Studien zum mittelniederdeutschen Adverb

Sammanfattning: The present work is a corpus-based study of Middle Low German adverbs. The corpus covers the period from c. 1225 to c. 1600 and comprises several text categories (e.g. legal documents and literary texts) from the three main Middle Low German regions, Westphalia, Eastphalia and northern Lower Saxony. The extralinguistic parameters investigated are time, region, and text category. In addition, some semantic factors are taken into account, such as the type of adjective to which the derivational suffixes are added. The distinction between adjectives and adverbs and the concept of the suffix are discussed in some detail.The presentation of results is divided into three main parts. The first part investigates variation in the distribution of adverbial derivational suffixes such as -inge(s), -like(n) and -linge(n). The second part analyses variation in the distribution of a number of temporal adverbs, e.g. heute, immer/stets, jetzt/nun, nie, niemals and oft. In the third part, some syntactic aspects of Middle Low German adverbs are considered. In this context, the development of adverbs derived from adjectives in North Sea Germanic languages and in High German is compared.The present study shows that the distribution of both adverbial derivational suffixes and temporal adverbs exhibits variation across time and region. In contrast, the parameter of text category is shown to be of lesser importance.