Grammaticalization Paths of English and High German Existential Constructions: A Corpus-based Study

Simone E. Pfenninger

Grammaticalization Paths of English and High German Existential Constructions: A Corpus-based Study
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Country
Switzerland
Published
8 June 2009
Pages
369
ISBN
9783034300216

Grammaticalization Paths of English and High German Existential Constructions: A Corpus-based Study

Simone E. Pfenninger

Existential constructions are a fundamental feature of many Indo-European languages, and constructions with non-referential subjects have developed in all of the latter, albeit at different stages in their histories.

High German does not feature a prototypical existential construction that is equivalent in syntactic and pragmatic function and semantic meaning to the English existential there-construction. How did a prototypical existential structure originate in English? Why is it that High German has never developed such a construction? Has it ever shown a tendency towards developing one? How did two closely related languages such as English and High German come to differ so much with respect to these constructions?

By means of investigating a variety of historical and contemporary data this study shows that not only semantic, pragmatic and syntactic factors are involved, which decide the choice of a certain construction, but also very much the more general different linguistic development that the two languages underwent in the course of time.

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