PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This paper will focus on the morphosyntactic status of complex personal names in German. From a diachronic point of view, it is argued that combined first and last names shifted from syntactic (i. e. appositional or attributive) towards rather morphological (i. e. compound-like) structures, in which family names can be analysed as grammatical heads. This shift goes along with the increase in importance of family names in the period of Early Modern German. Corpus data (16th to 18th century) provide evidence for this formal restructuring of the name components (e. g. the emergence of single case marking on the last name: Ludwigs des Langen >> Ludwig Langs).