This article investigates the diachrony of the adnominal genitive in written German by analyzing its usage in a diachronic corpus of sermons from the Upper German dialect area spanning the time from the 9th to the 19th century. The wide temporal scope allows for a better assessment of the events relating to the genitive’s disappearance from spoken German in Early New High German and the successive rise of its adnominal form in written German. Sermons make it possible to study the phenomenon over a long time because they provide a relatively consistent data basis in terms of genre and region. At the same time, as a genre that has characteristics of both spoken and written language, sermons show signs of changing stylistic trends, which makes them valuable for gaining insights in the divergent development of genitive use in spoken and written German. In order to characterize this divergence better, I use the concept of polarization, which describes the differentiation of linguistic usage between disparate contexts such as speech and writing. It becomes clear that the changes in genitive use found in the corpus cannot be viewed independently of sociopragmatic factors and their impact on the stylistic shape of the texts.*

中文翻译：

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极化和书面标记的出现。德语定格属格的历时语料库研究

本文通过分析从 9 世纪到 19 世纪上德国方言地区的历时布道语料库中的使用情况，研究书面德语中定格属格的历时性。广泛的时间范围可以更好地评估与早期新高地德语中属格从口语中消失以及其在书面德语中的名词形式的相继兴起有关的事件。布道使长期研究这一现象成为可能，因为它们在流派和地区方面提供了相对一致的数据基础。同时，作为兼具口语和书面语特征的体裁，讲道文体呈现出变化的迹象，这对于洞察德语口语和书面属格使用的不同发展具有重要意义。为了更好地描述这种分歧，我使用了极化的概念，它描述了不同语境（如语音和写作）之间语言使用的差异。很明显，语料库中的属格使用变化不能独立于社会语用因素及其对文本文体形式的影响来看待。 *