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The ge- Participle Prefix in Early New High German and the Modern Dialects
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2008
Extract
During much of the Early New High German period, a small group of verbs with stem-initial g− and k− commonly formed their past participle without the prefix ge-.The standard account attributes this development to Upper German syncope. Quantitative data from a large collection of Nuremberg texts strongly suggests that this account is untenable, and a careful examination of the modern dialects shows that it is in fact the nonsyncopating Central German dialects that most strongly resemble the Early New High German situation. This paper proposes an alternative account involving inflectional haplology as the mechanism responsible for the loss of the prefix in the g-lk- verbs. This analysis answers many questions that the standard account raises, as well as explaining some striking patterns that the previous literature does not mention.
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- Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 1998