Functional Variation of German Also across Registers and Speaker Groups

Abstract This study investigates the variation of the polyfunctional linguistic item also across registers and language contact settings. I present findings from a corpus study using the corpus of the Research Unit Emerging Grammars, RUEG for short (Wiese et al., 2019), which provides comparable, re...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Contrastive Pragmatics 2023-06, Vol.4 (2), p.289-320
Main Author: Labrenz, Annika
Format: Article
Language:English
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Abstract This study investigates the variation of the polyfunctional linguistic item also across registers and language contact settings. I present findings from a corpus study using the corpus of the Research Unit Emerging Grammars, RUEG for short (Wiese et al., 2019), which provides comparable, register-differentiated data of bilingual and monolingual speakers of German in Germany and bilingual heritage speakers of German in the US. The data suggest that functional variation of a specific lexical item reflects the use of functional features in specific communicative situations. The data further indicate an impact of the societal status that a language occupies in the larger society (majority vs. heritage language) on the distribution of such functions.
ISSN:2666-0385
2666-0393
DOI:10.1163/26660393-bja10077