“Non-coordinating UND” in Middle and Early New High German
Even though it has been noted quite early that the conjunction UND may also serve as a relative/equative particle
or even a subjunction in Middle High German and Early New High German, corpus-based empirical studies are lacking so far. Based on new empirical data, I show that
non-coordinating UND originated in the Upper German dialect area during the 12th century, subsequently spreading to the Central German dialect area and
reaching the peak of its use in the 14th century. In contrast to recent literature, I argue that the non-coordinating use of the
conjunction originated from semantically and syntactically ambiguous constructions of the form UND-XP-VFIN. I also propose that
the earliest instances of the phenomenon are (adverbial) relative constructions and that the temporal and the equative function
developed via reanalysis of adverbial relative clauses with a temporal/modal head element.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Outline of the study
- 2.1Verb-position and ambiguous examples
- 2.2Syntactic classification
- 2.3The search queries in online corpora
- 3.Corpus data
- 3.1Reference corpus of Middle High German (ReM)
- 3.2Middle High German Conceptual Database (MHDBDB)
- 3.3Herzogenburger Urkunden (HZU)
- 3.4Chronological and geographical distribution
- 3.5Interim conclusion
- 4.Analysis: From coordinating conjunction to relative particle to equative particle and subjunction
- 4.1Syntactic structure of UND-relative clauses
- 4.2From coordinating conjunction to relative particle
- 4.3From relative particle to equative particle and subjunction
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
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Primary sources
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Secondary sources