Von der Flexion in die Wortbildung und darüber hinaus. Zur diachronen Entwicklung des s -Suffixes im Deutschen

Abstract

Abstract Based on the classification scheme of grammatical categories by Plank (1981), the historical development of the s-suffix in German is described. It is shown that the suffix has reached different stages of development, ranging from inflection to word formation and to the lexicon. The article traces this development and examines on the basis of the variants öfter vs öfters, to what extent the development goes beyond the change path outlined by Plank. For this purpose, approx. 15.000 hits from the Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA) corpus (1600–1900) are analyzed with respect to time, space, genre and grammatical properties.