Zur Geschichte der Nominalgruppe im alteren Deutsch: Festschrift fur Paul Valentin: Akten des Pariser Kolloquiums Marz 1999 (review)

To celebrate the retirement of Paul Valentin after 30 years as Professor of Germanic Philology at the Sorbonne (as Jean Fourquet’s successor), Yvon Desportes organized a conference in Paris in March 1999 under the title ‘On the history of the nominal phrase in German with special consideration of determinants’ (translation JMJ). The eleven papers—all in German—presented at that time now appear as a Festschrift under a slightly different title, On the history of the noun phrase in Older German. Examples cited range from Germanic to modern German, but the majority of the papers focus on the earlier stages of High German.

Despite the change in the wording of the title, determinants still play a major role in the essays. Rosemarie Lühr analyzes the word order of quantifiers in Old High German and beyond, discussing partitivity in some detail and with numerous examples. Jean Haudry outlines the prehistory of the article in the Germanic languages, postulating Indo-European ‘article-like pronouns’. Elvira Glaser looks at the article as preserved in Old High German glosses, often overlooked as sources of syntactic data. Glaser includes insightful remarks on the varying degrees of reliability of glosses and glossaries. Yvon Desportes attempts to apply to Middle High German Paul Valentin’s model for describing the modern German article. He describes the evolution of binary categories (+/− definite, +/− countable) and their relationship to number, leading to a new (modern German) operative category: indefiniteness. Erika Oubouzar traces the development of ein (both an article, ‘a’, and a number, ‘one’) within Old High German, again underscoring the varying semantic and morphological aspects involved. Appropriately, then, ein plays a significant role in a volume focusing on a topic that intersects morphology, parts of speech, syntax, and semantics.

Some of the studies deal with syntax somewhat more narrowly. John Ole Askedal’s study investigates sentence length and noun phrase frequency in selected writings of three philosophers: Immanuel Kant, Hermann Cohen, and Joachim Kopper. Askedal’s cautious conclusions suggest a tendency of formal written German to evolve in an unusual direction, one that is different from less formal and from dialectal German. Jörg Riecke looks at noun phrases in medical/medicinal texts diachronically (Old High German through sixteenth century), identifying both genre-specific and production/reception factors such as orality. In a similar fashion, Odile Schneider-Mizony relates the evolution of extended attribute phrases (late fifteenth century and beyond) to the expansion of an audience of readers. Hans Ulrich Schmidt continues his work on the Old High German suffix -lîh, a once very highly productive morpheme, and its relationship to adverbial phrases. Maxi Krause investigates the interior structure of temporal noun phrases in the accusative and genitive and includes a detailed table of the results (82–95). The longest contribution is Franz Simmler’s analysis of the adjective morphology of pre- and post-nuclear phrases (sixteenth through eighteenth century); his comments on the necessity of using extensive databases are poignant. Furthermore, Simmler concludes that periodization attempts must consider internal linguistic factors as well as external historical considerations.

Throughout the Festschrift, comparisons to other Germanic languages are made, making the lack of an index particularly unfortunate. Closing remarks from the conference by Paul Valentin, addressed to ‘Old High Germans’, and a list of Valentin’s publications round out the volume. Once again, Desportes has edited and contributed to a volume on Old High German of lasting value; see also Syntax und Semantik, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1992; Semantik der syntaktischen Beziehungen, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1997. As a note, the cover illustration, ‘Rechts von N.’ (‘to the right of N.’) is borrowed from...