2. How many parts of speech? How many cases?
To all those working to raise the prestige of their vernacular language, ‘grammar’
meant in practice ‘Latin and Greek grammar’. According to long-established
tradition, Latin and Greek had eight different parts of speech and five (Greek) or
six (Latin) cases. So, therefore, must German, or so the pioneer grammarians
thought. For the parts of speech, the first three grammars of German from the 1570s
followed the Greek model, listing pronoun, verb,
adverb, participle, conjunction, preposition and article, but Ritter (1616) omitted
the participle and instead listed the interjection as a separate part of speech.
(In Greek grammar, the interjection was subsumed under the adverb). Not until
Schottelius (1651) was the ideal of eight parts of speech dispensed with for
German: Schottelius listed both the interjection and article as separate parts of
speech, making nine in total. Three and a half centuries later, the same nine are
now listed by Eisenberg (1999: 14) in his authoritative grammar of German.
It’s worth noting that there is a difference, however. Eisenberg (1999: 21-23) also
gives considerable importance to ‘syntactical categories’, i.e. sentence
constituents that can contain more than one word or part of speech, such as the
nominal phrase, prepositional phrase, adjectival phrase, or adverbial phrase. This
is a point we’ll return to under Section 7.
Besides the number of the parts of speech, the boundaries between them were also
(and still remain) problematic. The adverb is a good example. Even in standard
reference grammars today, there is disagreement about whether or not the words
underlined below are adverbs:
Sie arbeitetschön
Eisenberg (1999: 207), a linguist’s grammar of German, would classify schön as an
adjective (not an adverb, as I was taught!)
Das Kind ist der Mutter ähnlich. Wir sind stolz auf uns.
Dreyer & Schmitt (1999), a widely used grammar for foreign learners of German,
would say that the underlined word in each sentence is an adverb (as would Funks
(1763); cf. Jellinek 1914: 101). The adverb also arguably overlaps with the
adjective (sie singt schön), with particles (komm schon!), with conjunctions
(deshalb kommt er nicht), and with the participle (dies ist dringend erforderlich)
(Eisenberg 1999: 204-209).
Earlier grammarians had still other difficulties. They struggled to distinguish the
adverb from prepositions and prefixes (for instance, in Er klettertehinauf,
Schottelius viewed hinauf as an adverb), and often viewed interjections as adverbs.
Even some nouns looked to earlier grammarians like adverbs, or perhaps vice versa.
In er kam abends, for example, abends might be seen as the genitive of the noun
Abend. In other words, the boundaries of the adverb to virtually every other part
of speech were as much in doubt in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as today
(McLelland 2008).
The apparently basic question of the boundaries between the parts of speech still
remains topical today, and answers vary depending on the linguistic theory
followed. But at least the question of case has now been solved for German, with
the four cases of nominative, accusative, dative and genitive (see Jellinek 1914:
190-192). For early grammarians case too was a problem. In addition to the
nominative, accusative, genitive and dative, Latin had twofurther cases: the
vocative (a case used for addressing someone), and an ablative (used after some
prepositions and in a number of other constructions). Shouldn’t German have these
six cases like Latin, or at least five cases like Greek? Of the first three
grammarians of German, Ölinger (1574) omitted the ablative but kept the vocative
(as in Greek), while Albertus (1573) and Clajus (1578) found all six cases in
German. The vocative could be recognized by the addition of o ____! (e.g. O Vater!)
while the ablative looked identical to the dative but was recognizable because it
was preceded by von. In the seventeenth century, both Olearius (1630) and
Schottelius (1663) persisted in their belief in the ablative in German. After all,
the dative meant the ‘giving’ case; patently von (‘from’) could not be followed by
the giving case, and must govern the ‘taking-away’ case (the literal meaning
of ablative) (Schottelius 1663:229). It was Aichinger (1753: 128-29) in the
eighteenth century who first made the important decision that the fact that the
forms were the same (e.g. the same ending after von as after prepositions like mit)
was sufficient evidence that we are dealing with the same case. For Aichinger the
sevisible signs – and not the semantics of the relationships between entities –
were definitive (though not all later grammarians agreed). Adelung (1782) agreed
with Aichinger, but did allow for a vocative case in a few limited instances only.
By the mid-nineteenth century, however, grammarians assumed four cases for German.
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Originally Posted by peaceandfriendship
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