Katerina Somers
UW–Madison open-topic Resident Fellow (2025–2026)
Associate Professor, German, Nordic, and Slavic+, UW–Madison
Translation, Prose, and the Literization of German in the Middle Ages
Translation, Prose, and the Literization of German in the Middle Ages proposes a fundamental reassessment of how we study the languages of the past: I argue that we deemphasize the search for underlying historical grammars and instead approach the languages of early texts as the linguistic artifacts of conscious human innovation within particular sociocultural circumstances. I illustrate this argument by tracing the development of clauses and clause complexes across multiple, innovative medieval German prose genres, from biblical translation to sermons to autobiography. This book characterizes the development of German prose writing as an important literary and linguistic phenomenon.
Katerina Somers is an Associate Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Currently, she is particularly interested in sociohistorical linguistics, Carolingian documentary culture, medieval German, medieval biblical translation, and the history of the German language. While she has published articles (e.g., in the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, Transactions of the Philological Society, and Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik) and a book (From Phonology to Syntax. Pronominal Cliticization in Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch, in the series Linguistische Arbeiten with Niemeyer Verlag) on the morphosyntax of early medieval German, over the past several years her attention has shifted to analyzing medieval texts as socioculturally determined artifacts. In her 2024 book, How to Create an Early German Scriptus. The Literization Approach to Historical German Syntax (Open Germanic Linguistics: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/460), she introduces a new method for this type of analysis as an alternative to traditional structuralist frameworks. She continues to develop her literization methodology by using it to analyze different genres of prose texts from the medieval period.
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