Subject Properties in Early Modern Germanic Languages - (Konvergenz Und Divergenz) by Pierre-Yves Modicom (Hardcover)
About this item
Highlights
- This monograph is devoted to the cross-linguistic profile of subjects in Early Modern Germanic languages.
- Author(s): Pierre-Yves Modicom
- 384 Pages
- Foreign Language Study, German
- Series Name: Konvergenz Und Divergenz
Description
About the Book
This book delivers the first comprehensive review of subject properties accross four Germanic languages: English, German, Dutch and Danish. It relies on empirical data with a focus on the late 16th century, the latest period of time when English couBook Synopsis
This monograph is devoted to the cross-linguistic profile of subjects in Early Modern Germanic languages. The typologically complex question of subject criteria is addressed in a functional framework relying on recent developments in Construction Grammar. The set of data is extracted from a parallel corpus made up of the 1587 German chapbook about the life of Dr. Faustus and its English, Dutch and Danish translations, all of which had been published by 1592. At that time, the syntactic features of English subjects were still comparable to Continental languages like Danish, facilitating the inclusion of English in a cross-Germanic analysis.
The analysis makes use of two comparative concepts of subjecthood; argumental subjecthood, centred on the argument-structural characteristics of subjects, and informational subjecthood, which corresponds to the syntacticization of information-structural properties. Subjecthood is defined as a labile multi-level configuration of argumental and informational parameters. This approach sheds new light on notorious tricks of Germanic syntax such as oblique subjects, expletives, scrambling and subjectless passives.
