Quantifying Expressions in the History of German

“The authors of Quantifying Expressions in the History of German provide an in-depth empirical study of the diachronic changes affecting a representative group of quantifying words in the history of German. Some of the changes they report are well known, like the loss of genitive marking with quantifying words like viel and wenig. Historical developments of other quantifiers—that is, strong quantifiers or indefinite pronouns—have until now received only little attention. The book contains a wealth of data for each quantifying expression under investigation and for each historical period of German: future work on the diachrony of quantifying expressions will consider the present book to be an extremely valuable source of data. In addition, the study impressively shows how the multitude of small changes found in the realm of quantifying expressions in German can be accounted for in terms of a more general change triggering Head-to-Specifier reanalysis from the functional head Card to its specifier position SpecCardP. Even if one might not subscribe to each syntactic analysis R&S suggest, the overall picture, taking into account the specific development
of individual quantifying expressions, presents itself as a convincing proposal for the diachrony of quantifying expressions.”