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On the habitual verb pflegen in German: Its use, origin, and development

  • Łukasz Jędrzejowski EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: October 15, 2021
Linguistics
From the journal Linguistics Volume 59 Issue 6

Abstract

In this article, I examine the distributional properties, emergence conditions, and development of the habitual verbal head pflegen ‘use(d) to’ in the history of German. Synchronically, I argue that Present-day German possesses subject to subject raising verbs and that they can all be brought down to a common denominator: They allow promotion of the embedded subject into the matrix subject position (= A-movement). However, at the same time I argue that German subject to subject raising verbs differ and that their heterogeneity follows from their semantics. What all this boils down to is that German subject to subject raising verbs do not form a uniform class, neither semantically nor syntactically. As for pflegen, I account for its syntactic peculiarities referring to its functional status, i.e., the status of being a habitual head. Diachronically, I show that pflegen grammaticalized into an AspHAB-head in the transition from Old High German (750–1050) to Middle High German (1050–1350) and that this grammaticalization process restricted the way it behaves in Present-day German.

Keywords: functional category; German; grammaticalization; habituality
Corresponding author: Łukasz Jędrzejowski, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Literatur I – Sprachwissenschaft, Universität zu Köln, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany, E-mail:

Funding source: Daimler Benz Foundation

Award Identifier / Grant number: 32-06/18

Data sources

DeReKo – Das Deutsche Referenzkorpus, version 2.3.3,
http://www.ids-mannheim.de/cosmas2/.
Faber – P. Matthiam Fabrum, 1650, Probstein oder Censur des Lutherischen Tract a e tls/so unlengst gedruckt/vnd intitulirt: Wann wilt du Catholisch werden: Sambt dem Anhang: Wilt du dich noch nicht accommodirn? Wienn in Oesterreich: Rickhes.
FnhdC – Das Bonner Frühneuhochdeutschkorpus,
https://korpora.zim.uni-duisburg-essen.de/FnhdC/.
GerManC – GerManC Korpus, Historische ſe aus der Zeit von 1650 bis 1800.
KHZ – Mannheimer Korpus Historischer Zeitungen 1740–1877.
ReA – Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch 750–1050, version 1.1,
https://www.deutschdiachrondigital.de/.
ReM – Referenzkorpus Mittelhochdeutsch 1050–1350, version 1.0,
https://www.linguistics.rub.de/rem/.

  1. GerManC and KHZ are historical subcorpora of DeReKo.

Acknowledgment

I presented earlier versions of this work at the following venues: Systematic Semantic Change workshop at the University of Texas at Austin (April 2013), Infinitives at the Syntax-Semantics Interface: A Diachronic Perspective workshop at the conference 46th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea at the University of Split (September 2013), Habituality and Genericity in Flux workshop at the conference 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics at the University of Naples (July 2015), 2nd Workshop Germanistische Linguistik zwischen Köln und Tokio at the University of Cologne (January 2017), and at a linguistic colloquium at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (September 2018). For useful comments and interesting questions, I am indebted to the audiences as well as to the following colleagues (in alphabetical order): Bar Avineri, Nora Boneh, Rammie Cahlon, David Fertig, Hana Filip, Remus Gergel, Katrin Goldschmidt, Klaus von Heusinger, Roland Hinterhölzl, Stefan Hinterwimmer, Katsumasa Ito, Agnes Jäger, Alexander Klaaßen, Paula Kleine, Alexey Kozlov, Yoshiki Mori, Augustin Speyer, Alina Tigău, as well as anonymous reviewers and the editorial board members, in particular Volker Gast, of Linguistics. In October 2017, I also had a great opportunity to discuss selected issues presented in the present article with Östen Dahl, whose insights and comments had a considerable and visible influence on the present work. Very special thanks go Nora Boneh for her sustained interest and invaluable feedback during all stages of the research that led to the final version of this article. I thank Paula Kleine who collected large amounts of data from older stages of German. I owe my thanks to Simone Hess, Paula Kleine, Lisa Lubomierski, and Jan Miebach for their editorial help, and to Ann Kelly for her editorial support. Last but not least, my thanks go to Jonathan Watkins for proofreading. All remaining errors are, of course, my own responsibility.

  1. Research funding: The research for this article was supported in part by the Daimler and Benz Foundation (grant number 32-06/18).

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Received: 2018-08-12
Accepted: 2020-10-06
Published Online: 2021-10-15
Published in Print: 2021-11-25

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Copularity of French and Dutch (semi-)copular constructions: a behavioral profile analysis
  3. Light heads and predicate formation: on two scopes of discontinuity
  4. The word as a unit of internal predictability
  5. On the habitual verb pflegen in German: Its use, origin, and development
  6. Embedded root phenomena and indirect speech reports
https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0161
Keywords for this article
functional category; German; grammaticalization; habituality

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Copularity of French and Dutch (semi-)copular constructions: a behavioral profile analysis
  3. Light heads and predicate formation: on two scopes of discontinuity
  4. The word as a unit of internal predictability
  5. On the habitual verb pflegen in German: Its use, origin, and development
  6. Embedded root phenomena and indirect speech reports
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