Herbert Penzl

A History of the English Language. By Rolf Berndt. Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie, Leipzig. 1984. 240

This hard-cover volume was written in Rostock, East Germany, for &dquo;German-speaking students and in particular for future teachers of English&dquo;. After a general introduction on language change (9-15) there is a brief characterization of the external language history of English from AngloSaxon times to the end of the Middle Ages (16-30). Berndt agrees with modern historians that the &dquo;Anglo-Saxon&dquo; invasion of England in about 449 involved, in spite of Bede’s account of 731, various Germanic warbands rather than entire tribes. For the competition between English and French after 1066 he can provide many specific details (26-30). Brief descriptions of the periods of English follow (31-47), then the three main chapters: &dquo;Historical Changes in the Sphere of Lexis&dquo; (48-104), &dquo;Aspects of the Morphological and Syntactic Development of English&dquo; (105-72), &dquo;Phonological Changes&dquo; (173-202). The 124 &dquo;Notes&dquo; (203-6) are almost entirely bibliographical. There is a &dquo;Selected Bibliography&dquo; (209-10), and a &dquo;Glossary&dquo; (211-40) which contains the analyzed forms of all the unglossed sample sentences of the text. The separate historical treatment of the lexicon, morphology-syntax, and phonology is the author’s innovation and results in a surprisingly lucid treatment in spite of regrettably few cross-references. In my opinion the success is due to another innovation: the use of many numbered, apparently authentic sentences as grammatical illustrations and basic data (unfortunately, not systematically identified). For didactic reasons, they are offered in a normalized orthography, which also lessens their documentary impact. Didactically, the presentation of lexical and syntactic changes

Linguistic Analysis of Lyrical Poetry: Karl Krolow’s “Im Rückspiegel”

ZusammenfassungAm Beispiel von Krolows Gedicht wird gezeigt, daß die Untersuchung des Thema/Rhema-Fortschreitens in den Einzelsätzen und der Verteilung semantischer Hauptmotive mit ihrer Metaphorik einen wertvollen Einblick in die inhaltliche Struktur poetischer Texte gewährt.AbstractKrolow’s poem serves as an example for the analysis of the topic/comment progression and the motival texture with its metaphorical linkages in poetic texts, which offers valuable insights into their semantic (content) structures.