergleichsmaßstab entwickelt werden, der nicht
nur eine Gegenüberstellung, sondern auch eine Bewertung verschiede-
ner Modelle erlaubt. Daher wird in diesem Buch eine Annäherung an
entsprechende theorieunabhängige Kriterien versucht. Dies geschieht
anhand einiger klassischer Theorien zum Lautwandel.
Die Modelle werden zunächst kontrastiv aus einer wissenschaftsge-
schichtlichen Perspektive dargestellt. Dabei werden Lautwandeltheorien
von den Junggrammatikern über strukturalistische und generative An-
sätze bis zur modernen Variationslinguistik diskutiert. Anschließend wird
analysiert, wie der Wandel jeweils beschrieben und wie er erklärt wird:
Wie verhalten sich die Beschreibungskategorien der einzelnen Modelle
zu den phonetischen Daten, auf welchem Abstraktionsniveau wird also
operiert? Welche Rolle spielen jeweils Beschreibungssystem und Fach-
terminologie? Welches Verhältnis besteht zwischen Erklärungsanspruch
und Erklärungswert? Was sagen einzelne Modelle tatsächlich aus? Wie
verlässlich sind diese Aussagen? Nach welchen Kriterien kann man die
Vor- und Nachteile einzelner Theorien bewerten? Und schließlich: Welche
Forderungen an die künftige Forschung zum Lautwandel lassen sich aus
der Analyse ableiten – und richten sich diese Forderungen nur an ein-
zelne oder an alle Forschungsrichtungen?
Als Einstieg in das Thema des Laut- bzw. Sprachwandels ist dieses Buch
auch gerade für Studierende geeignet. Sprachwissenschaftliche und
phonetische Grundkenntnisse sind für das Verständnis ausreichend.
Cognitive Grammar is a radical alternative to the formalist theories that have dominated linguistic theory during the last half century. Instead of an objectivist semantics based on truth conditions or logical deduction, it adopts a conceptualist semantics based on human experience, our capacity to construe situations in alternate ways, and processes of imagination and mental construction. A conceptualist semantics makes possible an account of grammar which views it as being inherently meaningful (rather than an autonomous formal system). Grammar forms a continuum with lexicon, residing in assemblies of symbolic structures, i.e. pairings of conceptual structures and symbolizing phonological structures. Thus all grammatical elements are meaningful. It is shown in detail how Cognitive Grammar handles the major problems a theory of grammar has to deal with: grammatical classes, constructions, the relationship of grammar and lexicon, the capturing of regularities, and imposition of the proper restrictions. It is further shown how the framework applies to central domains of language structure: deixis, nominal structure, clausal structure, and complex sentences. Consideration is also given to discourse, the temporal dimension of grammar, and what it reveals about cognitive processes and the construction of our mental world.
This book investigates the nature of generalizations in language, drawing parallels between our linguistic knowledge and more general conceptual knowledge. The book combines theoretical, corpus, and experimental methodology to provide a constructionist account of how linguistic generalizations are learned, and how cross-linguistic and language-internal generalizations can be explained. Part I argues that broad generalizations involve the surface forms in language, and that much of our knowledge of language consists of a delicate balance of specific items and generalizations over those items. Part II addresses issues surrounding how and why generalizations are learned and how they are constrained. Part III demonstrates how independently needed pragmatic and cognitive processes can account for language-internal and cross-linguistic generalizations, without appeal to stipulations that are specific to language.
The Handbook of Historical Linguistics provides a detailed account of the numerous issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics, the area of linguistics most directly concerned with language change as well as past language states. Contains an extensive introduction that places the study of historical linguistics in its proper context within linguistics and the historical sciences in general. Covers the methodology of historical linguistics and presents sophisticated overviews of the principles governing phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic change. Includes contributions from the leading specialists in the field.
This paper outlines the basic facts of Swedish clause-level word order, in particular the distribution of the verb-second (V2) phenomenon. A sample of other (Germanic and non-Germanic) V2 languages is discussed, and possible correlates of embedded V2 are explored. Finally, it is claimed that cross-linguistic facts suggest that embedded V2 does not involve recursion of a discrete category C (the prototypical complementizer position), but rather that what is referred to as C in the generative V2 literature is a trivial clustering of syntactic features onto a single (unlabelled) head.
