Linguistic Purism in Action: How Auxiliary Tun was Stigmatized in Early New High GermanThe auxiliary do (tun) is one of the most-discussed constructions in West Germanic. In German, there is a striking opposition between modern standard German, where the construction is virtually ungrammatical and considered to be "sub-standard" by most speakers, whilst, as this book shows, the construction is attested in all modern dialects as well as historic stages since 1350. In answering why auxiliary tun is ungrammatical in modern standard German, it is shown that the stigmatization of tun was caused by prescriptive grammarians in the 16th-18th century. Furthermore it is shown that the stigmatization of tun as "bad" German occurred in clearly discernible stages, from bad poetry (1550-1680), to bad written German (1680-1740) and finally to "bad" German in general (after 1740), thus providing evidence that the history of the standardization of German needs to take into account direct metalinguistic comments from prescriptive grammarians. The effectiveness of linguistic purism is also shown by evidence from two other constructions, namely polynegation and double perfect. |
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Common terms and phrases
Aktionsart ander attested auff auxiliary tun Besch causative tun chron construction Corpus dialect areas distribution doen double perfect durative 15 durative 15 lit/did durative 16 lit East Central German egressive 17 lit eighteenth century English ENHG period examples geben Gebrauch gehen Germanic languages Gottsched grammar grammatica of G grammaticalised habe Hochdeutsch inchoative infinitive Jellinek Konopka leben lexical verb lieb linguistic Low German machen marker Meißnisch modern German dialects modern standard German negation negative Opitz periphrastic Polenz polynegation prescriptive grammarians punctual reden regard regional sagen schon Schottel schreiben semantics sentence seventeenth century sociolinguistic speakers Sprache standard German standard language Stieler subjunctive suggesting supraregional syntactic Takada tense Teutsche Teutschen text type theo theo/dev thet thue thun thut tun-periphrasis tuon tuot Umschreibung ungrammatical in standard Upper German viel vnnd Wegera Weiss West Germanic languages whilst wissen Wörterbuch Zesen
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References to this book
Standardization: Studies from the Germanic Languages Andrew Robert Linn,Nicola McLelland No preview available - 2002 |