The verb-pronoun-enclitics in the direct speech of Early New High Ger-man and Middle Low German narrative texts

The influence of grammatical context on the use of cliticised forms in the translation process

Abstract

Middle Low German syntax has received relatively little attention within the older history of research, as it was assumed – wrongly – that there were hardly any differences to High German sentence structures. The approach to historical orality, which cannot be grasped directly from today’s perspective, represents a further desideratum. A combination of these two research approaches can be found in the following article, which uses a parallel corpus of Early New High German and Middle Low German prose texts from the 15^th century to analyse the use of the verb-pronoun-enclitics of the 2^nd person singular nominative in the literary construction of direct speech. The translation texts with their well-known relationship of dependency provide a special opportunity to compare these two closely related languages in order to examine the extent to which the clitics are recognised and edited in the translation process. The focus here is on the preparation and evaluation of the relevant evidence as well as the exemplary discussion of two specific phenomena(topic drop, pronouns in Wackernagel position); beyond that, the article offers an insight into the basic approach and methodology of the associated dissertation project. In addition, the question of whether the pronominal clitics are an intentional expression of staged orality or a grammaticalised form that was generally used in the 15^th century is investigated. Finally, it is shown which aspects of the formation of clitics in the text corpus have so far remained open and require further investigation.