THE ROLE OF SEMANTICS IN THE EMERGENCE AND MAINTENANCE OF SUFFIXES: AN INVESTIGATION OF OLD HIGH GERMAN -HEIT AND -TUOM

Abstract

This dissertation is an investigation of how the suffixes -heit and -tuom develop in Old High German, and how these suffixes interact with the preexisting suffixes of the language. It has long been recognized that the head of a compound may be reanalyzed as a suffix. The present study examines this phenomenon for -heit and -tuom, and emphasizes the role that semantics plays in their emergence as suffixes from independent words, how they interact with the preexisting suffixes, and how they become productive. The answers to these questions provide insight into how a derivational system changes over time and the types of information that the system is sensitive to. The data are drawn primarily from corpora and include virtually all instances in which heit and tuom occur, including glosses. They are treated qualitatively by examining the contexts in which the words are used, though quantitative methods are used to examine the productivity of the suffixes. The heit and tuom data are separated into three categories, i.e., independent, compound, and suffix, that are each analyzed in turn. Then, an analysis is proposed to account for the shift from word to suffix. Lastly, the interaction of the new suffixes with the old ones is evaluated by comparing competing pairs within the same text. The analysis proposes that semantics alone is sufficient to account for the shift from word to suffix. The meaning of the word directly influences the meaning of the suffix, the types of bases it attaches to, and its productivity. Semantics continues to play a role in the organization of the system after grammaticalization has occurred. While the new suffixes appear to compete with the preexisting suffixes, it is shown that the new suffixes assume a meaning different from that of their competitors. The results of the present investigation generally corroborate previous research on the suffixes -heit and -tuom, but they provide new insights into the behavior of these suffixes and the motivations for that behavior. The analysis provides principled reasons, rooted in semantics, for why the two suffixes developed differently, and why they interacted with the preexisting suffixes in the way that they did. Furthermore, the development of these two suffixes proposed here supports similar research conducted for historical English. Future work should examine why English and German diverge in the development of these suffixes, as well as if the present analysis can account for other grammaticalizations that occur in Old High German.