Abstract
In this paper, Old High German mood alternations in the different types of subordinate clauses (complement, adverbial and relative clauses) are discussed. The use of the subjunctive in subordinate clauses is notoriously more frequent than in Modern German and has not yet been thoroughly investigated. Based on a comprehensive corpus study, the paper will show that the licensing conditions for the subjunctive in Old High German are determined by notions such as veridicality and – in relative contexts – specificity. These conditions are thus similar (but not always identical) to those observed for Modern Greek and Romance languages. Furthermore, a syntactic analysis is provided in order to account for the licensing of the subjunctive in each type of subordinate clause.
Highlights
We discovered that the indicative never occurs in complements of nonveridical verbs, while both the indicative and the subjunctive are possible in embedded reports
Note that if we look into the annotation, we discover that among the 9 forms annotated for the indicative, the mood form is ambiguous between the indicative and the subjunctive in 6 of the cases
The indicative is attested in Old High German (OHG) veridical contexts, and very frequently in non-veridical ones. This reminds of a phenomenon that may be observed in Colloquial or Substandard Italian, in which the indicative is replacing the subjunctive in many contexts
Summary
As illustrated in (1), Modern German ( MG) has almost completely lost the use of the subjunctive in favour of the indicative in subordinate clauses (apart from indirect speech and other special contexts, cf. Thieroff 2010):[1]. Old High German (OHG)[2] subordinate clauses could exhibit the subjunctive (cf Schrodt 1983, 133 ff.):[3]. / arleitti from shore.DAT pushed.SUBJ.3SG ‘He asked him to push it [the boat] away from the shore’. 2. What are the factors licensing the subjunctive in OHG subordinate clauses?. We will first discuss mood alternations in subordinate clauses from a cross-linguistic perspective (§ 2). We will consider mood alternations in OHG and we will present some hypotheses on the licensing of the subjunctive in this language stage (§ 3).
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