Modern Methods in the Investigation of German Historical Syntax

The International Professional Conference held in Eichstatt, West Germany, 4-6 May 1989 devoted to historical syntax studies in German is reported, & the 20 lectures delivered at the meeting are listed. Some of the topics included ingressive & egressive infinitive constructions in Middle High German Lancelot-prose, variation & grammaticalization in the history of extended adjectival & participial attributes, verbal phraseologisms in early seventeenth-century newspaper texts, Johann Werner Meiner's conception of dependence grammar, the development of modal words in Early New High German, sociolinguistically oriented studies of Early New High German sentence & nominal group syntax, peculiarities of the syntax of reformation dialogues, fourteenth-century sermons, the development of passive periphrases in German, case change within the framework of relational grammar, the syntax & style of nineteenth-century German, & the relationship between syntactic & metric division in German poems written around AD 1200. Z. Dubiel