Orð og tunga - 01.06.2014, Page 75

Elspafí and Niehaus: Standardization of a pluriareal language
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We hope that our case studies could illustrate one important metho-
dological point and its consequences for research. Studies on stand-
ardization and of standard as well as non-standard variation require
more and bigger corpora, particularly from the 'age of standardiza-
tion', i.e. the nineteenth century, onwards. In addition, for big lan-
guages such as German we also need more regionally balanced text
corpora. As the two case studies on grammatical phenomena clearly
demonstrated, one major problem can be a 'descriptive gap' in stand-
ardization studies as well as in grammaticography, when variants are
overlooked or ignored because of a lack of adequate corpora. This,
in turn, limits the validity of such studies, particularly with respect
to an adequate description and explanation of linguistic phenome-
na in terms of the 'principle of viability' (cf. section 2.1). The bigger
present-day as well as historic corpora are, and the more they reflect
the areal division of a speech community, the better they can help to
generate formulations of empirically based 'diachronic principles of
grammar'. The comparatively large Variantengrammatik corpus gives
us a slight hint at what treasures may be hidden in big historical cor-
pora - even if they turn out to be small in terms of absolute numbers.
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