Volume 145, Issue 2

This paper argues for incorporating corpus data into the teaching of historical linguistics. While deeply annotated historical corpora are becoming available and corpus data is already widely used to answer various research questions, corpora are as yet rarely used in teaching. We believe they are ideally suited to make the variation in historical data transparent and help students to explore contexts and parameters. In our first study, we show how the KaJuK corpus and its more elaborated version, the GiesKaNe corpus, can be exploited to study adverbial sentences. Using the RIDGES corpus, the second study deals with phrasal and lexical development. Both studies focus on explaining the method and its extension to other corpora and research questions.

The now archaic optative subjunctive was common in earlier forms of the German language. This paper examines two questions: Why is the optative subjunctive rarely used today? Which linguistic constructions are presently used in the contexts and functions that originally accompanied the optative subjunctive? The paper goes beyond previous studies on this subjunctive and its substitutes by explaining closely how its context, function and syntax in historical instances may have an impact on the constructions that have replaced it. Furthermore, this paper argues that pragmatic change, economy, analogy and especially expressiveness can explain such displacement by specific constructions.

This article analyzes and edits a vernacular compilation on the ›discernment of spirits‹, which was written in the second half of the 15th century by an anonymous writer from Tegernsee for lay brothers and sisters in the context of the Melk reform. The text deals with the inner influence of grace and nature on man and compiles the chapter ›De diversis motibus naturae et gratiae‹ from Thomas à Kempis’ ›De imitatione Christi‹, as well as excerpts from Henry of Friemar’s treatise ›De quattuor instinctibus‹. The author aims to maintain proximity to the Latin texts and theological terminology, and achieves a hybridization of the compiled hypotexts in terms of style and content.