Handbook of Variation in Standard German

The present project leaders (Prof. Dr. Christa Dürscheid, Prof. Dr. Stephan Elspaß, Prof. Dr. Arne Ziegler) intend to apply for the continuation of the FWFs and SNFs sponsorship of an international research project led by the universities of Zürich, Salzburg (beforehand: Augsburg) and Graz. The SNF shall once more serve as the lead agency. Being part of the D-A-CH agreement, the current project has been receiving funding approved for the duration of 36 months - from the DFG (EL 500/3-1), the FWF (I 716-G18) and from the leading agency, the SNF (100015L_134895), since August 8th 2011. The research project investigates grammatical variation within German standard language which, up to date, has not been examined on a larger scale. Up until now, collations on grammar have remained incomplete by having one-sidedly focused on conditions within Germany (and there again mainly within northern Germany). In the first application the general aim was expressed to capture and document the grammatical variation of written German standard language by using a large corpus of texts written in standard language and gathered from all German speaking connected regions in order to make the collected and described data available for researchers and the public. To achieve the projects aim three working phases were presented in the first application: In the first two phases, each with an estimated duration of 18 months, it was planned to first create a digital corpus of the standard language used in newspaper articles of German speaking countries and then to analyse the generated corpus and, on a linguistic level, describe the determined grammatical phenomena. Already in the first application, a third phase with focus on the development of a handbook was designated for a second project term. The first two phases will be completed within the estimated 36 months; the current application for extension refers to the third phase. In addition to the statistical evaluation of the data and an n-Gramm-analysis, the groundwork for a digital publication shall be provided in this third phase. Four types of articles are intended: Short articles on various grammatical variables that will be ordered alphabetically by word or by a word group (for example the use of widerspiegeln as a particle- or a prefix verb; i.e. das Resultat widerspiegelt ... vs. das Resultat spiegelt ... wider), general articles that give an overview (for example of particle- or prefix verbs), articles that offer definitions, and articles for cross referencing. Instead of the originally estimated time plan of 24 months these jobs are now planned to be completed within 36 months. The reasons for this time extension are the following: 1) The previous analyses have shown that there are far more phenomena that need to be investigated than originally estimated. Currently, already 2.452 variants have been recorded on the projects own database. Due to the scope of the collected data four extra months need to be added to the first time plan. The fact that, in some cases, canonically established terminologies and concepts will have to be revised will be a major challenge. 2) Instead of the intended printable version of the handbook on variational grammar, an online version shall be created. This online version will be linked to the digital corpus and will enable countless recipient orientated possibilities of automatic search. Furthermore, such a version offers unlimited space for lexicographical descriptions and for a cartographic presentation of the regional variation which, if possible, can solely be exemplified in a printed one-volume book.

Variantengrammatik des Standarddeutschen ('Variational Grammar of Standard German') is both the name of the project to be presented here and of the central result of this project: the main aim of the project was to compile the first grammatical reference work that systemati-cally presents areal variation in the grammar of Standard German on the basis of corpus lin-guistic surveys and analyses. In this respect, the Variantengrammatik breaks new ground in German linguistics. Since the end of 2018, the Variantengrammatik has been available in the form of an online reference work in wiki format, which is freely accessible to both specialist colleagues and laypersons. Thanks to the cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for the Ger-man Language in Mannheim (IDS), it is hosted there (mediawiki.ids-mannheim.de/VarGra or via www.variantengrammatik.net). This ensures that the main result of the project is perma-nently available to the scientific community as well as the interested public. In order to investigate the areal diversity in the grammar of standard German, an areally balanced and annotated corpus was created for the project, consisting of local and regional sections of the online editions of 68 regionally distributed newspapers. The selected newspa-pers are subdivided into fifteen areas of the contiguous German-speaking region. The to-kenised, lemmatised and part-of-speech-annotated total corpus on which the Variantengram-matik is based comprises approximately 600 million words. The final version of the Variant Grammar contains over 1,500 articles and entries. The Variantengrammatik is based on the concept of the 'standard of usage' and its inherent areal variation, which is not limited to the somewhat simplistic notion of national variation. It thus follows the same path as the Atlas zur Aussprache des deutschen Gebrauchsstandards (AADG) ('Pronunciation Atlas of the German Standard of Usage', cf. Kleiner 2011ff.) in the field of pronunciation and the Variantenwörterbuch ('Dictionary of (Standard) Variants', cf. Ammon / Bickel / Lenz et al. 2016) in the field of lexis. From the AADG, the Variantengram-matik has adopted the wiki format; the division grid into fifteen areas and the corresponding areal markings were adopted from the Variantenwörterbuch. In its structure as a reference work, the Variantengrammatik is most similar to the Duden 9 dictionary (Hennig 2016): like the latter, it is structured as a grammatical dictionary with al-phabetically ordered individual articles, which are supplemented by overview articles and basic articles. To enable users to quickly grasp the areal information, there are maps in addi-tion to the information in the continuous text. Another new feature is that the frequency of occurrence of the variants in the fifteen areas is consistently given in the form of frequency tables.