Kasusveränderungen im gegenwärtigen Deutschen.
Case changes in the present German.

Summary/Abstract: In detailed investigations of the use of cases in present-day German, caused by Sebastian Sick‘s book Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod, I discovered that the statements by Sick (2004) present only half of the truth (or even less), since the replacement of the genitive by the dative is only part of more extensive changes: the dative is also replaced by the genitive (especially after prepositions), dative and accusative are exchanged, and all three oblique cases are exchanged by the nominative. My initial findings concerned cases assigned by verbs and prepositions as well as cases in appositives. Meanwhile, I noticed that you can find case changes also in conjoined NPs like den Leichen von Generalbundesanwalt Buback und seines Fahrers (rather than: seinem Fahrer). In my article many examples for case changes are presented and interpreted. They show the increasing uncertainty of speakers of German in their use of cases in all of the three affected areas (government by nouns and prepositions, apposition and coordination). We can draw the conclusion that the case system of German has become instable, that it is changing and might possibly be given up altogether − a change that already has taken place in all other Germanic languages except Islandic.

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