Orð og tunga - 01.06.2014, Page 74

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Orð og tunga
As to our research questions, we can now answer them as follows:
How much variation did printed standard German allow in the
nineteenth century? -
The Kaiserreich corpus does not indicate any relevant areal vari-
ation. The almost complete lack of variation might, however, be
due to the small size of the nineteenth century standard German
corpus.
Does printed standard German change from 'monocentricity' to
'pluricentricity' (cf. von Polenz 1989:15)? -
For the period from 1870 to the First World War, von Polenz' no-
tion of 'monocentricity', which corresponds to a low degree of
areal variation, can be supported - at least on the basis of the
small corpus that we have so far. Present-day standard German,
by contrast, allows for more areal variation. Corresponding find-
ings reported in the research literature (cf. Schmidlin 2011:65;
Klein 2013:26) can be supported by the results of our corpus
studies. The rise in variation could be attributed to the increas-
ing informality in newspaper style which has become noticeable
particularly after the mid-twentieth century (cf. Betz 2006:183-
185), as informality is closely associated with the degree of areal
variation in language. However, as we can find patterns in the re-
gional distribution of linguistic variants which in many cases are
not only determined by political borders, a change 'from mono-
centricity to plurií7í'«í/ífy' would describe the linguistic situation
more adequately.
Is (and was) the variation in non-standard German similar to or
rather different from printed standard German? Which tenden-
cies in standard and non-standard German are discernible in the
last150 years? -
As for the last 150 years, variation in non-standard German and
printed standard German can differ substantially in a historical
perspective, as our case studies indicate. In two of our three case
studies (4.1 and 4.2), the variational patterns seem to be more
similar to each other in the present, not least due to a tendency
towards informal styles in standard German (as we just argued).
A major finding of the case studies on the serialisation of verb-
clusters and the discontinuous pronominal adverbs is that plu-
riareal patterns which have emerged in today's standard German
can be traced back to present-day as well as earlier non-standard
usage. Further corpus studies are needed, of course, to establish
whether these are rather singular cases or whether they repre-
sent a more general pattern in the recent standardization history.