Diachronic investigations of (in)definiteness expressions in German

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In the German language, the (in) definiteness of the objects indicated by noun phrases is expressed lexically. In this study, the following three linguistic phenomena were discussed and explained in terms of their (in) definiteness: The relation between the grammaticalization of the German existential construction “es gibt + accusative noun phrase” and the (in) definiteness of this noun phrase, the correlation between the (in) definiteness of the attributive genitive in Old High German and its prenominal/postnominal position relative to the head noun, and the relation between the modal verb sollen and the (in) definiteness of the sentence subject. These investigations have suggested that the nominal category of (in) definiteness can give a new perspective on the semantic and syntactic features of the German language.