The Syntax of 16th and 17th Century Title Pages (DFG project)
The history of the title page begins with the invention of printing with movable type. While medieval manuscripts do not have title pages, the first decades of the printing age gradually saw the development of the use of placing a separate page with specific information at the beginning of the book, separated from the beginning of the text. In this respect, the early title pages differed significantly from the forms commonly used today in terms of layout, scope, information content and linguistic structure. The syntax of these early title pages displays a variety of characteristic features that have at best been mentioned in research to date, but have not yet been investigated. In addition to very extensive and complex syntactic structures, which can be explained by the informational function of title pages, there are also phenomena which are particularly familiar from orality and which are probably related to the advertising function of title pages.
The project is now complete and the results have been published.
Publication
Götz, Ursula / Gessing, Anne / Neumann, Marko / Woggan, Annika: Die Syntax von Titelblättern des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter 2017 (Lingua Historica Germanica 17). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110545562.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Ursula Götz
Institute for German Studies
Kröpeliner Straße 57
18057 Rostock
Tel.: +49 381 498 2621
E-Mail: ursula.goetzuni-rostockde