Kalb’s Leber und Dienstag’s Schnitzeltag: Zur funktionalen Ausdifferenzierung des Apostrophs im Deutschen

Abstract

This paper analyzes the non-standard use of the apostrophe in modern German texts. Traditionally, it is assumed that the apostrophe has a purely phonographic function in German, even though the first examples of non-phonographic apostrophes date back to the 17th century. Still today, spellings with non-phonographic apostrophes, such as die Pizza’s, are considered as mistakes or misspellings. However, the in-depth analysis of these spellings reveals that the vast majority of non-phonographic apostrophes are not used at haphazard. They rather indicate information about the morphological structure of words: they either mark the right border of their left context, the left border of their right context or the morphological border as such.

Keywords

• apostrophe
• morphology
• non-standard use
• punctuation