Orð og tunga - 01.06.2014, Blaðsíða 67

Elspafi and Niehaus: Standardization of a pluriareal language
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the 3-1-2 order is considered to be a feature of Austrian standard
German (cf. Hard 1981:178; Zeman 1988:78 and 2002:51-53; Askedal
1989:25; Bader & Schmid 2009:219).
So what findings do the corpus studies provide? Which serializa-
tion patterns occur in standard language usage? The major caveat
which concerns the validity of our results is that all corpora used for
this study except for the corpus Variantengrammatik are rather small,
compared to today's standards in corpus-linguistics, and that, in gen-
eral, three-verb clusters are a rather rare phenomenon, let alone vari-
ation in these clusters. This means that we have to deal with small
numbers of variants, particularly in our historical corpora.
The Variantengrammatik corpus, however, with ca. 640 million
words compiled from some 60 regional newspapers in the German-
speaking countries, clearly shows pluriareal variation (also cf. Scherr
& Niehaus 2013), cf. figure 2.
% of h>ts ptn V4ri«r»t

Fig. 2. Serialization in verb clusters in the corpus Variantengrammatik (main German-
speaking countries) (light grey: 1-3-2; dark grey: 3-1-2; black: 3-2-1)