Volume 146, Issue 1

This study examines the development of punctuation in the Luther Bible in the period between 1522 and 2017 based on a passage from the Gospel of Matthew in 82 editions. The analysis is quantitative, qualitative, and at the same time hermeneutical: by repeatedly recalling the original printings, the aim is to capture all the relevant factors for historical punctuation. Among other things, aspects of the general text structure and line breaks are taken into account. From a syntactic point of view, various special cases are discussed, such as punctuation in non-sentential prepositional groups and in infinitives to block misinterpretation, but also the lack of punctuation in ›incorporated‹ main clauses. Furthermore, it is shown how the modern syntax-based punctuation since the middle of the 19 th  century runs counter Luther’s listener-oriented sentence construction.

The paper presents a diachronically based concept of the evidential function in the language. It is argued for a specific discourse evidentiality of the oldest autochthonic German poetry which encoded not epistemic interpretations of outer sources of information, but rather a strong guarantee for the truth of reported events. The origins of this kind of evidentiality can be found both in ontogenesis of a given language, e. g. language acquisition, and in its phylogenesis.

This paper examines the ›Eneasroman‹ of Heinrich von Veldeke within the context of its co-transmission. The different composite manuscripts, combining the ›Eneasroman‹ with various co-texts, raise the question of what conclusions can be drawn from them about the understanding and reception of the novel. It becomes obvious that the surviving compilations, all of them from the late Middle Ages, do not aim at highlighting the elaborate semantics of love. Instead, various historiographical and epistemological connections between the ›Eneasroman‹ and its accompanying texts are established, which emphasize the historical dimensions of the novel and the salvational significance of Eneas as the progenitor of the Romans.

Hartmann von Aue’s ›Ereck‹ and ›Iwein‹, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s ›Parzival‹ and Heinrich von dem Türlin’s ›Crône‹ all include fighting scenes that link mutual physical exhaustion and elaborate metaphors to a spectrum of outcomes between winning and losing. The metaphors derive from quotidian social contexts of a courtly audience: games, love, oaths and markets connote constellations of equality or superiority. While the metaphors illuminate the hierarchy of the two fighters, I argue, they also mirror the cause of the fight on the discursive level. The scenes thus form an intertextual group featuring a poetological connection between exhaustion and the metaphorical visibility of the cause of the fight.