ECLASS:
> Participants will receive a link for an e-class & dropbox.
How grammar is created and shaped: Grammaticalization processes in the history of German
The famous 19th-century linguist August Schleicher coined the slogan ‚Wenn wir nicht wissen, wie etwas geworden ist, so kennen wir es nicht’ – Unless we know how something came into being, we do not understand it.
In this masterclass we will try to understand how grammatical items and categories develop in natural language. The case studies will be taken from the history of German and cover phenomena from central grammatical areas such as tense, aspect, mood/modality, negation and sentence structure. To give an example: In Old and Middle High German texts, we can observe the rise of the periphrastic perfect of the type ‘haben’ + past participle: ‘Jemand hat einen Baum gepflanzt’. How does this new grammatical form arise? Is it a loan from Latin/Romance? If not, how come that both Germanic and Romance languages converged in this type of grammatical innovation? (see also Fr. ‘Quelqu'un a planté un arbre’ or En. ‘Someone has planted a tree').
The case studies will provide snapshots on the complexity of grammatical change and its underlying mechanisms (and thus vitiate Schleicher’s Darwinian view of language decay, of course). They will be discussed from different theoretical perspectives, formal and functionalist. The role of language contact and language acquisition in grammaticalization processes will also be addressed.
