430 Deutsch
Refine
Document Type
- Article (1)
- Part of a Book (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Keywords
- variation (2) (remove)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
Publisher
This article examines the language contact situation as well as the language attitudes of the Caucasian Germans, descendants of German-born inhabitants of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union who emigrated in 1816/17 to areas of Transcaucasia. After deportations and migrations, the group of Caucasian Germans now consists of those who have since emigrated to Germany and those who still live in the South Caucasus. It’s the first time that sociolinguistic methods have been used to record data from the generation who experienced living in the South Caucasus and in Germany as well as from two succeeding generations. Initial results will be presented below with a focus on the language contact constellations of German varieties as well as on consequences of language contact and language repression, which both affect language attitudes.
Among the German negative-conditional connectors in the range of consequens markers there are the prototypical cases sonst and ansonsten. Morphological alternatives (sonsten and ansonst) are rarely mentioned in contemporary grammars and dictionaries but they actually occur with considerable frequency. The four connectors are used in two functions: as a conjunctional adverb which can occupy various positions within the sentence or as a specific kind of subordinating conjunction (Postponierer). The large IDS corpora allow us to reveal specific distributions of the lexemes and of their different ways of use. Comparing the frequencies and the distributions can indicate to which extent the phenomena are part of the standard language. The paper will report on the results and demonstrate how the findings can be deduced from the corpora. It will draw conclusions for assessing the acceptability of the variants and the extent to which they can be considered standard language additionally testing statistical instruments to visualise and calculate the variance of phenomena as association plots and DPnorm.