Determiner Syntax in Middle Low German: Evidence from the "Luebecker Ratsurteile"

In this dissertation, I take a look at Middle Low German nominal phrases as evidenced in the Lübecker Ratsurteile, a collection of court proceedings published by Wilhelm Ebel in 1955, which cover the years 1421-1550. By digitizing the corpus, I was able to perform a corpus analysis on noun phrases, where I concentrated on determiner use and form, adjectives, and set phrases. I compare the results of this corpus study to two standard grammars of Middle Low German, namely Lasch's (1914) Mittelniederdeutsche Grammatik and Lübben's (1882) Mittelniederdeutsche Grammatik. The use of the Lübecker Ratsurteile corpus gives us insight into the relative frequencies of determiners, adjective agreement patterns, and variation, which, while mentioned in both Lübben and Lasch, are not quantified. This study has three purposes. First and foremost, it is concerned with the determiner syntax as evidenced in the Lübecker Ratsurteile and its relation to the Middle Low German grammars. Second, it aims to facilitate work on Middle Low German syntax in future through the digitization of the corpus. Third, the theoretical framework elaborated in this study (Lexical-Functional Grammar) offers a new method of analyzing German noun phrases that may be extended to other Germanic languages.