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Hans Ulrich Schmid: Die Ausbildung des werden-Futurs. Überlegungen auf der Grundlage mittelalterlicher Endzeitprophezeiungen

Various explanations have been offered for the periphrastic verbal construction werden + infinitive, a construction found in no other Germanic language but High German. These explanations are briefly reviewed here. Using a corpus of ca. 100 German versions of the "Fifteen Omens before the Day of Judgement", in which different and competing options for the expressions of futurity are attested from all German dialect areas between the 12th and the 17th centuries, a new explanation for this construction is postulated, namely, that it is a result of the convergence of two competing and homonymic constructions, firstly, werden as a full verb, and, secondly, in combination with a modal verb (particulary sollen) + the infinitive. – Six previously unpublished fifteenth-century versions of the text are edited in an appendix to the article.