Free and bounded variation in grammar. Diachrony and diatopic of auxiliary variation in German.

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Melitta Gillmann; Professor Dr. Alexander Werth
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509137817

In present-day German as well as in its historical stages, the perfect auxiliaries haben ‘have’ and sein ‘be’ vary to a greater extent than what is reflected by the existing research literature. Besides well-known cases such as the auxiliary variation with positional verbs (sitzen ‘to sit’, stehen ‘to stand`, liegen ‘to lie’), which are determined by region, other cases have hardly ever been noticed (e.g. hat/ist einen Weg eingeschlagen ‘has taken a path’, hat/ist etwas angegangen ‘has started something’, hat/ist getourt ‘has toured’). A pilot study conducted in preparation of this proposal shows that the usage of the auxiliaries varied even more extensively in historical stages of German. It was not uncommon that individual writers used both auxiliaries with one verb even in the same texts. Strikingly, the observed variance may only partly be explained in terms of language-internal or -external factors. In a considerable share of the data, both auxiliaries appear in the same contexts without altering the meaning and without showing regional differences. This raises the questions of whether the auxiliaries were and are in free variation, i.e., their grammatical and sociolinguistic function overlaps, how the variance evolved over time, and in which ways diachrony and diatopic are intertwined in the emergence and development of the variants.To answer these questions, our project aims to perform a broad, systematic study to explore variation of the perfect auxiliaries. The goal is to comprehensively describe auxiliary selection in historical stages of German, i.e., from Middle High German or Middle Low German to the beginning of the New High German period (for Old High German, see below), as well as its contemporary areal distribution, and to determine possible factors influencing the choice of the auxiliary. To this end, two interlinked projects will be carried out at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the University of Passau. We will create and analyze a common, cross-site data base with perfect occurrences. The findings resulting from these analyses will be summarized in joint publications that integrate the diachronic and the diatopic point of view.In order to determine factors influencing the auxiliary choice, corpus data will be annotated according to semanto-syntactic features such as telicity, aspectuality, semantic verb class and degree of transitivity. A central goal of the project is to set up reliable criteria for operationalizing these features, which will be evaluated based on language data. In this way, annotation guidelines for future empirical studies on verbal constructions will be created.On a theoretical level, the project offers insights into the general relation of variation in diachrony and diatopic as well as to the existence of free variation. In this way, the project provides an important contribution to research on language change and variation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants