The development of thewürde+ infinitive construction in Early Modern German (1650–1800)

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents a corpus-based analysis of the evolution of thewürde+ infinitive construction in German during the Early Modern period (1650–1800), using newly available data from the GerManC-corpus. We demonstrate how this construction occupies a unique position orthogonal to both the tense and mood systems of German through an analysis of the syntax and semantics ofwürde+ infinitive clauses, beginning with Modern Standard German and then subsequently with a historical focus on the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we examine the contexts in which the construction occurs and see how, as it came to be used more frequently over the period in question, it encroached more and more into contexts which had been the preserve of the synthetic preterite subjunctive, even being used in some where the latter is still the norm in modern German. Thus, by the end of the eighteenth century it had become difficult to identify a clear difference in meaning and use between these forms, and the reasons why thewürde+ infinitive construction may be preferred over the synthetic preterite subjunctive are by no means clear. We conclude our discussion with an overview of how thewürde+ infinitive construction was received in the prescriptive tradition during this key period in the standardization of German, seeing its stigmatization in some contexts in part as an attempt by prescriptive grammarians to establish an explicit and clearly justified role for it in the language.The authors must acknowledge their gratitude to Mikhail Kotin (Zielona Góra) and Szilvia Szatzker (Budapest) who kindly made unpublished material available to them, as well as to Christopher Young (Cambridge) for clarifying queries about some MHG texts, and to two anonymous reviewers for the PBB for their helpful suggestions. The GerManC-corpus project was funded by grants from the British research councils ESRC and AHRC (RES-000-22-1609 and RES-062-23-1118).