Der Präteritum Konjunktiv im Deutschen – gestern und heute

In German, the preterite subjunctive can be expressed either synthetically (es käme) or analytically (es würde kommen). It is often claimed that the synthetic forms are falling out of usage, and that the analytic würde-construction is replacing them. However, there are a number of verbs whose preterite subjunctive forms are still used with some regularity (kommen, geben, wissen etc.), especially in writing. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether the usage of some of these verbs in the würde-construction has increased during the second half of the 20th century – and, if so, whether this increase has been accompanied by a decrease in usage of the corresponding synthetic forms. Since the preterite subjunctive, in its synthetic form, is primarily a feature of the written language, the investigation has been concentrated to written texts. A corpus called the DWDS-Kernkorpus has been used as the material of the investigation; the corpus consists of four different types of written texts: fiction, functional literature, academic texts, and newspapers. The analytic and the synthetic preterite subjunctive forms of eight verbs (kommen, geben, wissen, stehen, finden, liegen, tun, and sehen) have been searched in the corpus. The frequency of these forms in each decade has been compared, which reveals the diachronic development of their usage. The results of the investigation indicate that the synthetic forms of the eight verbs have been used regularly throughout the time period, and that they – in most cases – are more frequent than their analytic counterparts. An increase of the analytic würde-construction could not be observed. This suggests that, to a certain degree, the synthetic preterite subjunctive remains a viable feature of the written German language