Pronominal partitivity in German dialects: Transitions and changes in progress

Pronouns with (amongst others) indefinite-partitive function as French en and Italian ne are well-known (and well investigated) in Romance. As for Germanic languages, it is commonly assumed that the Dutch pronoun er in its partitive/quantitative manifestation is quite a unique phenomenon (cf. De Schutter 1992). Considering dialectal data, however, it appears that several (High) German dialects, mostly situated in a stripe between West Central German and East Franconian, but also in Highest Alemannic and other areas, do use an originally pronominal genitive form to refer to an indeterminate partial quantity. Apart from base dialects, partitive pronouns can be found for instance in Thuringian regiolects and thus also in ‘higher’ varieties of German. Forms like Central Hessian ere and sen can be traced back to the Old High German genitive forms of the personal pronoun iro (3rd person plural) and sîn (3rd person singular masculine). Once embedded in a complex system of partitive structures using genitive case, in modern dialects they constitute isolated, fossilized relics, for most German dialects having lost the genitive as an adverbial and adnominal case, with important consequences for the expression of partitive relations (cf. Glaser 1992). The central issue of the talk is the areal (horizontal) dimension of the pronominal expression of partitive-anaphoric reference in the German-speaking area in general and in Hesse in particular. Do the syntactic isoglosses correspond to the ‘traditional’ phonetic/phonological dialect-geographic boundaries? Focussing on the German state of Hesse as an administrative unit, using a classification-neutral division in grid squares, data collection methods of the current research project ‘Syntax of Hessian Dialects’ (SyHD) are applied, based on the experiences of the SAND and SADS projects. Hesse, comprising all three main German dialect areas (Low, Central and Upper German), represents one of the remaining core areas of partitive genitive pronouns and, due to its central position, is influenced by various (expanding?) surrounding patterns of pronominal partitivity. Not least, the area is expected to show interesting transition zones: different types might coexist at present, as mentioned by Glaser (1993) for the Egerland dialect and subdialects of East Franconian.