Sprachausbau im Sprachkontakt: Syntaktischer Wandel im Altschwedischen (review)

There are few people left who remember the stir Uriel Weinreich’s Languages in Contact made in 1953. A new area in humanities was created, and its impact on general linguistics is hard to appreciate nearly sixty years later. Since that time countless articles, dissertations, and books dealing with borrowed elements and describing the fortunes of immigrant languages have been written, and each one of them acknowledges its debt to Weinreich’s “perennial classic.” Höder’s Sprachausbau im Sprachkontakt is part of that stream. New approaches to the subject, “languages in contact,” have hardly resulted in revelations. Various processes have been subsumed under “models” and “frameworks,” and new terms have been invented for the more traditional ones. In an influential recent work, we read: “Linguistic change is a social phenomenon. It is negotiated by speakers in face-to-face encounters, and an innovation in a speaker’s output is not a linguistic change until it has been agreed on and adopted by some community of speakers, however small the community may be” (qtd. 91–2). Have we not always known that every innovation, whether in language or social mores, passes through three stages: introduction, possible acceptance by a narrow group, and its spread to wider circles? Without initial acceptance the novelty will die; unless it spreads, it will be marginal and endangered. Höder realizes that theory and practice (as scholarly occupations) are often at cross-purposes in linguistics (95). His goal is to look at syntactic change in Old Swedish (see the subtitle of the book), but a Habilitation dissertation needs a long, wide-ranging introduction. Everything from the runes to second language acquisition has been thrown into the pot. I am afraid that those who are interested in Old Swedish syntax will skip the first hundred pages.

“Languages in Contact” is not the only theoretical topic addressed in the book. Another is “Schriftlichkeit und Mündlichkeit” [written and oral forms of expression]; it enjoys great popularity in Germany. Old Swedish (its conventional dates are 1225–1526) is a dead language; consequently, one can rely only on preserved texts in deciding to what extent we witness the development of Swedish as a more or less abstract entity only in its written form. Since Höder’s investigation is corpus-based, he compares Latin and German texts with their translation into Swedish. Finally, during the late Middle Ages the literary standards emerged in west European languages and complex syntactic structures—hypotaxis among them—became prominent. Unlike Classical Greek and Latin, Old Germanic had limited means for expressing subordination. For instance, in Old Icelandic, er was an all-purpose connective, and, depending on how we segment the sentence, it sometimes looks (to us) like a relative pronoun or a conjunction and sometimes occupies the place of the subject. The line between coordination and subordination is not always clear even in modern languages. Höder cites the difference between German denn [for] and weil [because] and monstrosities like nichtsdestoweniger [“notwithstanding”] and “inasmuch as ~ in so far as” to show that the course of grammaticalization does not always run smoothly. On page 142, Höder gives an instructive list of thirty connecting markers of subordination. Not all of them by far have counterparts in Old Icelandic.

The literary norm of the early Germanic languages was strongly influenced by Latin, for it was through Latin that medieval writers learned to write prose. It is therefore customary to trace various innovations in the sentence structure of Germanic to Latin syntax. This point of view needs no revision, but the timing is important: several major shifts occurred simultaneously and relatively late. The growth of hypotaxis coincided with the introduction of perspective in painting, with the discovery of “literary perspective” (narrators learned to describe two actions happening in two different places at the same time) and with the appearance of what may be called the rudiments of the modern sense of humor (before that, if we disregard punning, it was easy to...