Home > Catalogue > Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale > 52 | 2018 > Mood Alternations in Old High German Subordinate Clauses

Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale | Vol. 52 | September 2018

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Research Article

Mood Alternations in Old High German Subordinate Clauses

Marco Coniglio    University of Göttingen    

Roland Hinterhölzl    Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italia    

Svetlana Petrova    Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Deutschland    

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abstract

In this paper, Old High German mood alternations in the different types of subordinate clauses (complement, adverbial and relative clauses) are discussed. The use of the subjunctive in subordinate clauses is notoriously more frequent than in Modern German and has not yet been thoroughly investigated. Based on a comprehensive corpus study, the paper will show that the licensing conditions for the subjunctive in Old High German are determined by notions such as veridicality and – in relative contexts – specificity. These conditions are thus similar (but not always identical) to those observed for Modern Greek and Romance languages. Furthermore, a syntactic analysis is provided in order to account for the licensing of the subjunctive in each type of subordinate clause.

Published
Sept. 28, 2018
Accepted
Aug. 14, 2018
Submitted
Aug. 3, 2018
Language
EN

Keywords: Mood alternation • Complement clause • Adverbial clause • Old High German • Relative clause • Veridicality • Corpus study • Specificity • Subjunctive • Indicative • Subordinate clause

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/AnnOc/2499-1562/2018/01/001

Copyright: © 2018 Marco Coniglio, Roland Hinterhölzl, Svetlana Petrova. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.