Volume 141, Issue 3

Contemporary German shows a rigid lexical segregation between humans and animals (e. g. stillen / säugen ›suckle/breastfeed‹, corpse / carcass ›Leiche/Kadaver‹). This was not the case historically but only evolved in Early New High German and the beginning of the New High German period. This article lays out the emergence of the lexical boundary between humans and animals using the three lexical pairs essen / fressen ›eat [human]/eat [animal]‹, trinken / saufen ›drink [human]/drink [animal]‹ and schwanger / trächtig ›pregnant [human]/pregnant [animal]‹ on the basis of extensive corpus and dictionary studies, and pursues the question why the segregation between human and animals emerged at all and why this happened in the 18 th  century.

Taking two examples as a starting point, the article explores and discusses major syntactic features of 16 th - and 17 th -century title pages. Their characteristics include a strong preference for nominal constructions and a high degree of ambiguity reflected in unclear syntactic relations and different possible classifications of the same syntactic units. In a subsequent evaluation of a corpus of 600 examples, it is shown that all title pages by and large use the same syntactic strategies regardless of the regional varieties and text types investigated. Nevertheless, the specific syntactic uses reveal the given communicative requirements of early modern title pages.

Albrecht Dürer’s use of ›Italian‹ words in his letters from Venice to Willibald Pirckheimer has commonly been dismissed as a curiosity of little consequence – half-understood mangling of a language of which Dürer had only the crudest grasp. This article brings the first systematic analysis of the entire corpus of such material in Dürer’s writings. It shows that his ›Italian‹ lexis is consistently drawn from Venexian , the early modern regional koiné of Venice. Its accurately registered, heard forms Dürer transcribes into the orthography of Nuremberg’s written German dialect. Apart from loan words and idioms, the corpus includes loan coinages. For these Dürer draws on terms and concepts from Venexian to devise or refunction German vocabulary which is highly significant in the evolution of his language of art theory and practice.

Isolated, yet at the same time, in an environment that is hostile to them, the four characters Jörg Wickram imagines in his novel ›Gabriotto und Reinhart‹ are alone together, as the two doomed couples are all also bound to each other in friendship. The construction of paradoxes, calculated primarily for effect, appears to be one of the novels controlled narrative devices. Much like the narratological strategies of intensification, exaggeration and repetition, they are controlled artifices designed for impact, and well-thought-out gambits on the part of the author which he uses, above all, to continue and intensify the tradition of medieval storytelling, and less frequently to counterpose an alternative understanding. Time and again the author makes use of the potential of widespread literary concepts to demonstrate that the love described in the novel is unparalleled.