Middle Low German Grammar: Nominal Inflection

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The aim of the project is to provide a new scientific grammar of the Middle Low German language, first of all concerning the inflectional morphology. In the first phase the focus lies on the inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns as one subgoal of the project. For all these word classes the in-flection forms are presented als well as their diatopic, diachronic and functional variation. Gram-matical variation, which is a crucial feature of historical languages, will be described qualitatively as well as quantitatively.The analyses are based on grammatically annotated texts of the Reference Corpus Middle Low German / Low Rhenisch (1200–1650), which provides amongst others a detailled annotation of inflectional features. Besides the word classes and the inflection, the lemmata are annotated. As the corpus is structured by the parameters ‘language area’‚ ‘time‘ and ‘genre’, it allows developing a grammatical description taking variation into account.In order to achieve the goal of describing the inflection of nouns, adjectives and pronouns with regard to variation the following steps are settled: (1) Defining the descriptional categories, the struc-ture and the appropriate presentation of the data. (2) The additional preparation and annotation of the corpus data in order to extent the data base für specific grammatical questions. (3) Creating and performing appropriate search queries in the corpus. (4) Analysing the data. (5) Presenting the results of the analyses. (6) Preparing the publication of a print version as well as an electronic ver-sion (open access).