The cartography of the DP from Middle High to Modern German

Positions and features of selected quantifiers, possessives, and adjectives

Abstract

Based on data from a new parsed corpus, we propose a cartography of the DP in medieval and early-modern German. Our cartography expands on Roehrs’s (2020) structure for the Modern German DP and on claims about the relative orders of different classes of adjectives by Cinque (1994) and Scott (2002). We propose that the DP in earlier stages of German has at least two underlying positions for (different kinds of) quantifiers and a position between D and N for adnominal genitives. Furthermore, we argue that there are two types of DP-internal movement, resulting in some surface deviation from the underlying cartographic order. Diachronically, in earlier German certain determiner-like elements could remain in their underlying positions, but in Modern German they move to a position at the front of the DP. We identify changes in the definiteness features of these determiner-like words as the catalyst for this structural change.