Variation In German

This book examines the interrelations between language and society in the German-speaking countries. The questions 'what is German and who speaks it?' and 'how does the language vary dependent on social, political and geographical factors?' are addressed and placed in their historical context. This is a comprehensive account of major topics in the contemporary study of German sociolinguistics, and topics covered include the history and development of the German language, German as a minority language, minority languages in German-speaking countries, traditional dialects, variation in contemporary colloquial speech, the influence of English on German, and German in East and West. It draws together much otherwise inaccessible material from a great range of sources. The authors also assess critically research work carried out in German-speaking countries.

This monograph investigates the syntax of the finite verb in Máocheno, a minority language spoken in a German speech island of Northern Italy. Basing her study on detailed new data collected during extensive fieldwork, and focusing on finite verb movement; on multiple access to the left periphery; on pro licensing mechanism and on the distribution of OV/VO word orders, the author refutes the traditional view that the syntactic variation found in Máocheno is due to the presence of two competing grammars as a consequence of contact with Romance varieties and accounts for the peculiarities of Máocheno syntax within a theory couched in the framework of Generative Grammar. This book contributes to our understanding of the verb-second phenomenon and sheds new light on the asymmetries between Old Romance and Germanic verb-second languages. A useful tool for all linguists working on both theoretical and comparative syntax and to anyone interested in language variation, dialectology and typology.

This book offers a broad survey of issues relating to the German language in Switzerland. The initial focus is on the German-speaking community's relationship with the French, Italian and Romansh language communities. Consideration is then given to the complex issue of diglossia within the germanophone Swiss community, and the maintenance of both the Swiss German dialects and the Swiss German standard language as co-existent codes of equal status. The Swiss German dialects, the Swiss variety of standard German, and the influence of various foreign languages on both of these language forms are described in some detail. Finally, sociolinguistic issues affecting the German language in Switzerland are considered: the connection between social variation and linguistic change; language variation stemming from differences of age, sex and ethnic origin; and linguistic behaviour and phatic communication.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Marburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Contrastive Linguistics, language: English, abstract: In the last decades, modern English has evolved into one of the dominant world languages of science and technology, sports and pop culture. In that it also has a growing influence on other languages such as German. Recent linguistic research has not yet been able to come up with the actual percentage of anglicisms in modern German. Linguists like Zifonun and Kirkness do however estimate that 11-40 % of all neologisms that enter the German language are of English origin. The biggest word class among these are nouns because their morphosyntactic integration into the target language does not pose too great a problem for speakers of German. This is different with verbs: their morphological structure is more complicated than that of nouns due to their wider system of inflectional paradigms. In comparison to German, English syntax is much stricter which results in different syntactic treatments of verbs in both languages. Besides, nowadays the only productive class among these consists of the regular weak verbs. All new loans are incorporated into this class and must therefore rigorously follow its inflectional paradigms. In that, the integration of verbal anglicisms into German is different from the integration of nouns which provides a fruitful area of linguistic research. After all, they account for 10-20 % of all anglicisms, as linguist Stephanie Bohmann is said to have found out. The aim of this term paper is to take a look at variation in the formation of the past participle (“Partizip II”) of English verbs in German. For that purpose I will start with an introduction to previous research in that specific field, answering the general question how the past participle is formed in German and where problems may occur with verbal anglicisms. In a next step I will present the empirical study I conducted and the results collected from it in order to get a deeper insight into morphosyntactic variation in the process of word integration.

The book provides the first comparison of usage preferences across registers in the language pair English-German. Due to the innovative quantitative approach and broad coverage, the volume is an excellent resource for scholars working in contrastive linguistics and translation studies as well as for corpus linguists.

Choice, Rationality and Social Theory is a powerful rebuttal of the remarkably influential theories underlying 'rational choice analysis'. Rational choice analysis maintains that social life is principally to be explained as the outcome of rational choices on the part of individual actors. Adherents of this view include not only philosophers, political scientists and sociologists, but also prominent politicians in Western governments – notably of the United Kingdom and the United States. Rational choice analysis is said to be rigorous, capable of great technical sophistication, and able to generate powerful explanations on the basis of a few, relatively simple theoretical assumptions. Barry Hindess argues that the theory is seriously deficient, first, because there are important actors in the modern world other than human individuals, and second, because it says nothing about those processes of deliberation that play an important part in actors' decisions. The use of highly questionable assumptions about actors and their rationality has the effect of closing off important areas of intellectual inquiry and ignoring the reality of certain forms of thought and the social conditions on which they depend. These points are established through detailed examination of the concepts of the actor and of rationality – providing an overall argument that constitutes a serious challenge to any adherent of rational choice analysis.

This volume offers several empirical, methodological, and theoretical approaches to the study of observable variation within individuals on various linguistic levels. With a focus on German varieties, the chapters provide answers on the following questions (inter alia): Which linguistic and extra-linguistic factors explain intra-individual variation? Is there observable intra-individual variation that cannot be explained by linguistic and extra-linguistic factors? Can group-level results be generalised to individual language usage and vice versa? Is intra-individual variation indicative of actual patterns of language change? How can intra-individual variation be examined in historical data? Consequently, the various theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches in this volume offer a better understanding of the meaning of intra-individual variation for patterns of language development, language variation and change. The inter- and transdisciplinary nature of the volume is an exciting new frontier, and the results of the studies in this book provide a wealth of new findings as well as challenges to some of the existing findings and assumptions regarding the nature of intra-individual variation.

The volume presents new approaches to explaining word order variation and change in the Germanic languages and thus relates to one of the most prominent and widely discussed topics in the theory of language change and diachronic syntax. The novelty of our approach consists in three main points. First of all, we aim at describing functional variety in the field of word order and verb placement in the early Germanic languages not as a result of language contact, but rather as a language-internal phenomenon related to stylistic and grammatical conditions in information packaging. Second, given that information structure is not directly accessible in texts from historical corpora that are available only in written form and bear no or little information on prosody and intonation, it presents various methods of retrieving information-structural categories in such texts. Third, it presents empirical studies on the relation between word order and information structure of the four main texts of the Old High German period and embeds these results in the wider picture of word order change in Germanic. The volume will be of interest to students of German, English, and general linguistics as well as to researchers interested in diachronic syntax, philology of Older German, language change, information structure, discourse semantics, language typology, computational linguistics, and corpus studies.