Areal variation in Middle High German

Abstract

Abstract Using the Corpus der altdeutschen Originalurkunden ‘Corpus of Old German Original Charters’ (Wilhelm et al. 1932–2004), we will show that charters offer valuable information on dialectological differences during the Middle High German period. This text genre is unsurpassed in terms of its geographical resolution even though it faces certain challenges due to its partially formulaic style. With two well-known phenomena, i.e. inflected forms of the infinitive (‘gerunds’) and so-called ‘contracted’ verbs like haben/hân ‘have’, we will show how these materials can be analysed and put into perspective with other sources like the new Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik by Klein, Solms & Wegera (2018).