Temi scelti di linguistica antico-sassone: la parola ai manoscritti

Selected topics in Old Saxon linguistics: what manuscripts can tell us. In his “Overview of Old Saxon Linguistics, 1992-2008” published in 2010, Marc Pierce states that “Old Saxon has sometimes been the Cindarella of the Early Germanic languages. Admittedly, the study of Old Saxon has not been neglected as that of some of the others […], but a good deal of work remains to be done.” This paper aims to partially fill this gap by offering an overview of certain significant linguistic features selected in the subfields of Old Saxon phonology and syntax in the light of a “return-to-the manuscript” approach. So far, the analysis of Old Saxon phonological system has mainly focused on stressed syllables and has generally left the development of end syllables in the shade. Yet, unstressed vowels show a greater degree of graphemic variation in representing the underlying phonemes than stressed ones. The present investigation aims to cast light on the specific Old Saxon traits of this phenomenon. Syntactically speaking, this study will focus on nominal expressions and, particularly, on determiners, a field which has not received as much attention as other areas of inquiry like for example the syntax of verb phrases. It will be shown that the different realization of the DP projection can help to account for variant readings between the witnesses (not necessarily to be interpreted as “errors”) and ultimately to better evaluate them in their diachronic dimension.