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Nils Langer: Zur Verbreitung der tun-Periphrase im Frühneuhochdeutschen

The stigmatization of unwanted syntactic constructions in the course of the historical development of the German standard language has been largely ignored in the secondary literature. In this article, the development of the use of auxiliary tun ‘to do’ is investigated in order to determine the extent to which seventeenth-century grammarians were able to form the syntax of the emerging standard language. In contrast to previous studies on the influence exerted by grammarians, this article is concerned with a construction that did not become part of Standard German. The study is based on an empirical investigation of the distribution of the tun-periphrasis in Early New High German (1350-1650) (ENHG) with reference to geographical, chronological and sociolinguistic (text type) variables. It is shown here that the construction was widespread in the period under review, and, most importantly, that there are no discernable patterns of particular frequency/lack of frequency with regard to any of the aforementioned variables. These findings suggest that the reasons behind the stigmatization of the construction as ‘bad German’ lie in the aim of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century grammarians to develop a prestige variety of German which would be independent of any of the existing varieties of ENHG. The article shows that the stigmatization of the construction occurred in three stages with varying motivations behind the stigmatization and an increasing extension of the areas covered by the stigmatization. The earliest stigmatization, in the 16th century, is restricted to poetry. In the late seventeenth century, the use of the construction was no longer acceptable in non-literary formal written language, but it was not until the eighteenth century that the present notion of it being ‘bad German’ and associated with speakers of ‘socially lower status’ fully crystallized.