The rise and fall of partitive markers in some Germanic varieties

Abstract

The purpose of this contribution is a comparative analysis of different “partitive markers” in the noun phrase of several Germanic varieties, with a special focus on areally peripheral non-standard or less standardized West Germanic varieties. Starting with the use of genitive case for the marking of partitive functions in various syntactic contexts in the older stages of German, we then take a closer look at those varieties for which the survival of at least some genitive forms and functions related to partitive meanings is reported in modern times. This is true for some Highest Alemannic dialects in Switzerland (Henzen 1932, 122–124; Szadrowsky 1937, 1940) and for Lëtzebuergesch, both the dialects and the Koiné (Döhmer 2017).1 We would like to emphasize, however, that for Highest Alemannic recent data are lacking completely. While there is some recent research on the more widely existing pronominal remnants of partitive genitive forms (see Strobel 2017), there is in general much less information concerning the expression of partitivity within the noun phrase (see Glaser 1992, 1993; Grestenberger 2015)