Re-evaluating comparative analysis between English and German: from Indo-European perspectives

• There has been much work concerning the comparative analysis on English and German (e.g. Hawkins 1986), but there is an area still less studied. Diachronic comparative studies in these languages show a typologically unique diversity within a same language family. What is used as a key factor in this paper is alignment change. Alignment can involve various linguistic features, but what various pieces of evidence (gender, tense-aspect, the passive voice, realisation of transitivity, etc., Toyota 2007) from these two languages indicate is that German is much more archaic than English. This can be further supported by orientation types of languages, which is closely related to alignment. What is commonly assumed as active alignment can be divided into speaker-oriented and hearer-oriented languages (cf. Durst-Anderssen 2005, 2006, 2008). German has the speaker-orientation and English, the hearer-orientation. So there is a slight difference even in alignment between these two languages. Some features such as word order is stable geographically, while alignment is persistent genetically (Nichols 1992), and the case of English and German (or the Germanic languages in general) goes against this typological generalisation. A much closer analysis of these languages can bring in new angles in future linguistic analysis.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

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kon (subject category)

ref (subject category)