Deutsche Grammatik--Thema in Variationen: Festschrift fur Hans-Werner Eroms zum 60. Geburtstag (review)

In the three decades following his 1968 dissertation (University at Marburg) on the word vreude ‘joy’ in Middle High German, Hans-Werner Eroms (University at Passau) has been extremely productive in a number of linguistic areas including dialectology (especially Bavarian German), syntax, morphology, and the history of linguistics as is evidenced in a listing of his over 170 published monographs, articles, and reviews (411–23). It is fitting that many of the 26 essays (all in German) collected for the occasion of his 60th birthday should reflect and, in some instances, explicitly refer to a fair part of Eroms’s own philological contributions. Fifteen of the papers are subsumed under the rubric ‘Grammatical theory and the grammar of present-day German’, the remaining eleven fall under the heading ‘History of the language and an historical grammar of German’. Even in the light of these admittedly broad descriptors, the papers collected here cover quite a wide range of topics.

Roughly one-third of the essays deal in some fashion with syntax, extending along the language timeline from Old High German—Rosemarie Lühr on ‘generalizing’ relative clauses (263–81) and Karin Donhauser on negation, (283–98) to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who died in 1989. Syntactic topics addressed include pronoun placement, relative clauses in head position, and the pragmatics of relative clauses.

Among topics of a (perhaps) somewhat broader nature, Gerhard Helbig (121–36) discusses the terminology of German sentence types (Satzarten), concluding that the intricate complexities of formal and functional categories are co-determined by pragmatic components (Satzmodi). Hans Jürgen Heringer (235–43) returns to the writings of the neogrammarian Hermann Paul and his use of the notion of evolution. The first essay in this handsome volume, Jean-Marie Zemb’s ‘Von einem Grammatiker, der auszog, das Definieren zu lernen’ (3–20), is an engaging, wide-ranging, and challenging discourse on a medley of linguistic topics past and present, including Aristotle’s ‘Categories’, the recent German orthography (including punctuation) reform, and treatment of ‘sentences’ by the experts at Duden publishers (Bibliographisches Institut, Mannheim). Anyone who doubts that linguistic discourse can be engaging, even entertaining, should read (and reread) Zemb.

In a historical study, Theo Vennemann (‘Germania semitica’, 245–61) presents evidence of significant influence of Semitic on the (West) Germanic family of languages, specifically via the etymology of terms related to English plough, play, furrow, farrow, folk, flock and two Proto-Germanic etymons, *felh-‘to hide, bury’ and *folg-‘to follow’.

More recent corpora investigated in the essays include Low German charters (thirteenth-sixteenth century, ‘to do’ as auxiliary), a Parish Book from Gebenbach in Bavaria (1418–1437, dialect features), a letter by Sebastian Brant (1502), a novel by Grimmelshausen (1669, ‘to do’ as auxiliary), and a Finnish translation of Günther Grass’s tale ‘Unkenrufe’ (1992).

The auxiliary verb tun ‘to do’ is the object of three studies while one paper investigates current usage of scheinen ‘to appear’ as a quasi-modal verb. Bavarian German is the object of analyses of verb-initial declarative sentences, the particle auch ‘too, also, etc.’, and the use of ‘Northern German’ Januar/‘Southern German’ Jänner ‘January’ in Passau by Hermann Scheuringer (389–97). Jean-François Marillier (21–34) discusses the interplay of morphological and syntactic aspects of the German perfect auxiliary pair haben/sein ‘to have’/‘to be’ + participle (cf. English She has arrived/Christ is risen).

Textlinguistics is practiced by Klaus Brinker (191–202), who analyzes a sermon broadcast on radio in 1990. Franz Simmler (299–335) analyzes the ninth-century bilingual Latin-Old High German Tatian manuscript from St. Gall (Switzerland), a socalled Gospel Harmony, or Synopsis of the Life of...