Hauptinhalt

Rudolf Steffens: Die Präpositions-Artikel-Enklise in der deutschen Sprachgeschichte unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Bibelübersetzung Martin Luthers 

The article takes a historical perspective on the preposition-article enclitic in German. It offers the first reliable survey of the cliticization inventory of the Middle High German period, which was not entirely retained in New High German as degrammaticalization processes led to a significant reduction. The 1545 edition of Luther’s translation of the Bible has been subjected to a detailed statistical analysis. In order, the most common contractions (out of a total of 7149) in Luther’s translation are im, zum, am, vom, zur. Luther’s usage thus almost matches the New High German status, in which the most frequent contractions are im, am, zum, zur, vom. Luther makes use of contractions involving prenominal genitive (auf< auf des) and plural articles (zun < zu den), which are not permitted in modern German and his cliticization inventory is more extensive than that of New High German. In Luther, the cliticized forms have mostly been grammaticalized out of their analytical predecessors to a lesser degree than in modern Standard German. Thus, whereas cliticization is now obligatory with unique nouns (der Flug zum Mond, der Besuch beim Papst), for Luther both contractions (vom Satan) and analytic forms (von dem Satan) were permissible.