The Diachrony of the nominalized infinitive in German

The nominalized infinitive (also conversion, gerund) is a very frequent phenomenon of contemporary German. However, this does not hold for older stages of German. Surprisingly, the emergence of the nominalized infinitive, i.e. its morphosyntactic development including the identification of its general motivation, has never been comprisingly investigated, although synchronic studies on Middle High German (such as MONSTERBERG-MÜNCKENAU 1885, KONING 1933, KLOOCKE 1974) already exist. This will be undertaken by the project linguistically which is located at the interface between syntax and morphology (VOGEL 1996: 250): It aims at investigating the diachrony of the nominalized infinitive in German with respect to its emergence, its diachronic motivation, and its morphosyntactic development including the nominalization of verbal complexes and VPs (consider formal restrictions of contemporary German such as ?das Gegessen-Haben, ?das Besucht-Worden-Sein). Aside from its usage as an abstract noun (such as das Laufen the running, das Herumstehen the standing about), the nominalized infinitive also appears in light-verb constructions (such as ins Rollen kommen, zum Verschwinden bringen), in the progressive (such as Er ist am Arbeiten), and potentially (cf. e.g. ENGELBERG 2004) in the so-called absentive (such as Er ist Arbeiten/arbeiten) in contemporary German. For the light-verb constructions, the usage of infinitives is rare, but without doubt nominal, especially due to the sometimes observable rivalry with the more frequent -ung- nouns (such as zur Aufführung kommen / zum Aufführen kommen) which is also supported by familiar results from language typology (cf. e.g. AHADI 2001 on Farsi). The project combines empirical research (including diachronic corpus-based investigations and an online-questionnaire experiment for acceptability judgments of contemporary German) and theoretical research taking into account language typology of related languages (especially Germanic) and non-related languages (such as Turkish), language acquisition, aphasiology, variational linguistics. Both equally weighted components aim to motivate the general emergence of the nominalized infinitive diachronically and synchronically.

Nominalized infinitives (cf. das Tragen 'wearing', das Herumgehen 'walking around', das In-der-Ecke-Stehen 'standing in the corner') are frequently used forms of present-day German. In earlier language stages, however, this was not the case. Verbal infinitives becoming nouns is a process of linguistic change which takes hundreds of years and which begins in late Old High German (around the year 800). This is one major result of the recently finalized FWF project "Nominalized Infinitives in the Diachrony of German" (V-347), which was carried out at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. By using electronic text resources and corpora, data from the earliest transmission of German to contemporary German were examined which illustrate that the emergence of nominalized infinitives does not simply come "out of nowhere". "The productivity of the nominalized infinitive," says principal investigator Dr. Martina Werner, "is closely intertwined with the development of abstract words on -ung which became unproductive. Words such as Drehung 'rotation', Steuerung 'control', Haftung 'respondibility' may still exist in contemporary German from earlier language levels, but they express less and less abstract concepts in present-day German than in the past, but rather refer to results: Heizung refers to the 'radiator', less and less to the 'process of heating', while Wohnung today means 'apartment' and no longer 'housing' as it used to be (sic). Due to this linguistic change, nominalizations such as Lachung or Herumstehung are usually no longer formed today. Only relics of the former -ung-pattern have survived. Today, we use the nominalized infinitive easily." The gradual emergence of the nominalized infinitive is simultaneously associated with the gradual decrease of the -ung-nouns, while in English, words on -ing, which is the English counterpart of the etymologically related German -ung, have become high-frequent. "However, English -ing no longer corresponds to German -ung, but to the nominalized infinitive," Werner explains. "Language change follows rule-based patterns. These develop over centuries, which is why grammatical change usually goes unnoticed by speakers. If we could become 300, 400 years old, we might notice it. But our lifespan looks more like a flash in the pan as compared to the duration of grammatical change." By the way, change does not make language 'better' or 'worse'. "For if that were so, our ancestors would have spoken much better in the Baroque, much better in the Middle Ages, and so on". So it makes no sense to assume that language would become better the further you go back in history. Rather, language is constantly changing, but its level of complexity remains the same. "Coding forms can change. But the underlying principles remain," Werner summarizes.