Linguistic purism in action: How auxiliarytunwas stigmatized in Early New High German. By Nils Langer. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2001. Pp. 312. Hardcover. $97.80

Extract

Nils Langer wrote this book with one major aim: to explore whether prescriptive grammarians influenced the formation of standard German. He does this by comparing language use and metalinguistic comments in the Early New High German period and by eliminating other factors, including “… system-internal reasons (as illustrated by an analysis of ENHG language use), sociolinguistic identification (as illustrated by distributional patterns of language use, e.g., with regard to text type)” (4), or random variation. Langer aims to establish that certain constructions disappeared from standard-language use after prescriptive grammarians' objections. He does not claim that grammarians are the major “creators” of standard German, but that we must assume a certain degree of influence for certain constructions, in particular when it comes to excluding features from the standard language. With this aim in mind, he investigates the use of periphrastic tun and to a lesser degree polynegation and double perfect constructions.