Natürlicher syntaktischer Wandel. Epistemizität als Drehscheibe der kategorialen. Innovation. Oder: in S. wird es (wohl) gerade schneien

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of grammatical innovation in general, with special focus on the German language in particular. The main interest is concentrated on the grammaticalization phases of the syntactic variants of epistemic modality in German.

The theoretical background is offered by Markedness Theory within the broader frame of Naturalness Theory (NT). The main postulates are derived from the proposition of NT (Mayerthaler, Dressler, Wurzel, Panagl, Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology, John Benjamins, 1987), which claims that grammatical/language variants that are more natural are less marked and consequently are developed later in the process of language evolution than less marked and consequently more natural grammatical/ structural variants. The latter become productive earlier within the innovation processes of languages.

According to the Slovene Model of Natural Syntax, it is claimed that the Markedness Level of the Microgrammatical Context of the observed grammatical categories or structures shows systematic sensitivity in correlation with the functional complexity of the structure involved and/or the phase of grammaticalization: Higher functional complexity and/or earlier stage or phase of grammaticalization shows a positive correlation with higher markedness degrees of the microgrammatical context of constructions.

As concrete examples of the above-mentioned theoretical postulate, we present the syntactic variants for epistemic modality in German (expressed by modal verbs, by würde-constructions, and by werden+infinitive constructions).

Each of the observed syntactic variants forms a separate sample. All samples are compared on the basis of analyses of the Microgrammatical Context with which they collocate (person, number, tense, voice, transitivity etc.).

Statistical analyses of the linguistic data confirm that there is a clearly marked interdependence between functional complexity, age of the constructions, and the markedness of their microgrammatical contexts. Interstructural relations and the direction of further innovative development in a certain categorical spectrum can be derived from the obtained data.