A Historical Study on Syntactic Structures in German

从近代开始，德语逐渐从中世纪的听觉语言和口语化语言转变为视觉语言和文学语言。本研究旨在从语篇语言学和语用学的角度来描述这些变化，特别是句法结构的变化。这里使用的数据来自波恩大学的早期新高地德语文本语料库，按体裁和时期收集和分类。本研究的结果可以概括为：1)在英语语篇中，有限动词已经占据了英语语篇中的地位，并且已经形成了动词大括号结构。然而，与NHG相比，词序仍然相当自由，频繁的修饰表明。2)关于语序的几个原则被观察到：(a)一个明确的相表不一定是介词表。此外，修饰语与补语和修饰语的区分也没有关系。(b)限定动词和不定式的位置，将单词和短语划分为适当的长度。(c)分割的词和短语产生节奏。(d)根据信息传递的原则，这些词和短语沿着时间轴排列。越是重要的，越是落后。3)在阐述方面，没有证实拉丁文的影响，也没有看到Textsorten的倾向。4)句式结构简单，意合式比形合式使用频率高。5)在16世纪，连词“wande”的意思是“原因”和“理由”，已经分化为“weil”和“denn”。前者表达了事件之间的因果关系，后者表达了一个人断言的理由。这些不同的功能为构建文本提供了新的途径。6)据推测，在16世纪，语序从以听觉和口语化规则为基础的语序转变为以视觉和文学规则为基础的语序。

From the modern period on, German had gradually become a visual and literary language out of an auditory and colloquial one in the medieval period. This study aims to describe these changes, especially changes in syntactic structures from the viewpointof text linguistics and pragmatics. The data used here are from the Early New High German text corpus at the University of Bonn, collected and classified by genre and period. The results of this study can be summarized as below :1) In the ENHG,the finite verb had taken its position as in the NHG,and the verbal brace construction had already come into being. Compared with the NHG,however, the word order was still considerably free as frequent exbraciations show.2) Several principles concerning the word order were observed : (a) A exbraciated phase ist not necessarily a prepositional one. Besides, the exbraciation had no relation to the distiction between complemtnt and adjunct. (b) finitte verb and infinitives are located to divide the words and phrases into appropriate length. (c) The divided words and phrases function to produce rhythm. (d) Those words and phrases are arranged along the time axis, according to the principles of information trasmission. The more important ones are, the more backward they are.3) With regard to exbraciation, the influence of Latin ist not confirmed, and any inclination by Textsorten is not seen.4) Sentence structures are simple, and paratactic ones are more frequent than hypotactic ones.5) In 16th century, the conjunction 'wande', which had meant causes and reasons, had diverged into 'weil' and 'denn'. The former epresses a causal relationship betwenn events, the latter expresses grounds for one's assertion. These differentiated functions proposed new ways cnstruct text.6) It is assumed to be in 16th century that the word order changes from the one based on auditory and colloquial rules to the one on visual and literary rules.