The literization approach to early German syntax
Katerina Somers, Department of German, Nordic, & Slavic+
In this talk I present a new approach to the study of early German syntax that focuses on each historical attestation as an ad hoc, individual literization—or scriptus (plural scripti)—of a speaker’s exclusively oral vernacular. I define literization as both a synchronic and diachronic process. As a synchronic process, it refers to a speaker transforming their multilectal spoken vernacular into a scriptus in the context of a specific writing project. In the diachronic sense, it refers to a community of speakers developing a written vernacular and writing culture: improving the functionality of their scripti, in turn, reveals new domains in which the written word can be of use. In both the synchronic and diachronic sense, literization demands linguistic innovation from the literizer. That is, none of the varieties of an exclusively oral German, whose processing theretofore had been facilitated by interlocutors being in the same place at the same time, were equipped with the linguistic means of establishing the unprecedented degree of grammatical and lexical coherence required in the dislocated context that writing alone effects. In the case of German-speaking Carolingian Europe, where aspiring writers did not yet have any vernacular writing culture to support their endeavors, I argue that each literization, or text, constitutes an individual and idiosyncratic vernacular scriptus. In order to understand how a literizer decided to meet the new demands of disembodied language in order to create their scriptus, one must consider the whole sociocultural context in which these choices were made.
This talk, then, elaborates the argument that exclusively oral multilectal vernaculars lack the lexical and grammatical coherence required to function well in the domain of writing (Koch and Oesterreicher 1994; 2007). That is, creating a scriptus for unliterized languages requires that literizers engage not just with the mechanics of writing itself, e.g., wrestling sound into graphemes, but with literacy as a conceptual category. Even if a literizer could simply transcribe some variety of their phonic vernacular into a graphic form, i.e., match the written to the spoken, structure by structure, the resultant scriptus would lack functionality for the project at hand. This is especially the case for the Carolingians, who, when they wrote in the vernacular at all, preferred to write about Christianity. Indeed, the most significant early German texts are gospel harmonies, which relate the story of Jesus in a unified narrative. No variety of their spoken vernacular had the linguistic tools needed to write a story that the literizers themselves only ever encountered in Latin, a language that had already undergone multiple centuries of literization. Though linguistic tools existed to cultivate greater coherence in oral vernaculars, especially their planned, public varieties, these were shaped by the processing constraints of an always oral production. The vernacular had never before contended with the possibility of complete disconnection between speaker, receiver, and the linguistic production itself. Thus, literizers must augment the vernacular’s grammatical and lexical coherence. Drawing on Kloss (1978), I argue that they do this through creative processes of syntactic and semantic ausbau: the development of new stylistic devices (“Stilmittel”) and domains for the use of written varieties (“Anwendungsbereiche”).
Kloss, Heinz. 1978. Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen seit 1800. 2nd ed. Düsseldorf: Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann.
Koch, Peter, and Wulf Oesterreicher. 1994. “Funktionale Aspekte der Schriftlichkeit.” In Schrift und Schriftlichkeit. Eine interdisziplinäre Forschung, 1:587–604. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Here’s a link to download the book this talk draws on, for free: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/460
