Conditional sentences in the Old East Frisian Brokmonna Bref

Abstract

This paper offers a descriptive account of conditional sentences in the Brokmonna Bref (Brookmen’s Charter), an Old East Frisian regional law text of the thirteenth century. The text shows peculiarities of compositional design, particularly the systematised employment of verb-initial conditional sentences, attested to a lesser degree in other East Frisian texts, and which a comparative perspective reveals as sporadic outside Old Frisian. The descriptive approach provides a suitable opportunity to revisit, from the syntactic side, questions of phraseological inheritance in the language of Old Frisian law. In presenting data, this research takes initial steps towards further study of Old Frisian syntax and its relationship to West Germanic structures.