“Non-coordinating UND” in Middle and Early New High German

Abstract

Even though it has been noted quite early that the conjunction UND may also serve as a relative/equative particle or even a subjunction in Middle High German and Early New High German, corpus-based empirical studies are lacking so far. Based on new empirical data, I show that non-coordinating UND originated in the Upper German dialect area during the 12th century, subsequently spreading to the Central German dialect area and reaching the peak of its use in the 14th century. In contrast to recent literature, I argue that the non-coordinating use of the conjunction originated from semantically and syntactically ambiguous constructions of the form UND-XP-VFIN. I also propose that the earliest instances of the phenomenon are (adverbial) relative constructions and that the temporal and the equative function developed via reanalysis of adverbial relative clauses with a temporal/modal head element.