Orð og tunga - 01.06.2014, Page 69
Elspajl and Niehaus: Standardization of a pluriareal language
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dialectal and diachronic studies (cf. Dubenion-Smith 2010, 2011; Sapp
2011:204-205). Sociolinguistically speaking, Bader & Schmid believe
that the dominance of the 3-1-2 order in Austrian standard German
could be caused by a more 'casual' handling of standard-norms in
Austria (cf. Bader & Schmid 2009:219), but this seems disputable as
perhaps also the opposite seems likely: the 3-1-2 order might be con-
sidered a 'national' norm by Austrian speakers (cf. Patocka 1997:281).
This does not change the empirical fact that this word order variant is
commonly used in standard context in other German-speaking coun-
tries as well and stands as a general feature of south-eastern standard
German.
4.2 Grammatical variation II: discontinuous pronominal
adverbs
Another grammatical construction which variationist studies have
paid a lot of attention to in recent years - also for other Germanic
languages such as Dutch, Frisian and Afrikaans6 - is the pronominal
adverb and its discontinuous variants. Example (3) presents a pro-
nominal adverb in its continuous variant, examples (4) and (5) illus-
trate the two most common discontinuous forms7 of the German pro-
nominal adverb damit 'with this'.
(3) damit habe ich nichts zu tun
this-(PRO)-with have I nothing to do
'I have nothing to do with this'
(4) da habe ich nichts mit zu tun
this-(PRO) have I nothing with to do
(5) da habe ich nichts damit zu tun
this-(PRO) have 1 nothing this-(PRO)-with to do
In the discontinuous variant (4), the pronominal (usually da-, but also
ioo- and hier-) and the prepositional element of the adverb are separat-
ed in such a way that at least one other part of the sentence is moved
in between. In most of such cases, the pro element is moved to the be-
6 Cf. Fleischer (2002a, b) and Negele (2012) for an overvievv.
Sometimes the first pronominal element is immediately follovved by a 'full' pro-
nominal adverb, resulting in a 'contact' position: da darnit habe ich niclits zu tun 'this
(PRO) this-(PRO)-vvith have I nothing to do'. In another variant, the pronominal
variant is dropped:_habe ich nichls mit zu tun '0 (PRO) 'have I nothing vvith to
do'.