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94. Jahresversammmlung des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung : 8.-11. Juni 1981 in Soest
(1981)
96. Jahresversammlung des Vereins für niederdeutsche Sprachforschung : 23. bis 26. Mai 1983 in Stade
(1984)
Niederdeutsch morgen
(1991)
In recent decades, the investigation of spoken language has become increasingly important in linguistic research. However, the spoken word is a fleeting phenomenon which is difficult to analyse and which requires an elaborate process of examination and appraisal. The Institute for the German Language (Institut für Deutsche Sprache) has the largest collection of recordings of spoken German, the German Speech Archive (Deutsches Spracharchiv [DSAv]). Up to now, the inadequate processing and accessibility of the valuable material held by the DSAv has been regarded as its major shortcoming. A solution to this problem is at hand now that a start has been made with the systematic modernization of the DSAv and, in particular, with the digitalization of its material. In recent years, we have been able to systematically exploit the unique opportunities provided by a new and easier form of access to the spoken language via the recorded sound signal, which can be realized digitally in the computer, and its linkage to the corresponding texts and documentary data. Through the integration of the existing data about the corpora and of the written versions of the texts into an information and full text database and through the linking of these data with the acoustic signal itself, it is now possible for us to construct a data pool which allows a better documentation of the material and provides rapid internal and external access to the sound recordings. Processed in such a way, the material of the German Speech Archive can now be regarded as having been saved for posterity. As a result, entirely new areas of inquiry and entirely new research perspectives have been opened up. This is true both for the work of the Institute itself and for linguistic research in German as a whole.
Traditionally, research on language change has been a post-mortem activity, focused on isolated changes that are complete and often only documented in written texts. In the 1960s the field was advanced considerably by Labovian sociolinguistics and the investigation of “change in progress” adduced through patterns of community-internal linguistic variation correlated with external facts about speakers such as age and class (see Labov 1994 for an overview). However, despite the many benefits of such work on “dynamic synchrony,” we still know relatively little about how language change unfolds over the lifetimes of individual speakers, that is, in real time (cf. Bailey et al. 1991). The logistical challenges of such research are, of course, considerable. Whereas it is straightforward for psycholinguists to observe language development in children over the course of a few years, documenting changes in the verbal behavior of individuals over several decades is by contrast much less feasible. Nevertheless, present theoretical models of language change could be considerably improved by the results of real-time studies.