The German geschweige denn construction
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Mechthild Habermann
Abstract
The corresponding German construction to English let alone is geschweige denn with a meaning of ‘and even more/less so’. For present-day German, the construction is described as a coordinating conjunction, the use of which is tied to certain usage conditions, such as negative contexts. The construction is idiomatic and can be described as a form-function pairing in a Construction Grammar framework. This paper describes the origin and development of the idiomatic construction from a diachronic perspective. The data analyzed comes from the core corpus of the German Text Archive (Deutsches Textarchiv; DTA), occasionally complemented by the extension corpora of the DTA. It is shown that the construction evolves from verb phrases such as ich geschweige (‘I remain silent’), which are often used with a genitive complement or a dass-clause complement (‘that-clause’). One crucial aspect of the development of the coordinating conjunction is the loss of the filling of the nominative complement, usually ich (‘I’), with geschweige and the loss of ge- prefixes in inflected verb forms, which gradually leads to a change of the verb form to ich schweige, while the conjunction fossilizes the form prefixed with ge-. Furthermore, over time, the coordinating conjunction denn wins against the competition by dann and other words to form geschweige denn. The paper also traces the development of the idiomatic verb phrase ganz zu schweigen von, which happens in parallel to that of geschweige denn.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial: Constructions under construction: Items, patterns, grammar
- Constructicon in progress
- Multi-Dimensional Regularity Analysis: How the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model can be applied to corpus data
- Lexical knowledge, memory and experience
- Nominal constructions in spoken academic Englishes: A quantitative corpus-based approach
- Causative constructions in process: How do they come into existence in learner writing?
- “I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed.” Constructing drunkenness
- The German geschweige denn construction
- A reference constructicon as a database
- Dimensions of constructional meanings in the German Constructicon: Why collo-profiles matter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial: Constructions under construction: Items, patterns, grammar
- Constructicon in progress
- Multi-Dimensional Regularity Analysis: How the Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model can be applied to corpus data
- Lexical knowledge, memory and experience
- Nominal constructions in spoken academic Englishes: A quantitative corpus-based approach
- Causative constructions in process: How do they come into existence in learner writing?
- “I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed.” Constructing drunkenness
- The German geschweige denn construction
- A reference constructicon as a database
- Dimensions of constructional meanings in the German Constructicon: Why collo-profiles matter
