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Hans Ulrich Schmid: Historische Syntax und Textinterpretation. Am Beispiel des Objektenitivs imk Alt- und Mittelhochdeutschen  

Over the years, various views, sometimes contradictory, have been offered on the functions of genitive objects of verbs in German. This article begins with a discussion of some of the more important of these opinions. The analysis of over 1000 cases of objective genitives in Old and Middle High German leads to the conclusion that syntactic factors alone are not sufficient adequately to explain the expansion of the genitive case for objects in Middle High German. With examples from historical legal usage, it is demonstrated that pragmatic and textual linguistic factors must also be taken into account.