Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1992

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

German

Major Professor

Henry Kratz

Abstract

This study catalogues and compares the citations of false negation, four other types of negative circumlocutions, and genuine negation in Wolfram's Parzival, Hartmann's Êrec, Îwein, Der arme Heinrich, and Gregorius, and Gottfried's Tristan. The term false negation represents the expression of a positive idea by the negation of its opposite, e.g., vreuden lære, vor valsche vrî, niht sparn. False negation proves to be only 10 to 40 percent more frequent in Parzival than in Hartmann's narratives, but three and a half times as frequent in Parzival as in Tristan. Other negative circumlocutions are less frequent in Parzival than in the other works studied. All negative circumlocutions combined occur with approximately equal frequency in Parzival and Hartmann's works.

Verbal false negation is more frequent than the adjectival type in all of the works studied except Der arme Heinrich. Forms of false negation that either have the meaning "without," such as valsches vrî, or have a meaning similar to "did not avoid" or "did not fail," such as niht vermîden, constitute almost half of the false negation in Parzival, a much higher proportion than in the other works. Parzival contains many more expressions of both types than the other works studied. Niht ze constructions and formulas are much more frequent in false negation in Parzival than in the other works, but double negatives are less frequent. Common themes are represented in 50 to 60 percent of the false negation in all of the works studied. Happiness is the most frequent theme in false negation in most of the works, and in Parzival is twice as frequent a theme as any other. Amplification of false negation by a positive expression accounts for a smaller percentage of the citations in Parzival and Gregorius than in the other works.

Many of the features mentioned above vary in frequency among the sixteen books of Parzival, but do not show correlative differences among books or sections of the story.

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