Raught Laura. Specialized imperative verbal forms in the Gothic Bible: A corpus annotation and analysis project

Iowa State University, 2021. — 60 p.The Gothic language has multiple verb forms that are used to express the imperative meaning but the specific differences in use for these forms are not completely understood. While research has been done about the first-person, third-person, and negative (prohibitive) second-person forms, no quantitative study to date has investigated all second-person verbal forms with imperative meaning in Gothic. Understanding the linguistic means of expressing the imperative meaning in Gothic is important both for Germanic philology (as Gothic is the crucial source of data in the history of Germanic languages) and for Christian theology (because of the special role that imperatives play in the Bible). This study is intended as the first step toward filling that gap by annotating all verbal forms with the imperative meaning in the Gothic New Testament, and identifying potential reasons why one form might be chosen over another. In this study, a corpus of the Gothic New Testament was annotated to identify all verbs with the imperative meaning. Then, the grammatical forms of the verbs expressing this meaning were cataloged. Verbs that were ambiguous in terms of their imperative meaning were additionally annotated for the type of semantic ambiguity. In addition to the imperative mood, forms used to express the imperative meaning included the optative mood, participles, and infinitives. The Biblical register (Gospels vs. Epistles), the morphological form of the original Greek verb, and the Gothic lexeme all seemed to have some effect on the Gothic form choice. More advanced analysis is needed to understand the details of these effects. The outcomes of this study have the potential of being applied to research in the fields of Germanic philology, historical linguistics, and Christian theology. In addition to providing tentative evidence that the Biblical register, the verb’s lexical properties, and the original Greek form might influence the choice among the Gothic verb forms with the imperative meaning, an important contribution of this study is a dataset that enumerates and classifies all occurrences of these verbs in the Gothic New Testament.