From a focus particle to a conjunction

Diachronic and synchronic analysis of German zumal

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3014313
AutoresIra Eberhardt (University of Tübingen, autor de correspondencia)
Año2017
Volumen93
Número2
Páginase66-e96
Fecha de publicación2017-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLanguage (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
EditorialProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/lan.2017.0031
OpenAlexW2626165596
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas23

This article addresses the German conjunction zumal ‘the more so as’ from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. On the basis of historical corpus data, I trace the uses and meaning development of the lexical item zumal , from a temporal adverb to a conjunction. I argue that it acquired its current syntactic and interpretive features from the final step in this development: the focus particle zumal adopted some syntactic features and meaning components from the subordinate causal conjunctions da and weil , with which it frequently cooccurred in the historical data. In the current language it is thus best analyzed as a subordinate causal conjunction with focus-marking properties, similar to the combination besonders weil ‘especially since’

Adverb · Conjunction (astronomy) · Focus (optics) · German · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy · Psychology