LINGUIST List 25.2293
Sat
May 24 2014
Review: Germanic;
Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics;
Typology: Diewald, Kahlas-Tarkka & Wischer
(2013)
Editor for this issue:
Rajiv Rao <rajivlinguistlist.org>
Date: 10-Mar-2014
From: Bev Thurber
<b.thurber
shimer.edu>
Subject: Comparative Studies
in Early Germanic Languages
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Book announced at
http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-4424.html
EDITOR: Gabriele Diewald
EDITOR: Leena Kahlas-Tarkka
EDITOR: Ilse Wischer
TITLE: Comparative Studies in Early Germanic
Languages
SUBTITLE: With a focus on verbal categories
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Language Companion
Series 138
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Bev Thurber, Shimer College
SUMMARY
This book contains an introduction by the
editors plus twelve papers presented at the
16th International Conference on English
Historical Linguistics in Pécs, Hungary in
August 2010 during a session called
“Contrastive study of the verbal categories and
their grammaticalisation in Old English and Old
High German.” While the papers focus on one or
both of these two languages, later stages of
English and German are also discussed, as are
other Germanic languages, including Gothic. The
contents of the book are as follows:
The introduction to the book, written by
Gabriele Diewald, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, and Ilse
Wischer, sets the papers in context, both
linguistically and methodologically. They begin
by describing the general development of verbal
categories from Proto-Indo-European to
Germanic, and then mention grammaticalization
studies as “the red thread that unites all
investigations” in the volume (p. 4). Next, the
historical corpora used in subsequent papers
are summarized. The introduction ends by
classifying the papers by which verbal
categories they address and summarizing each
one briefly.
The papers are arranged so that ones examining
similar verbal categories are clustered
together, and papers that connect or lie on the
border of two verbal categories are between
papers focusing on each of those two
categories. The first four papers involve the
passive voice and issues related to it.
“*HAITAN in Gothic and Old English,” by Robert
A. Cloutier, compares the use of *HAITAN in
five kinds of constructions in Gothic, Early
Old English, and Late Old English corpora. The
author identifies a few innovations in the use
of `hātan' in Old English and verbs that
competed with `haitan' in Gothic. The Greek
originals of the Gothic texts help Cloutier
identify competing verbs by finding Greek verbs
that are translated as `haitan' as well as
other Gothic verbs. The most common use of the
verb in all three corpora is found to be in
transitive naming constructions, and those that
generally use passive voice.
In “Incipient Grammaticalisation: Sources of
passive constructions in Old High German and
Old English,” Robert Mailhammer and Elena
Smirnova examine the development of the passive
in English and German by looking at
constructions in which ‘be’ and ‘become’ are
used with past participles in Old English and
Old High German. They show that these
constructions need not have been interpreted as
passives in the earliest stages of these
languages. They also argue that transitivity is
important in whether to read such constructions
as passives, and that the two verbs are used as
aspect operators in these situations.
“Passive auxiliaries in English and German:
Decline versus grammaticalisation of bounded
language use,” by Peter Petré, follows up on
the last one by examining the differences
between passive constructions in Old English,
early Middle English, and two Old High German
texts. The author shows that both English and
German originally used both ‘be’ and ‘become’
to build passives. He attributes the divergent
development in the two languages to the way the
two languages’ systems of boundedness evolved.
German evolved a bounded system and therefore
chose `werden' (to become) while English’s
unbounded system uses `to be.'
“Causative `habban' in Old English: Tracing the
Development of a Budding Construction,” by
Matti Kilpiö, describes the origin of the
causative use of `have,' as in the example `I
had my shoes repaired,' using data from the
Dictionary of Old English Corpus. The author
goes through all 20 instances (19 unique; one
is repeated in two manuscripts) of causative
`habban' in the corpus and classifies them
according to chronology, dialect, syntactic
properties, and semantic properties before
analyzing all of them as causatives. The paper
concludes with an explanation of how this
construction could have arisen as a process
internal to Old English.
Kilpiö’s paper forms a bridge to the next set
of papers by linking passive voice and
modality. The next set of papers is loosely
about modality, including links between
modality, evidentiality, and futurity, as well
as futurity itself.
“Remembering `(ge)munan': The rise and decline
of a potential modal,” by Matthias Eitelmann,
examines the history of the Old English verb
`(ge)munan' (to think about or remember) as a
preterite-present verb and as a modal verb.
Eitelmann begins by analyzing the meaning of
`(ge)munan,' which he finds denotes a different
sort of remembering than is used today. In the
following discussion of the word’s history, Old
Norse influences are shown to have contributed
to an increase in the verb’s use. The author
also uses dictionaries to compare Modern
English renditions of `(ge)munan' and examines
occurrences of the verb’s descendant in English
through the 19th century. All of this data is
used to explain the evolution and eventual
decline of `(ge)munan' in English.
“The emergence of modal meanings from `haben'
with `zu'-infinitives,” by Anne Jäger, examines
the writings of Notker to determine how `haben'
+ 'zu'-infinitive developed as a modal
construction. Jäger describes four different
uses of this construction, which correspond
with stages of grammaticalization. The first
three are attested in Notker’s work, a result
which Jäger uses to push the timeline of
grammaticalization back from Middle High German
to late Old High German. A comparison of
Notker’s translations with the Latin originals
allows Jäger to argue that this construction is
not simply a word-for-word translation from
Latin.
