Variation and change in verbal inflection in late medieval and early modern Nuremberg.

This dissertation is a quantitative, exploratory study of morphological variation and change in Early New High German, using an electronic corpus of late medieval and early modern (1356-1619) Nuremberg texts. The 480,000-word corpus is based on dated, autograph manuscripts from fifty-one informants. A wide variety of text types are represented. Using a combination of commercial and custom-written software, a database which includes every verb occurrence in the corpus, 86,281 tokens in all, was created and then analysed. Much of the change over time in verbal inflection that occurred during the corpus period involved the leveling of morphophonemic alternations, including a variety of stem-vowel alternations and the stem-final consonant alternation resulting from Verner's Law (grammatischer Wechsel). Because of the precise datability of the corpus material, the findings of this study allow the course of these changes to be followed in greater detail than has been possible in the past. A number of morphological variables are examined which occur with high enough frequency from enough different informants to allow patterns of synchronic variation to be detected. These variables include: (1) -e vs. -O as a personal ending in several different paradigmatic positions; (2) -et vs. -t in the 3rd sing. pres. indic. of most verbs and in the weak preterite suffix; (3) stem-vowel variation in certain strong and irregular verbs; (4) g(e)- vs. O- in the preterite participle; (5) the preterite participle of sein ('to be'); (6) the 1st and 3rd plural present indicative of sein. Nearly all of these variables exhibit clear social patterns in the corpus material. In one pattern which occurs repeatedly, the informants fall into two clear groups. The first group includes the city chancery, along with three men who were involved in the writing of official texts and usually one or two merchant males. The other group consists of all of the female informants and usually two or three men. The forms used by the latter group are consistently closer to those found in the modern Nuremberg dialect than those used by the former group. It is hypothesized that this pattern is mainly the result of educational differences.PhDGermanic Languages and LiteraturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/104297/1/9513354.pdfDescription of 9513354.pdf : Restricted to UM users only