Bei einem Glas guten Wein(es): Der Abbau des partitiven Genitivs und seine Reflexe im Gegenwartsdeutschen.

This paper is concerned with the loss of the partitive genitive (e. g. ein Glas Weines > ein Glas Wein) in German, focusing on the early stage of the decline, i. e. the ENHG period, and on variation in present-day German (e. g. einem Glas gutem Wein vs. einem Glas guten Wein). On the basis of data collected in a questionnaire study and in corpora (both contemporary and historic) it is proposed that formal properties of the inflectional suffixes involved are highly relevant for this language change phenomenon: Several observations concerning the diachronic and synchronic variation caused by the (incomplete) loss of the partitive genitive seem to be explicable by so-called ›signal strength‹, a concept which goes back to Köpcke (1993). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]