THE SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF LUTHER’S EARLY HYMNS

Abstract

The creation of German spiritual hymns and the revival of the tradition of cenobitic choral singing of spiritual songs during the service, as a part of the church reform, are associated with the name of Martin Luther. Luther’s desire to make the content of hymns comprehensible to all members of the community affected both lexical and syntactic features of the texts. In general, deviations from the closed-in structure are not typical for Luther’s language, as noted by J.Erben. His creations are characterized by a “normal” sentence form, with conjugated verb occupying the second place. For a dependent clause, a closed-in structure is typical. In early Lutheran hymns attributed to Luther, imperfect metre and imperfect rhyme, mainly male, are common. These specifics should be considered when analyzing the syntactic structures of Luther’s hymns. The article reviews syntactic constructions typical for early Luther hymns,focuses on the use of inflectable and non-inflectable adjectives in the function of an attribute, use or non-use of an unstressed ending -e in nouns, use of articles and pronouns in nominal groups, cases of presence and absence of a closed-in construction of sentences and positional division of different types of attributes, typical for the second phase of the Early New High German period, taking into account V.G.Admoni’s main provisions regarding the German language evolution at that time.

Keywords:

Luther’s hymnology, Early New High German syntax, M.Luther’s poetry, early Lutheran spiritual songs