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Das Deutsche und die dräuenden Apostrophe. Zur Verbreitung von ᾿s im Gegenwartsdeutschen

  • Carmen Scherer
Published/Copyright: May 6, 2010
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Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik
From the journal Volume 38 Issue 1

Abstract

Two main functions are attested for the apostrophe in German: the substitution of omitted letters (‘phonographic apostrophe’) as opposed to the indication of morpheme boundaries (‘morphographic apostrophe’). While the first type of use is in accordance with the orthographical norm, the second one is not. Based on a corpus study of a total of more than 350 million word forms, the distribution of the apostrophe in a specific graphemic environment, namely before <s>, will be investigated. It will be shown that 10–20% of all apostrophes are used in case of genitive or plural formation. Furthermore, a detailed context analysis will reveal an interdependency between the different types of apostrophe and text type.


Adresse der Verfasserin: Dr. Carmen Scherer, Deutsches Institut, FB 05 Philosophie und Philologie, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, D-55099 Mainz. E-Mail:

Online erschienen: 2010-05-06
Erschienen im Druck: 2010-May
Downloaded on 25.1.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/zgl.2010.002/pdf
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