Old Saxon and Middle Low German Adverbs of Degree

A Case of Diachronic Discontinuity

Bibliographic Data

ID21722829
AuthorsLourens Visser (0000-0002-9638-1826, University of Groningen, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume35
Issue3
Pages266-306
Publication date2023-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Germanic Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1470-5427 • E-ISSN: 1475-3014
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1470542722000162
OpenAlexW4385810709
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited7

Middle Low German is generally considered to be a direct successor to Old Saxon. However, later dialects, including Middle Low German, differ from Old Saxon with respect to a number of features, which is unexpected under a direct succession relationship. To account for the presence of such features, some scholars attribute them to High German influence on Middle Low German (Wolff 1934, Stiles 1995, Stiles 2013). Others, however, hypothesize that written Old Saxon (which provides the basis for the comparison) was an artificial grapholect that reflected Old English and Franconian conventions rather than a genuine spoken language (Collitz 1901, Rooth 1973, Doane 1991:45–46). This paper further contributes to this discussion by examining the systems of degree adverbs in Old Saxon and Middle Low German. Based on data from different corpora, it is shown that the system in Old Saxon resembles the one in Old English, while the Middle Low German system is comparable to the systems in Middle High German and Early Middle Dutch. It is concluded that an explanation based solely on language contact is problematic, and that the grapholect hypothesis has more explanatory power

Ancient history · German · Linguistics · Middle Ages · Middle English · Old English · Successor cardinal · Classics · History · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and language evolution · Mathematics · Philosophy

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