From preposition to purposive to infinitival marker: The Pennsylvania German fer…zu construction

The development from an allative preposition to a purposive marker to an infinitival marker is a common one cross-linguistically. In this paper, we look in some detail at this change in Pennsylvania German. We demonstrate that fer has completed this change in that it now occurs in a full range of complements. It has gone paired with a loss of the original infinitival marker zu. Functionally, the element has undergone a drastic change and given the loss of zu, one might expect that there would be equally far-reaching structural changes. The standard account of this type of change is one of reanalysis, but in this paper, we argue that the change is likely not to have involved reanalysis.