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On the Grammaticality of Poetry: The Asyndetic Verb-Late Clause in Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2021

Katerina Somers
Katerina Somers*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
*
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of German Nordic and Slavic, 1220 Linden Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA [[[email protected]]]
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Abstract

This article discusses asyndetic verb-late clauses in Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch, which has long been considered a problematic text within the Old High German corpus in part because of clauses like these. Clauses with a dependent clause’s verbal syntax and no complementizer have been characterized as ungrammatical and/or rare (Behaghel 1932, Schrodt 2004, Axel 2007) and thus have not been included in accounts of early German syntax. I argue that asyndetic verb-late clauses are grammatical and that they can function as main or dependent clauses. Crucially, they demonstrate that main verb fronting was not obligatory in 9th-century German. Although Otfrid marked the main-subordinate asymmetry by various grammatical means, including verbal syntax, I demonstrate that verbal prosody also influenced syntax: Heavy verbs are more frequent in clause-late or -initial position and light verbs in clause-second position, regardless of the main–dependent distinction. I suggest that prosodically-sensitive verbal syntax is characteristic of Otfrid’s exclusively oral vernacular. In contrast, Otfrid imports the concept of differentiating main and dependent clauses grammatically from Latin. The Evangelienbuch, then, represents an attempt to transform an oral vernacular into a written language by imposing, however imperfectly, the norm of grammatically distinct main and dependent clauses onto a prosodically-sensitive verbal syntax.*

Keywords

Old High Germansyntaxoralityprosodyobligatory verb frontingverb-final main clauses
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 358 - 404
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Copyright
© Society for Germanic Linguistics 2021

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Rob Howell and Mark Louden for their feedback on various drafts of this article. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their generous engagement with this work.

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