`tun' in Bavarian

[Paul Hopper]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Or perhaps the conjugation of Bav. dOa = NHG tun has become assimilated to
the modal auxiliary pattern in which singular and plural are distinct and
the plural typically has umlaut (muss/muessen, mag/moegen, kann koennen).
This could well have occurred as a result of the use of "tun" as an
auxiliary--common in non-standard German. For an example see below.
- Paul Hopper

Was tut sie denn den ganzen Tag,
Da sie wohl nicht spinnen und nähen mag?
Tut fischen und jagen.
(Moericke, "Schoen-Rohtraut")

--On Sunday, December 16, 2001 6:54 PM +0000 "W. Schulze"
<W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:

> ----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>> Inf.    dOa
>> Sg. 1   dua
>>     2   duasd
>>     3   duad
>> Pl. 1   dean
>>     2   deadds
>>     3   dean
>
> What I learnt during my training on German dialects is this: the plural
> forms stem from the subjunctive paradigm, hence we should correlate
> /dean/ [which I often hear being pronounced  /deadn/] to /täten/ and
> /deadds/ [which I sometimes hear being pronounced /dead[ed]s/] to
> /tätet/( plus Bavarian -s). Hence /ea/ < /ä/ would be a good option.
> Naturally, the problem remains why the indicative plural has been
> replaced by the subjunctive (historically, an irrealis or 'mediated'
> realis!). As far as I know it is sometimes observed in different
> languages that event constructions based on non-singular 'persons' are
> rendered in a more modal way than those that shown the involvement of
> singular 'persons'. This may reflect some kind of 'social [or perhaps
> better: communicative] deixis'. But I'm not sure about that. At any rate
> the distribution of the stem vowels most probably does not reflect a
> schematic ablaut, in my humble opinion.
>
> Wolfgang
>
>
> --
> Prof. Dr. Wolfgang M. Schulze
> IATS - Institute for General Linguistics and Language Typology
> [Institut fuer Allgemeine und Typologische Sprachwissenschaft]
> Dept. II [Communication and Languages - Kommunikation und Sprachen]
> F 13/14 - Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen
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