Bare Root Infinitives in German

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show how linguistic and literary studies can benefit from a joint work about linguistic structures in poetry. Firstly, the analysis of poetry has an important impact on linguistic theory as it leads our attention to specific structures and meanings that so far have not been considered. Secondly, a close linguistic analysis can reveal hitherto overlooked facets of meaning which have a great significance for the overall interpretation of a poem. We focus on Bare Root Infinitives (BRIs) in German. As they lack the features for tense, mood, person and number, they are more flexible in meaning than finite forms. When looking at poetry, besides the well-known deontic and bouleticmeanings (cf. Reis 1995, 2003; Gärtner 2014) a third meaning that we call reactive meaning stands out. Remarkably, this reactive meaning can also be found in everyday language. Its specific semantic properties show that a semantic analysis of BRIs in the style of Kaufmann (2012) is adequate: modality, but not non-referentiality, is a “hard-wired” semantic property of BRIs. The specific case study of the poem ‘muster fixieren’ (‘fixating patterns’) by Nico Bleutge reveals how the restricted context of the poem interacts with the different interpretations of BRIs to arrive at a complex text interpretation. Keywords: bare root infinitives, semantic-pragmatic interface, poetry, modality, pragmatic enrichment, semantics