Abstract
AbstractThis paper is concerned with the loss of the partitive genitive (e. g.ein Glas Weines>ein Glas Wein) in German, focusing on the early stage of the decline, i. e. the ENHG period, and on variation in present-day German (e. g.einem Glas gutem Weinvs.einem Glas guten Wein). On the basis of data collected in a questionnaire study and in corpora (both contemporary and historic) it is proposed that formal properties of the inflectional suffixes involved are highly relevant for this language change phenomenon: Several observations concerning the diachronic and synchronic variation caused by the (incomplete) loss of the partitive genitive seem to be explicable by so-called ›signal strength‹, a concept which goes back to Köpcke (1993).
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