Genitive definitions in the chronicle of Worms (XVI century)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the essential issue of the historical stylistics of German the development of the "nominal" or "substantive" style in the Early Upper German period (XIV-XVII centuries). The research was based on the chronicle of Worms (XVI century) that represents one of the most popular genres of the period. The purpose of article is to analyze the topology and frequency of various types of genitive definitions of a noun in the text. We distributed nuclear nouns into seven semantic groups with a total number of examples of about 160.
 The results obtained allow making following conclusions. The prepositive genitive prevails only in the groups of Nomina agentis and relational names. The connection between semantics and the topology of the genitive is hard to trace. Thus, the genitives of subject, object and possessive genitive are distributed between the pre- and postposition almost equally, with some preponderance of the latter. Genitivus definitivus and partitivus tend to postposition. With regards to parameters under consideration, the Worms chronicle corresponds to the general tendency in the XVI century, that is, to move genitive definitions into postposition.