Bare nouns, indefinite articles and partitivity in an Early New High German cookbook
The starting point of the present article is the usage of mass nouns with indefinite articles, known from modern Bavarian and neighbouring dialects. Our analysis is dedicated to the use of the indefinite article varying with bare nouns in a historical perspective, based on a cookbook handwritten in 1556 in the East Swabian variety of Augsburg, containing about 900 instances of mass nouns with and without articles. Like in modern Bavarian, the readings OBJECT and QUALITY can be distinguished. A comparison with the de-nominals in Old Spanish recipes shows that the indefinite articles appear in equivalent positions with mass nouns mostly denoting non-specific regular objects as instantiations of the kind. The discussion of quantifiers and measuring expressions shows a special syntactic and semantic behaviour of ain wenig ‘a little’. The final discussion leads to the assumption that the indefinite article does not formally express a partitive relation, but, at most, produces partitive effects.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Indefinite mass nouns in dialect and history: A short overview
- 2.1The Bavarian system
- 2.2The indefinite article with mass nouns in a historical perspective
- 3.Data and methods
- 4.Indefinite mass nouns in an ENHG cookbook
- 4.1Indefinite mass nouns in object or predicative position
- 4.2Ein-Numerals in titles
- 4.3Indefinite mass nouns in prepositional phrases
- 4.4The marking of indefinite mass nouns: An interim summary in the light of Modern (Middle) Bavarian
- 5.Mass nouns with quantity expressions
- 5.1Mass nouns and quantifiers
- 5.2Mass nouns and measuring expressions
- 6.Summary and discussion
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Abbreviations
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References
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.23045.gla