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The present contribution addresses the phenomenon of grammatical change using a historical sociolinguistic approach, which is based on the principle that systematic language change can only be described and explained by accounting for sociopragmatic and variational factors of language use. The approach is illustrated by an empirical investigation of the change of selected morphological and syntactic features in (Middle) New High German, using Labov’s distinction between ‘language change from above’ and ‘language change from below’ as a starting point of analysis. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that the historical sociolinguistic approach not only complements other methods of historical linguistics, but may also lead to results and findings that could perhaps not be achieved by other methodological approaches. Moreover, it is considered central to the description and explanation of the development of language varieties in periods of language standardisation.

In this paper I try to demonstrate the benefits of interaction between the fields of historical syntax of German on the one hand and linguistic typology on the other hand. Using four examples for each direction, I argue that both fields need each other’s input: German historical syntax can learn to avoid various forms of parochialism, and at the same time it can feed its vast amount of detailed knowledge into discussions of general linguistics.

This paper summarizes recent advances in research on the diachronic syntax of German from a generative perspective on the basis of three case studies. The first case study focuses on the sentence grammar of early German and argues that generalized V(erb)-to-C(omp)-movement, the core property of the verb-second phenomenon, goes back to Old High German times. In contrast to English, German has thus not been subject to a resetting of the verb-second parameter. Two further case studies deal with null subjects in Old High German and the diachrony of sentence negation, thereby addressing the issues of change in surface manifestations in relation to the underlying syntactic representation and the relation between historical syntax and dialect syntax.

Theoretical insights achieved by research on information structure in the past 30 years have recently begun to be adopted by researchers working diachronically on German syntax. Several aspects, especially to Old High German syntax, have been investigated, but there are many desiderata and a synthesis is still missing. From these studies we can say that the influence of information structure on syntax has changed: While in Old High German all ‘fields’ of the clause have a special information structural assignment (up to the point that the presence/absence of a field is correlated to the presence/absence of a certain information structural category), in Modern German the prefield and the afterfield are multifunctional, whereas information structural ordering occurs only in the middle field. Some information structural dimensions have gained importance, e. g. the old-new distinction for object order.

This article addresses the use of annotated corpora for research in historical German syntax, introducing the Reference Corpus of Middle High German (REM) as a showcase. The article shows how to search the corpus with the corpus tool ANNIS. It takes up a range of popular research questions from historical syntax, in particular inflection of predicative adjectives, pre- and postnominal genitive constructions, relative order of pronouns and of verbs and auxiliaries. It is shown in detail how REM can be exploited to retrieve corpus evidence of these phenomena. The article also discusses challenges and opportunities of using annotated corpora. It argues that use of annotated corpora opens up new ways for research in historical syntax.