Syntaktische Muster in siebenbürgischen Gerichtsprotokollen vom Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts

The importance of Transylvanian records of court proceedings from the end of the 17th century relies, in terms of content, on preserving the day by day life of ordinary people in Transylvania such as craftsmen, tradesmen, and peasants. Regarding linguistics, they are challenging due to the specific tension between feigned orality and literacy, when historical “spoken” language is documented. The research question pertains to describe, from a qualitative point of view, the complex sentences structure. Thereby, we look upon the different ways to construct complex sentences and their specific use according to the communicative functions of text parts: Which is the proportion between hypotaxis and parataxis in combining clauses? How deep is the hierarchy of subordinate clauses? Which subordinate clause functions are most used? Which composition types are relevant for complex sentence structure