Volume 144, Issue 1

In this paper, it is argued that the principle of monoinflection governing the distribution of strong and weak adjective inflection in the New High German noun phrase (NP) definitively became established in the 18 th  century. Empirical evidence for this assumption is provided by the findings of three corpus studies based on the historical corpus ›Deutsches Textarchiv‹ (German Text Archive). Focusing on three different constructional types within the NP, the evolving distribution of strong and weak adjective inflection is studied for the period from 1600 to 1900. Based on the findings of the three corpus studies, further structural tendencies in the (re)organization of the New High German NP and their interaction with the principle of monoinflection are discussed.

Walther’s von der Vogelweide aggressive stanza against an, otherwise unknown, Volcnant or Wîcman (L 17,25) opens up the lasting tradition of artistic polemics and ›peer-bashing‹ in German Sangspruchdichtung. Henceforth, the agonal rivalry between artists becomes the favourite field of a particularly harsh polemic. The article examines the pioneer’s text with regard to the split (or doubled) role of the singer who adopts two grammatical persons (which seems also to be crucial for Walther’s disputed authorship), to the metaphorical structure and to the discursive as well as generic references of the text. The singer in the text is boasting himself by constructing and simultaneously destructing an aggressively ridiculed counterpart. This, however, is not to be understood in biographical terms, but in genuinely poetological and professional ones: Walther claims his unsurpassed competence ( meisterschaft ) in all registers and varieties of an art that ranges far from well-tempered courtesy up to the most exquisite scolding. Scharpfer sanc is not an antithesis but a subset of courtly art and poetry.

The ›Turnier von Nantes‹, attributed to Konrad von Würzburg, is considered a political poem. However, the specific historical occasion is controversial in research because of the ambiguous facts. This also applies to the dating. But the identified mixture of unspecific facts with fictitious elements can be described according to the rhetoric procedure of narratio verisimilis ( verisimilitudo ). The work of art therefore does not report an actual, but a fictitious event – and just like the tournament it expresses the common self-image of the medieval aristocratic society.

What are the narrative functions of the present tense in medieval narrations? In order to address this question, the paper brings together linguistic observations on tense semantics and a literary analysis of ›Wilhalm von Wenden‹ by Ulrich von Etzenbach. It shows that the present tense can refer to three different kinds of ›now‹, i. e. the ›discourse now‹, the ›story now‹, and the ›recipient’s now‹. In all three contexts, the present tense is not used as a narrative tense but rather indicates a speaker’s voice commenting on the events. This leads to the hypothesis that the development of the ›narrative present‹ (as common in modern novels) is based on two requirements: The decoupling between the ›discourse now‹ and the diegetic world as well as the decoupling between the author and the fictional instance of the narrator.