Volume 142, Issue 2

With rapid increases of token frequency, the formerly weak regular verb haben ›have‹ has been affected by processes of reduction and irregularization that led to a suppletive paradigm in New High German. In contemporary spoken German, haben may even show further reductions, resulting in a short-form paradigm. However, current empirical research documents extensive variation of full and reduced forms in spoken German and provides indications that this variation may be linked to the verbal brace. In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study testing the effects of the verbal brace on the form of haben . We find that the form systematically varies as a function of syntactic position, i.  e. that reduced forms occur when haben is positioned in the left brace and full forms occur when haben is positioned in the right brace. First, a mixed-model regression analysis reveals that the verbal brace has the strongest effect on the variation net of theoretically relevant controls. Second, an interactional-linguistic analysis of deviant cases shows that reduced variants in the right brace are recurrently used for the management of turn-taking. We conclude by discussing the consequences for the paradigm of the verb and how the results shed light on the importance and development-in-progress of the framing principle in German.

This article investigates the origin and history of two names dating from late Antiquity or the migration period. The first is the personal name Tufa , the second is the tribal name Armilausini . The two names can be traced back to a corresponding Germanic loan word in the Latin military language, tufa and armilausia , respectively, both of which are continued in the military language of the Eastern Roman and Byzantine Empire. The names are based on the appellative nouns. Both the appellatives and, even more so, the names turn out to be characteristic products of the multilingual background of the Roman military, as they show several signs of linguistic interference such as lexical reanalysis / folk etymology, morphological remodelling and semantic specialization.

Around 1300, ›Hertig Fredrik av Normandie‹, one of the foundational works of medieval Swedish literature, was translated from a German source of which no trace has survived. This article exposes the anachronistic expectations about narrative coherence that underpin existing attempts to reconstruct that source and how it was adapted. By focusing on the end of the bridal-quest action, the article advocates a revision of value judgements about the (in)competence of the Swedish translator. In doing so, it shows how narrative poetics can open up new approaches to medieval literary relations between Germany and Scandinavia, as well as to the literary historiography of lost texts more generally.

This article compares a vision from the ›Legatus divinae pietatis‹ – attributed to Gertrude the Great (c. 1256–1301/1302) – with Alain de Lille’s twelfth-century allegory ›De planctu Naturae‹ (1160/1165). It shows how imaginary textiles, such as allegorical dresses in visions, function as a means of visualizing conceptions of time, temporality, and salvation. The late fourteenth-century German text › ein botte der götlichen miltekeit‹ (based on the earlier Latin ›Legatus‹) is particularly strong in highlighting textile craftsmanship by employing technical terms that illustrate the allegorical dress in performative ways. Recently discovered manuscript evidence further showcases profound textile knowledge in vernacular texts.