Syncope as the Cause of Präteritumschwund

New Data from an Early New High German Corpus

Bibliographic Data

ID22993877
AuthorsChristopher D Sapp (University of Mississippi, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume21
Issue4
Pages419-450
Publication date2009-12-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Germanic Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1470-5427 • E-ISSN: 1475-3014
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1470542709990134
OpenAlexW1976039255
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited9

This paper examines the cause of the decline of the preterite tense in favor of the present perfect tense in Early New High German. This development has long been attributed to apocope, which rendered the 3sg. weak preterite suffix -te homophonous with the 3sg. present suffix -t . By analyzing a database of over 20,000 past-tense clauses, this study evaluates the apocope account and more recent hypotheses. The resulting data lead to a new explanation: syncope in the 2sg. and 2pl. of weak verbs yielded dispreferred final clusters ( -tst and -tt ), resulting in a preference in these contexts for the present perfect, which then spread to other contexts.

German · Linguistics · Preference · Present perfect · Statistics · String (physics) · Suffix · Syncope (phonology) · History · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic research and analysis · Linguistics and language evolution · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology

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