From preposition to purposive to infinitival marker

The Pennsylvania German fer…zu construction

Kersti Börjars | The University of Manchester

Kate Burridge | Monash University

The development from an allative preposition to a purposive marker to an infinitival marker is a common one cross-linguistically. In this paper, we look in some detail at this change in Pennsylvania German. We demonstrate that fer has completed this change in that it now occurs in a full range of complements. It has gone paired with a loss of the original infinitival marker zu. Functionally, the element has undergone a drastic change and given the loss of zu, one might expect that there would be equally far-reaching structural changes. The standard account of this type of change is one of reanalysis, but in this paper, we argue that the change is likely not to have involved reanalysis. Key words: Allative; grammaticalization; infinitival marker; Lexical-Functional Grammar; Pennsylvania German; purposive; reanalysis

Published online: 31 January 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.123.15bor

Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

Burridge, Kate

2015. In Language Structure and Environment [Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts, 6], ► pp. 45 ff.

Burridge, Kate & Simon Musgrave

2014. It's Speaking Australian English We Are: Irish Features in Nineteenth Century Australia. Australian Journal of Linguistics 34:1 ► pp. 24 ff.

Börjars, Kersti, Nigel Vincent & George Walkden

2015. On Constructing a Theory of Grammatical Change. Transactions of the Philological Society 113:3 ► pp. 363 ff.

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