Abstract
This article addresses the German conjunction zumal ‘the more so as’ from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. On the basis of historical corpus data, I trace the uses and meaning development of the lexical item zumal , from a temporal adverb to a conjunction. I argue that it acquired its current syntactic and interpretive features from the final step in this development: the focus particle zumal adopted some syntactic features and meaning components from the subordinate causal conjunctions da and weil , with which it frequently cooccurred in the historical data. In the current language it is thus best analyzed as a subordinate causal conjunction with focus-marking properties, similar to the combination besonders weil ‘especially since’.
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