Already Jacob Grimm noted in volume 2 of his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1848) that adjectival forms with reference to mixed-gender human groups often showed neuter agreement in the historical stages of German. Askedal (1973) as well dedicated an extensive study to this issue, based on critical editions of a handful of Old and Middle High German literary texts. Standard reference works on historical German grammar so far merely state the rule without further differentiation by grammatical context. This survey traces the phenomenon of gender resolution (Corbett 1983) in Middle High German. Evidence is collected on a true-to-manuscript basis consisting of the businesslike prose of the Corpus der altdeutschen Originalurkunden bis zum Jahr 1300 (Wilhelm et al 1932–2004) as well as the main manuscripts of all three recensions of the Kaiserchronik as a literary object of comparison, transcriptions of which have only in recent years been made available. The survey aims to validate existing knowledge on this grammatical phenomenon and to reflect on it in a modern grammar-theoretical framework. For this purpose, variation in the agreement form of Middle High German bėide ‘both’, which refers to a pair of antecedents, is evaluated systematically and in great detail in its typical use contexts with regard to morphological, semantic, and syntactic circumstances.weiterlesen