Syntactic change from Early New High German to New High German on the example analysis of the play “The noble Charcoal Burner”

Abstract

The 17^th century marks a break in the history of the German language between the Early New High German and the New High German. From a linguistic point of view written sources from this time are from special interest because theoretically they should combine characteristics of both periods and therefore indicate the linguistic change. A manuscript that was found recently is called “Der durchlauchtige Kohlenbrenner” (“The noble Charcoal Burner”) and which is dated by its author Adam Christoph Schüler into the year 1670. The focus of this work are syntactic phenomena such as genitive, concord, periphrastic constructs, position of the verb, infinitivus pro participio, reduction, expletive es, or genus alteration. The aim is to show syntactic change on explicit samples of the plays text. Which fields are already affected by a syntactic change and how far advanced in change are each syntactic sectors at the time of the plays first release.