Volume 52, Issue 2

Based on the classification scheme of grammatical categories by Plank (1981), the historical development of the s -suffix in German is described. It is shown that the suffix has reached different stages of development, ranging from inflection to word formation and to the lexicon. The article traces this development and examines on the basis of the variants öfter vs öfters , to what extent the development goes beyond the change path outlined by Plank. For this purpose, approx. 15.000 hits from the Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA) corpus (1600–1900) are analyzed with respect to time, space, genre and grammatical properties.

This paper aims at developing an approach for the structural description of ellipses that is based on syntactic relationship between ellipsis and sentence. Both kinds of syntactic units are considered to be similar and to be organized – with some modifications – by the same syntactic and semantic rules. Syntactic constituents of ellipses project k 0 -definite semantic places which determine the syntactic unit’s potential of being connected to a context. For this kind of projection valency of predicate expressions is a central concept. The approach presented in this paper is surface structure oriented. It is neither reductionistic nor autonomistic in a way that ellipsis and sentence are seen as independent types of syntactic units with respect to their structural organization.

The representation of emotionality in dramas is one of the basic writing skills of authors, because the rhetorical aim of movere , of arousing emotional movement within the audience, can well be served by the verbal and nonverbal presentation of strong emotions of the dramatis personae. One grammatical pattern that is predestined for such a purpose is what has been called „Mad Magazine sentence“ (Lambrecht 1990), which has been (mis)named this way because it gained popularity in this magazine with the utterance “Me? Worry?”. These “non-finite predicative constructions” (Bücker 2012), as they are to be called more scientifically, are exclamative patterns that operate by condensing information to, typically, a pronominal reference act and a short predication act. Bücker (2012) analyzed the formal and functional spectrum of this pattern extensively in modern-day German (mostly based on internet communication but also on spoken German). What is still lacking, though, is a historical analysis: How far back in the history of German can we detect this pattern? Are the usage patterns similar or dissimilar to modern-day German? What special drama-related uses can be observed? This paper is written in the context of the DFG-funded research group Practices of Person Reference (DFG 457855466) and uses as data dramas by Gryphius (Baroque period), Lessing (Enlightenment) and Schiller and Goethe (Sturm und Drang and Classicism).