Volume 145, Issue 4

This corpus study investigates well-known violations of the verb second constraint in Old High German main clauses. Starting from the observation that the attested orders are overwhelmingly ambiguous regarding the position of the verb and the preverbal constituents, the paper applies methods for identifying diagnostic datasets which can be clearly distinguished in terms of structure and use. Two types of diagnostic non-verb-second orders are tested, namely verb-final clauses in which no verb movement applies, and verb-third clauses in which the verb as well as all preverbal categories occupy specified positions in the left periphery of the clause. The result is that diagnostic evidence for any of the datasets is sparse in native prose, and that especially diagnostic verb-third orders are not sufficiently distinguishable against their Latin originals. In addition, both diagnostic patterns interfere in use, suggesting that they represent less clearly differentiated, unproductive patterns, used for special stylistic purposes.

I provide an overview of the Tolerance Principle, its motivation, supporting evidence, and applications, with particular focus on how it can be used recursively to discover linguistic regularities of varying scopes. It corrects the misunderstandings in Enger’s recent article but the more important goal is to provide rigorously formulated predictions and quantitative data to the structural analysis of language.

The essay examines the fourteenth-century Yiddish poem ›Yosef Ha-Tsadik‹ about Joseph and Potipharʼs wife. The poem, presented here in a new critical edition, is primarily based on Hebrew and Aramaic midrashic and liturgical sources but also incorporates elements derived from German courtly love poetry, mainly to express Potipharʼs wifeʼs advances toward Joseph. It can thus be read as a Jewish dialogue with Christian secular literary traditions. Drawing on a comparison with the Jewish pretexts – some of which are presented here for the first time in German translations – and a number of examples from Minnesang, the study analyzes the strategies of both participation in and (ironic) distancing from the Christian courtly discourse.