A Diachronic Corpus of Sermons. Tracing Grammatical Change throughout the History of German
Creators: name: Pickl, Simon
Publisher: name: Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository
Year: 2016
Subjects: subject: Language history
subject: Linguistics
subject: FOS: Languages and literature
subject: Historical Linguistics
subject: German
subject: Corpus linguistics
subject: Language change

description: In this contribution, a single-genre diachronic corpus of German sermons spanning nearly one millennium will be presented. It is being compiled in order to be able to study grammatical change focussing on the diachronic aspect, keeping other factors of variation as uniform as possible, especially genre. There are two main reasons for the decision to design a diachronic corpus that is based on the single genre ‘sermons’. Firstly, the received history of grammatical change in German is characterized by a heterogeneous data basis. For instance, Old High German has been studied especially on the basis of translations of Latin religious texts, Middle High German has typically been portrayed as the language of courtly poetry, and studies on Early New High German have focussed predominantly on the language of chancery and trade (cf. Fleischer/Schallert 2011, 26–27). It is not always clear, therefore, if the differences identified between these periods are to be attributed exclusively to diachronic change or at least partly to inter-genre variation. Narrowing down the view by focussing on a single genre that is well documented throughout the history of German is a way of mitigating this problem. A second problem lies in the type of source material typically used when studying grammatical change in the past. Usually the sources come from widely available material, which is often representative of registers detached from orality. This restriction has been tried to overcome by using sources ‘from below’ (cf. Elspaß 2005) or ‘ego-documents’ (cf. Rutten/van der Wal 2013), which exhibit more oral features than the written registers. Sermons offer a different take on historical orality: they represent a reproduction or imitation of physically oral (albeit monologic) communication from the pulpit (cf. e.g. Mertens 1991) and retain a typical set of oral features even in their written form (cf. e.g. Mertens 1992). The corpus is designed to include prints and manuscripts of sermons from different German-speaking regions. The texts are transcribed using TEI and manually annotated to make the corpus searchable for grammatical phenomena to be investigated, especially inflection. This presentation will sketch the outline of the project and its current status along with some first results. References Elspaß, Stephan (2005): Sprachgeschichte von unten. Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen Alltagsdeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Fleischer, Jürg / Oliver Schallert (2011): Historische Syntax des Deutschen. Eine Einführung. Tübingen: Narr. Mertens, Volker (1991): “‚Texte unterwegs‘. Zu Funktions- und Textdynamik mittelalterlicher Predigten und den Konsequenzen für ihre Edition”. In: Danielle Buschinger / Wolfgang Spiewok (eds): Mittelalterforschung und Edition. Amiens: Université de Picardie, 75–85. Mertens, Volker (1992): “Predigt oder Traktat? Thesen zur Textdynamik mittelhochdeutscher geistlicher Prosa”. In: Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 24/2, 41–43. van der Wal, Marijke J. / Gijsbert Rutten (eds) (2013): Touching the Past. Studies in the historical sociolinguistics of ego-documents. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.