Chapter published in:
Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar
Edited by Evie Coussé, Peter Andersson and Joel Olofsson
[Constructional Approaches to Language 21] 2018
► pp. 137–168

Reduction or expansion? A bit of both

A case study on the development of German degree modifiers

| Leipzig University
| University of Bamberg
This paper presents a diachronic analysis of the German quantifier/degree-modifier constructions ein bisschen (‘a bitDIM’) and ein wenig (‘a little’). On the basis of data from two historical corpora, we examine to what extent these constructions followed a grammaticalization path comparable to the one Traugott (e.g. 2008a) observed for their English counterparts. Quantitative analyses on their gradual context expansion are combined with qualitative analyses on potential bridging contexts for reanalysis. Their combined histories suggest that the older German modifiers may have served as attractor sets for an increasingly strengthened mid-level quantifier/degree-modifier schema, promoting the emergence of younger modifiers. These observations stress the crucial role that network links between constructions can play in grammaticalization.
Keywords: degree modifiers, analogy, paradigmatization, low-frequency grammaticalization, German
Published online: 23 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.21.c6
References

Corpora and sources

DeReKo German Reference Corpus (Deutsches Referenzkorpus), available via COSMAS II, https://​cosmas2​.ids​-mannheim​.de​/cosmas2​-web/
DTA German Text Archive (Deutsches Textarchiv), http://​www​.deutschestextarchiv​.de/
DWDS Digital Dictionary of the German Language (Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache), http://​dwds​.de/
Internet Archive www​.archive​.org
MED Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, http://​quod​.lib​.umich​.edu​/m​/med/
MHDBDB Middle High German Conceptual Database (Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank), http://​mhdbdb​.sbg​.ac​.at/.
PCEEC Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, compiled by T. Nevalainen, H. Raumolin-Brunberg, J. Keränen, M. Nevala, A. Nurmi, & M. Palander-Collin (2006), distributed through the Oxford Text ArchiveGoogle Scholar

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