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Part of
Morphological Variation: Theoretical and empirical perspectives
Edited by Antje Dammel and Oliver Schallert
[Studies in Language Companion Series 207] 2019
► pp. 283–310

Variation in non-finiteness and temporality from a canonical perspective

| LMU München

In this paper, I take widely varying data on the occurrence and acceptability of overt future infinitives in German as evidence for their current emergence. Such a change, however, seems to conflict with a (tentative) prediction from Canonical Typology: Temporally marked infinitives are less canonical than temporally unmarked ones but change is expected to lead to the more canonical. The aim of the contribution is to save the prediction by bringing the canonical notion of non-finiteness closer to the original core of this framework.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology and data discussion
    • 2.1Finiteness in German
    • 2.2Variation in German (non-)finiteness
  • 3.Theoretical framework
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Abbreviations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 27 June 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.207.10rei
References

Corpora

Used

WebCorp Live
[URL] (last accessed for this study on 4 November 2014).
DeReKo = Deutsches Referenzkorpus
(‘German reference corpus’) [URL] (last accessed for this study on 4 November 2014).

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