Orð og tunga - 01.06.2014, Page 65

Elspafi and Niehaus: Standardization of a pluriareal language
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cies in standard and non-standard German are discernible in the
last 150 years?
• Does printed (standard) German change from a stage of 'mono-
centricity' to 'pluricentricity', as von Polenz (1989:15) claimed?
Von Polenz' hypothesis needs some explanation here. He assumed
that socio-pragmatic criteria played a much bigger role for New High
German than for any other period in the history of German. Thus,
in his periodization model for New High German, the time between
1770 to 1870 is labelled 'Establishment of an educated bourgeois va-
riety' ("Etablierung der biirgerlichen Bildungssprache"), whereas
the 'Establishment of the modern German standard language' took
place between 1870 and 19504 and was characterized by 'monocentric
tendencies' ("Etablierung der modernen Standardsprache, monozen-
trische Tendenzen"). In contrast, the time after 1950, which he sim-
ply called 'Contemporary German' ("Gegenwartsdeutsch"), could be
portrayed as the time of 'a polycentric drift' ("polyzentrische Wei-
terentwicklungen"). Whereas the first phase saw rapidly increasing
literacy rates, the second phase can be identified as the crucial period
of time of the emergence of a national literature and the standard lan-
guage ideology (cf. von Polenz 1989:16-27).
To illustrate our approach, we present three case studies, one in-
volving a lexical variable, and two focussing on grammatical variables
in standard German. For grammatical variation, we will investigate
the serialization patterns in three-verb clusters (4.1) and discontinu-
ous pronominal adverbs (4.2). For lexical variation, we will look at the
distribution of variants for 'Saturday' (4.3).
4.1 Grammatical variation I: serialization in three-verb
clusters
The serialization of verb clusters in German has received much at-
tention in the research literature.5 In our case study, we will focus on
4 This is noteworthy, because traditional German textbooks on the history of Ger-
man would have it that the German standard language had been established by
the end of the 18th century.
5 To name but a few: Bech (1955/57), Van de Velde (1981) and Askedal (1986) dis-
cussed the most important theoretical aspects in detail. The benchmark in histori-
cal research on verb clusters is still the study by Hard (1981), which was taken up
by Ágel (2001) to exemplify some 'historical principles in today's grammar'.