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Auxiliary Selection in Yiddish Dialects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2022

Lea Schäfer
Lea Schäfer*
Affiliation:
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
*
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstraße 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany, [lea.schaefer@hhu.de]
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Abstract

The variation of the two past tense auxiliaries (HAVE and BE) is a well-studied phenomenon in European languages, especially in the West Germanic varieties. So far, however, the situation in Eastern Yiddish has not been examined. This paper focuses on auxiliary selection in these Yiddish dialects based on data from the Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry, which were collected in the 1960s. Like most of the current works on this topic, the following analysis uses and discusses Sorace’s (1993, 2000) Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy, which allows to examine the Yiddish structures in light of historical and diatopic evidence from other Germanic varieties, particularly German and Dutch. The main focus is on intransitive verbs that show a high degree of variation—state verbs, controlled and uncontrolled motional process verbs, and change-of-state verbs. However, the Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy also has weaknesses, as is demonstrated in the following.*

Keywords

past tense formationYiddishdialectologyAktionsartaspect
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 341 - 384
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Copyright
© Society for Germanic Linguistics 2022

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Footnotes

*

This article was written as part of the project Syntax ostjiddischer Dialekte / Syntax of Eastern Yiddish dialects (SEYD), which was funded between 2017 and 2018 by a research grant from the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung and from the end of 2018 up until 2022 by the BMBF. I would like to thank Marc Brode, Jana Katcynski, and Florian Leuwer for their assistance in data collection. Furthermore, I thank Jürg Fleischer for providing data from the Wenker-survey. Many thanks to Ricarda Scherschel for proofreading my English and to Ilana Mezhevich (CUP) for her detailed and constructive comments.

References

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