Meißen oder Wien?

Abstract

The 18th century was marked by the dispute among scholars which German dialect landscapes should serve as models for the development of Hochdeutsch. In addition to the Upper Saxon variety, which was often mentioned as a prestige variety, also the so called ‘Maximilianische Kanzleisprache’ of the Viennese Court played an important role in the development of a superior German written language. The aim of my paper is to reconstruct the historical concept Hochdeutsch by using a framesemantic approach. On the basis of a text corpus that includes 6 grammars of the 18th century, an individual text analysis of the prefaces is carried out. Therefore, I reconstruct explicit predications (so called “fillers” (Ziem 2014:243)) of the reference object Hochdeutsch and then derive the predication potential (so called “slots” (Ziem 2014:243)) of the historical frame Hochdeutsch.