Reinhard Fuchs: Stabreimende Wortpaare in der Überlieferung unter Einbeziehung rechtssprachlicher Aspekte
“Reynard the Fox”: Alliterating Word-Pairs in the High German Transmission Under Consideration of Legal Aspects

Summary/Abstract: In the context of a long-term project of collecting and cataloguing the alliterating word-pairs in the earliest stages of German, i.e. Old and Middle High German, the role of word-pairs of legal origin and-/-or context has been repeatedly addressed. Alliteration is defined according to the Germanic tradition of alliterating only stressed syllables; word-pairs as terms joined by conjunctions with the same morpho-syntactic elements. Here we study the use of the rhetoric device in “Reinhard Fuchs,” a text that survives in both Early Middle High and Middle High German versions. The word-pairs are discussed in the context of their appearance in the transmission of the text, within the context of the story, then assessed with regard to the recorded occurrences of the pairings in earlier and / or near contemporary works. This collection suggests hints of the kind of education to which the author was exposed, and characterizes the work as using traditional rhetoric elements within its specific genre. It further supplements the ongoing survey of the alliterating word-pair within the history of recorded German.

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