The Development of Four Adverbs of Degree from Old to Early New High German
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The present study analyses four prominent adverbs of degree in Old, Middle, and Early New High German from a comparative West Germanic perspective: filu/vile/ viel ‘much, very’, harto/harte/hart ‘very, firmly’, sêro/sêre/sehr ‘very, sorely’, and gar(aw)o/gar(w)e/gar ‘wholly, very’. Based on corpus data, all four display considerable changes in their usage patterns over time. The findings support the observation that the Middle Germanic period was a time of convergence with regard to the usage of adverbs of degree (Visser 2023), since the developments in Low German largely follow those in High German. However, the geographic and textual distribution of sêro/sêre/sehr with the meaning ‘very’ in High and Low German suggests an expansion from Middle Dutch beginning around 1400. A broader implication is that usage patterns of adverbs of degree are quite borrowable in language contact situations.
Author: Lourens Visser
Institution: University of Groningen
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4402894380