Infinitive of German Language and its Corresponding Forms in Albanian Language

Abstract

Infinitive forms of verbs in different European languages, old or new, show a significant originality. This is demonstrated even by their comparison, even if it’s done in only two Indo-European languages such as German and Albanian. Changes consist in the form of their occurrence, morphological features and syntactic functions. However similarities between them are not missing. They come together in the existence as morpho-syntactic categories, in the combination of verbal features with other parts of the speech, and especially in syntactic functions, because in each language almost the same functions are performed by infinitive forms, according to the principle ‘lack of a form is compensated by another infinitive form or by another grammatical tool’. Even in the case of comparing German with Albanian language we come across the existence of an infinitive form in one language and its absence in the other language. This infinitive verbal form is the infinitive, which exists in the German language, while it does not exist in the standard Albanian language. The purpose of this article is to find the corresponding infinitive forms in Albanian language, those forms or grammatical tools which serve to compensate for the absent form in standard Albanian, as well as to express its syntactic functions, finding similarities and differences between them. This approach will be demonstrated by numerous examples extracted by the novel ‘Magic Mountain’, of German writer Thomas Mann, novel which has been translated even into Albanian language.

DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n7p465