The Development of Four Adverbs of Degree from Old to Early New High German

Bibliographic Data

ID21463485
AuthorsLourens Visser (0000-0002-9638-1826, Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen Groningen Niederlande, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume83
Issue4
Pages480-516
Publication date2024-04-05
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0165-7305 • E-ISSN: 1875-6719
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/18756719-12340311
OpenAlexW4402894380
LanguageEN
References cited11

The present study analyses four prominent adverbs of degree in Old, Middle, and Early New High German from a comparative West Germanic perspective: filu / vile / viel ‘much, very’, harto / harte / hart ‘very, firmly’, sêro / sêre / sehr ‘very, sorely’, and gar(aw)o / gar(w)e / gar ‘wholly, very’. Based on corpus data, all four display considerable changes in their usage patterns over time. The findings support the observation that the Middle Germanic period was a time of convergence with regard to the usage of adverbs of degree (Visser 2023), since the developments in Low German largely follow those in High German. However, the geographic and textual distribution of sêro / sêre / sehr with the meaning ‘very’ in High and Low German suggests an expansion from Middle Dutch beginning around 1400. A broader implication is that usage patterns of adverbs of degree are quite borrowable in language contact situations

German · Linguistics · Physics · History · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy

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