In “`Hearsay' and lexical evidentials in Old
Germanic languages, with focus on Old English,”
Olga Timofeeva collects examples of statements
involving `(ge)hieran' plus an infinitive of
utterance (i.e., with or without an intervening
noun in the accusative case) in Old English and
equivalent examples in Old Norse, Old Saxon,
Old High German, and Gothic in order to study
how these languages handle direct auditory
perception and hearsay evidence. Timofeeva
shows that the `(ge)hieran' + ACI (`accusativus
cum infinitivo') is used to describe direct
auditory perception, while `(ge)hieran' +
infinitive is generally used for hearsay
evidence. The similarity between all of these
languages suggests that this pattern has its
origin in Proto-Germanic.
The next two papers fit loosely into the
modality category by addressing aspects of
futurity. “Markers of Futurity in Old High
German and Old English: A Comparative
Corpus-Based Study,” by Gabriele Diewald and
Ilse Wischer, uses Old High German and Old
English corpora to compare the emergence of the
future markers `werden' (to become) in German
and `shall/will' in English. The corpora were
made up of selected texts: seven German texts
from between 790 and 1155 and eight English
texts from between 880 and 1120. The semantic
aspects of the two different types of
construction are discussed. Diewald and Wischer
identify factors internal to both languages
that led them onto different paths in
developing this construction.
The next paper, “The Verb `to be' in the “West
Saxon Gospels” and the “Lindisfarne Gospels,””
by Christine Bolze, compares the use of present
indicative and subjunctive forms of Old English
`bēon' in gospels from two different dialects.
The emphasis is on when forms derived from the
Indo-European root `*bheu-' are used rather
than forms from the other roots that contribute
to the paradigm of `to be' in Old English. The
results confirm that present indicative
`b'-forms are generally used to indicate
futurity. In the subjunctive, this remains true
for West Saxon, but Northumbrian’s lack of
`b'-forms in the subjunctive results in
frequent double glosses combining a subjunctive
`s'-form with an indicative `b'-form.
The last few papers do not have an overarching
theme, but they connect to the preceding papers
and to each other in different ways. The first
of these, “Aspectual properties of the verbal
prefix `a'- in Old English with reference to
Gothic,” by Vlatko Broz, examines the meaning
of this verbal prefix by looking at its
etymology and comparing its use in Old English
to the use of cognate prefixes in Gothic. Some
comparisons to Modern English and Croatian are
also made. Croatian is used as an example of a
language with prefixes that work similarly to
Old English `a'-. Broz concludes that the
prefix was originally used to mark aspect and
was gradually grammaticalized into nothing.
“`Ϸǣr wæs' vs. `ϸâr was': Old English and Old
High German existential constructions with
adverbs of place,” by Simone E. Pfenninger,
examines the development of these similar
constructions in Old English and Old High
German by analyzing their occurrences in
selected texts in both languages. As the two
languages developed, syntactic differences in
the constructions arose. This resulted in the
different existential constructions present in
the modern version of the languages. This paper
continues the theme of similar constructions in
the older languages that evolved in different
ways that can be seen in several of the other
papers in this volume.
The final paper, “On gain and loss of verbal
categories in language contact: Old English vs.
Old High German,” by Theo Vennemann, is
comprised of three parts. First, the author
compares the verbal systems of
Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic, and
Phoenician, and argues that a Phoenician
language substrate was instrumental in
selecting which Indo-European verbal categories
were retained in Germanic. In the brief second
section, he summarizes innovations common to
Old English and Old High German. The third and
longest section summarizes a variety of Old
English innovations that can be attributed to
Celtic and/or Semitic influence. Most of this
section is spent discussing the dual copula
paradigm in the West Germanic languages.
The book concludes with an index.
EVALUATION
This volume is a coherent collection of
detailed studies relating to verbal categories
in Germanic. A broad range of verbal categories
is addressed, but the most common one is the
passive voice, addressed by the first four
papers in the collection. This is followed by
modality and the future tense (two papers
each). Evidentiality, aspect, and existential
constructions are each the main focus of one of
the papers. The collection concludes with
Vennemann’s paper on verbal categories in
general. The broader focus of this final paper
makes it a fitting conclusion to the
collection.
Of the Germanic languages, the main focus is on
Old English, which all the papers except for
Jäger’s address. A strong secondary focus is on
Old High German, addressed by Jäger’s paper and
five others. Gothic comes in third, with three
papers addressing it in comparison to Old
English. There are also references to later
stages of English and German, other Germanic
languages, and Croatian (in Broz’s paper).
Several of the papers address the divergent
development of English and German. The papers
by Mailhammer and Smirnova, Petré, Diewald and
Wischer, Pfenninger, and Vennemann show how
selected verbal forms that differ in Modern
English and German descended from a common
ancestor. The emphasis on Old English and Old
High German links this variety of papers into a
coherent volume.
Within the scope of verbal categories, the
volume is tied together by the theoretical idea
of grammaticalization and the practical use of
historical corpora. All of the papers address
grammaticalization in some way, and the use of
corpora is prominent in many of the papers. The
volume looks to the future by stressing that
there is a great deal to be done in writing the
details of how the Germanic languages developed
grammatically. The authors of the papers in
this volume frequently include suggestions for
future research in the form of follow-up
studies.
The editors describe this volume as containing
three different types of combinations: i.
combinations of data,in the form of comparing
different languages; ii.combined theoretical
approaches to account for the complexity of
language change; and iii. combined methods,
including those from both social and natural
sciences. The editors’ overview is an accurate
description of how the papers fit together.
They address a variety of verbal categories
using different approaches. Each one is a
self-contained study of a very specific
phenomenon that fills a gap in the scholarship.
As such, they will primarily be of interest to
those specialists who are particularly
interested in Germanic verbal categories.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
B. A. Thurber is an Assistant Professor of
Humanities and Natural Sciences at Shimer
College in Chicago. She is interested in
historical linguistics.
Page Updated: 24-May-2014