Volume 136, Issue 3

This article focusses on the development of both the German s -plural and the prenominal genitive. The former is commonly assumed to have risen from possessive constructions with genitive attributes containing family names and an elliptic head noun like des Müllers (Haus) . While English ›group genitives‹ presumably have been grammaticalized from Middle English ›his-genitives‹, I argue that prenominal genitives including personal names in both languages originate from possessive constructions as well. This distinction can explain why the -s is (also) tagged to female nouns and why it is not possible to modify the genitive attribute on the right side in German as it holds for English group genitives. Dieser Aufsatz resultiert aus einer Erweiterung und Vertiefung eines Kapitels meiner Abschlussarbeit. Ich danke den Zuhörern der Oberseminare bzw. Kolloquien der Universitäten Frankfurt/Main, Göttingen und Saarbrücken, insbesondere Augustin Speyer, Helmut Weiß und Markus Steinbach, denen ich die Studie vorgestellt habe, für ihre wertvollen Anregungen. Ferner danke ich zwei anonymen, sehr engagierten Gutachtern für ihre Kommentare. Alle verbliebenen Unzulänglichkeiten liegen in der Verantwortung des Autors.

Since the 1970s, frames have been well-established in Linguistics as a means of visualizing complex concepts, but until now there has been no empirical case study to demonstrate the visualization of historical concepts. The MHG word triuwe will be used to illustrate the potential of frames as an analytical tool with a particular focus on the relevance of this methodology for German medieval literary studies as well as Historical Linguistics. The analysis of the semantic field of MHG triuwe with regard to content and linguistic application is based on the ›Referenzkorpus Mittelhochdeutsch (1050–1350)‹.

According to Konrad’s von Würzburg description of the artificial tree in the city of Troy, narrative practices in courtly romances are to be comprehended as an artificial reconstruction of truth. Since reality is conceived as an order of immutable regularities in the underlying metaphysical episteme , truth could be invented in a plausible way by referring to probability. As Latin tradition allowed poets a broader use of this option than historiographers, learned poets exemplified true regular relations between actions and their consequences by inventing particular factual truth on the basis of probability knowledge from the very beginning of the history of courtly romances. In this way, vernacular romances of antiquity produced a concept of poetical narration of the truth from the learned concept of historia . While the orders of knowledge facilitated the invention of particular factual truth, they made it impossible to conceive the invention of true general regularities. For this reason and according to the pattern of fabula , true general regularities could also be exemplified by invented untrue facts. Essentially, treating Matière de Bretagne implied a decision for this concept of poetical narration, although poets tended to introduce Breton narratives as historiae as well. Because of the differences between premodern and modern epistemic contexts, it must be considered unlikely that the claims of truth and the cognitive values of poetical narration in courtly romances can be explained in an adequate way by terms of fictionality or by concepts of imagination rooted in modern aesthetics. Rather, historical narratology should try to develop methods for reconstructing correlations between cultural probability knowledge and the rhetorical concepts of inventio and evidentia . Since human praxis (understood in an Aristotelian manner) may be conceived as the main subject of premodern narratives, a praxeological narratology might study the topics of social actions in narratives as discoursivizations of practical probability knowledge.