Home > Catalogue > Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale > 51 | 2017 > Verbal Mood in Early Old High German Relative Clauses

Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale | Vol. 51 | September 2017

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Research Article

Verbal Mood in Early Old High German Relative Clauses

Marco Coniglio    University of Göttingen    

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abstract

In contrast to Modern German, which has almost completely lost the use of the subjunctive in relative clauses, Old High German exhibits indicative/subjunctive mood alternations. In this paper, I will present a pilot study on the interaction of mood in early relative clauses with morphosyntactic and information/discourse-structural factors which are discussed in the cited literature and are assumed to influence the use of the subjunctive in relative clauses. The survey is based on a corpus of Old High German texts from the 8th and 9th centuries. Furthermore, a syntactic analysis will be sketched in order to explain the licensing of the subjunctive in Old High German relative clauses and the loss of mood alternation in the later stages of the language.

Published
Sept. 28, 2017
Accepted
March 21, 2017
Submitted
March 13, 2017
Language
EN

Keywords: Subjunctive • Indicative • Relative clauses • Old High German • Mood

permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/2499-1562/AnnOc-51-17-13

Copyright: © 2017 Marco Coniglio. 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.