Генеалогия дискурса и проблема языковых изменений
Discourse genesis and the problem of language change

Summary/Abstract: The objective of this analysis is twofold, namely, it discusses the relations between discourse in its historical dimension, and the grammatical change in the sphere of Germanic connectors. The earliest autochthonic monuments of the Old High German epoch demonstrate a high degree of syntactic iconicity by encoding temporal relations, while causality, conditionality, finality etc. seem in the majority of examples analyzed in this study to be directly derived from the temporal relation. The study verified the hypotheses that the types of syntactic clause connection are dominated by the character of the discourse. Thus, the narrative discourse type originally preferred a “plane” type of connection between the matrix and the depended clause, while the development of the argumentative type was accorded by the growth of the number of connectors, the metaphorical change of their original temporality and the complication of the sentence structure.

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