Noun phrases in early Germanic languages

Kristin Bech   Alexander Pfaff  

Synopsis

On the premise that syntactic variation is constrained by factors that may not always be immediately obvious, this volume explores various perspectives on the nominal syntax in the early Germanic languages and the syntactic diversity they display. The fact that these languages are relatively well attested and documented allows for individual cases studies as well as comparative studies. Due to their well-observable common ancestry at the time of their earliest attestations, they moreover permit close-up comparative investigations into closely related languages. Besides the purely empirical aspects, the volume also explores the methodological side of diagnosing, classifying and documenting the details of syntactic diversity. The volume starts with a description by Alexander Pfaff and Gerlof Bouma of the principles underlying the Noun Phrases in Early Germanic Languages (NPEGL) database, before Alexander Pfaff presents the Patternization method for measuring syntactic diversity. Kristin Bech, Hannah Booth, Kersti Börjars, Tine Breban, Svetlana Petrova, and George Walkden carry out a pilot study of noun phrase variation in Old English, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and Old Saxon. Kristin Bech then considers the development of Old English noun phrases with quantifiers meaning ‘many’. Alexandra Rehn’s study is concerned with the inflection of stacked adjectives in Old High German and Alemannic. Old High German is also the topic of Svetlana Petrova’s study, which looks at inflectional patterns of attributive adjectives. With Hannah Booth’s contribution we move to Old Icelandic and the use of the proprial article as a topic management device. Juliane Tiemann investigates adjective position in Old Norwegian. Alexander Pfaff and George Walkden then take a broader view of adjectival articles in early Germanic, before Alexander Pfaff rounds off the volume with a study of a peculiar class of adjectives, the so-called positional predicates, which occur across the early Germanic languages.

Chapters

  • The NPEGL noun phrase database: design and construction
    Gerlof Bouma, Alexander Pfaff
    Chapter 1
  • How to measure syntactic diversity: Patternization – methods and algorithms
    Alexander Pfaff
    Chapter 2
  • Noun phrase modifiers in early Germanic: a comparative corpus study of Old English, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old Icelandic
    Kristin Bech, Hannah Booth, Kersti Börjars, Tine Breban, Svetlana Petrova, George Walkden
    Chapter 3
  • The Old English quantifiers fela ‘many’ and manig ‘many’, and Ælfric as a linguistic innovator
    Kristin Bech
    Chapter 4
  • A new perspective on parallel inflection with reference to Old High German and Alemannic
    Alexandra Rehn
    Chapter 5
  • On the distribution of the strong and weak adjectival inflection in Old High German. A corpus investigation
    Svetlana Petrova
    Chapter 6
  • Beyond given versus new: the proprial article in Old Icelandic
    Hannah Booth
    Chapter 7
  • Modifying variation: about the adjective position in Old Norwegian
    Juliane Tiemann
    Chapter 8
  • Adjectival articles in early Germanic
    Alexander Pfaff, George Walkden
    Chapter 9
  • Positional predicates in early Germanic
    Alexander Pfaff
    Chapter 10

Statistics

Noun phrases in early Germanic languages

Biographies

Kristin Bech

Kristin Bech is Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo. Her main field of interest is the history of English, in particular syntactic variation and change, and the relation between syntax and information structure. However, in the course of her work she has frequently been in contact with other languages: her previous project funded by the Research Council of Norway was concerned with word order and information structure in early Germanic and Romance languages, while this most recent project investigated noun phrases in early Germanic languages.

Alexander Pfaff

Alexander Pfaff works as a researcher at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart. His research interests include theoretical and descriptive linguistics (syntax, semantics, morphology), diachronic linguistics, mathematical and computational approaches to datasets, noun and adjective types, adjectival modification, relationality, referentiality, plurals, partitives, and other aspects of noun phrases with a strong empirical focus on (North) Germanic, especially Icelandic. Currently, he works on the DFG-funded project Partition and individuation in Germanic (PI: Eleonore Brandner) at the University of Stuttgart.

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Published

March 3, 2024
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Open Germanic Linguistics
Cite as
Bech, Kristin & Pfaff, Alexander (eds.). 2024. Noun phrases in early Germanic languages. (Open Germanic Linguistics 8). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10590737
Copyright (c) 2023 Kristin Bech, Alexander Pfaff

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Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-467-3

doi

10.5281/zenodo.10590737

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-98554-096-9

Physical Dimensions

180mm x 245mm