Narrative Inversion in Prosaromanen der Frühen Neuzeit: Informations- und diskursstrukturelle Perspektiven

Abstract Verb-initial declarative sentences are rarely used in present-day German. They are currently found primarily in jokes such as Kommt ein Pferd in eine Bar ‚A horse walks into a bar‘ and are generally associated more with spoken than written language (Auer 1993; Sandig 2000). In terms of information structure, verb-initial declarative sentences in modern German are considered to be thetic expressions with sentence focus (Önnerfors 1997). Historical findings from Old High German indicate that the frequency of this sentence pattern was significantly higher at the outset of the German language’s history than it is in present-day German. Recent literature attributes this primarily to the fact that the verb-second grammar of present-day German only gradually became established in the history of the language, whereas the use of the pre-verbal position in Old High German is still considered optional (Axel 2007; Petrova 2011). Verb-initial declaratives would therefore be grammatically motivated in Old High German, as they are seen from a diachronic perspective as exponents of the transition between the declarative verb-final sentences of the pre-Old High German period and the declarative verb-second sentences of later periods in the history of the German language. However, Hinterhölzl & Petrova (2005, 2011) argue that verb-initial declaratives in Old High German, like their modern German counterparts, have no sentence topic, i.e., they should be classified as thetic sentences. They therefore argue for a discourse-pragmatic motivation for the verb-initial declarative and its assignment to the concept of narrative inversion already in Old High German. Overall, there is no consensus in the literature that the history of verb-initial declarative sentences can be described as a continuous development from Old High German to present-day German. The present paper addresses this question from the perspective of Early New High German, a period in the history of the German language characterized by a sharp increase in the use of verb-initial declarative sentences. It is demonstrated that only a clear distinction between different types allows for a plausible answer to the question of the diachronic scenario of verb-initial declarative sentences in German. Based on such a typology, it can then be shown that the use of verb-initial sentences in Early New High German is primarily motivated by discourse pragmatics: In terms of discourse structure, verb-initial sentences indicate coordinating discourse relations, which, however, do not necessarily have to be narrative. In terms of information structure, verb-initial declarative sentences in Early New High German are used in particular to signal continuity between two discourse segments, which brings them into close proximity to verb-initial declarative sentences in Old Icelandic (Booth & Beck 2021). Methodologically, this work is a corpus study whose corpus consists of prose novels from the Early Modern Period.