Eintrag

Titel

Jespersen's Cycle in German from the phonological perspective of syllable and word languages

Personen

Renata Szczepaniak

Jahr

2010

Typ

Aufsatz

Verlag

John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Ort

Amsterdam, Philadelphia

Seiten

321 - 334

In

Continuity and Change in Grammar

Schlagwörter

Phonologie
Sprachwandel

Abstract

This article deals with the phonological aspect of Jespersen¿s Cycle in German. This is the process whereby the older, Germanic negator ni was replaced by the more recent particle niht during the Middle High German period. At the same time, German changed from a syllable language to a word language. This typological shift is primarily a result of the replacement of the phonological syllable by the phonological word as the central prosodic domain in German. The tendency towards optimization of the phonological word involved many processes, including vowel reduction and deletion. Unstressed pretonic syllables such as the Middle High German preverbal negation marker ne/en were affected by this prosodic restructuring. I argued that this typological change is an additional factor that set Jespersen¿s Cycle in motion in German.

https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/bdg/37714