Verbal Mood in Early Old High German Relative Clauses

Abstract

In contrast to Modern German, which has almost completely lost the use of the subjunctive in relative clauses, Old High German exhibits indicative/subjunctive mood alternations. In this paper, I will present a pilot study on the interaction of mood in early relative clauses with morphosyntactic and information/discourse-structural factors which are discussed in the cited literature and are assumed to influence the use of the subjunctive in relative clauses. The survey is based on a corpus of Old High German texts from the 8th and 9th centuries. Furthermore, a syntactic analysis will be sketched in order to explain the licensing of the subjunctive in Old High German relative clauses and the loss of mood alternation in the later stages of the language.

Keywords

• Indicative. Mood. Old High German. Relative clauses. Subjunctive