Handbook of Grammatical Variation in Standard German

National and regional variation in the grammar of German standard language has - despite an increasing orientation towards text corpora - hardly attracted any attention in the domain of grammaticography. This type of variation is of course not something that has to be settled outside of standard language, but reality within standard language; corresponding variants must not be seen generally as socially marked, nor be allocated to a "grammar of spoken language." The differences between national and regional varieties of standard german concern (among other things) word structure, phrase structure, and government. In current German newspapers - depending on country or region - there are morphological and morphosyntactical variants such as Zugmitte / Zugsmitte (interfix), bei jdm. beantragen / jdm. beantragen (government of the verb), die Parks / die Pärke / die Parke (grammatical number), der / das Tunnel (grammatical gender), für / auf das Examen lernen (preposition) and Das Wetter ändert / Das Wetter ändert sich (reflexive). Syntactical variants as Bereits sind die Ämter besetzt / Die Ämter sind bereits besetzt (filling of the prefield position) or Gut, gibt es Bauern / Gut, dass es Bauern gibt (structure of the subordinate clause) are also part of it. Not recognizing or not respecting this leads to problems in various areas: in grammaticography to the hasty exclusion of grammatical variants (and therefore of possible ways of grammaticalization), which are not the focus of grammaticographs, and in institutions like schools and universities that spread linguistic norms to the unjustified labeling of regional or national variants of standard German as "mistakes". The fact that it deals closely with the appreciation of somewhat stigmatized variants makes this project eminently important for language policy. The planned grammar of standard German variants will neither deal with the description of dialect characteristics, nor with constructions that are the result of specifics of orality (volatility, synchronicity of interaction), or - as in internet communication - properties that are interfered with conceptual orality. The emphasis in the corpus analysis and interpretation will, in contrast, be placed on written standard language in the online editions of German newspapers. From a methodological and theoretical view, the project is closely related to works on the Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen (Ammon et al. 2004); however, it focuses not on the lexical differences of varieties, but on the differences in the area of grammar, and furthermore includes quantitative aspects (absolute vs. relative variants). The project explicitly targets the recording and portrayal of national and regional diversity in German standard language. As yet, this has only been done for lexic and phraseology (cf. dictionary of variants), and is still underway for pronunciation (cf. IDS-project "Deutsch heute"). As the data are mainly from the German speaking countries Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, it is indispensable to understand this as a trinational project and to consult partners from all German speaking countries and regions of Central Europe. Data are gathered from a broad body of newspaper texts from all the countries and connected regions of the German language area. For this purpose a large corpus of 250 milions words is created and set up technologically. After the completion of the project the material will be publicly available for scientific research. In addition, a handbook (an alphabetically sorted reference book) will be developed. This type of book, i.e. a grammar of variants as the companion piece to the Variantenwörterbuch, will fill a gap in grammaticography. It will serve as a basis for future grammars (or editions) and for continuing grammatical investigations. Moreover, it will be easily usable and accessible to the lay public, including both native and non-native speakers (Daf/DaZ), who are interested in the normity of certain variants for private or professional reasons (for example, teachers, translators, professors/lecturers).

Standard German is not a homogeneous entity: Differences in vocabulary (i.e. the classic example 'Semmel' vs. 'Brötchen') and pronunciation are well documented, and speakers are very aware of them. Grammatical differences, however, are far less prominent and, to date, have received little attention from researchers. This leads to questions like the following: Do you say 'Zugsverbindung' or 'Zugverbindung'? Is the plural 'Parks', 'Parke' or 'Pärke'? Is the perfect tense 'bin' or 'habe ich gestanden'? The international research project >>Regional Variation in the Grammar of Standard German<< demonstrates that none of these variants are either right or wrong, but that both alternatives represent standard language usage in different regions. The aim of this research project is a detailed empirical documentation and description of features such as differences in the use of case or prepositions or variations in grammatical gender, word formation and syntax. For this purpose, a vast, well-balanced corpus of newspaper articles (575 million tokens) from all German speaking regions (Austria, Switzerland, Germany, South Tyrol, Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein) was established. The corpus was linguistically tagged and annotated in order to perform complex search queries. This made it possible to capture and document 3.500 grammatical variants and variation phenomena. The obtained results are currently documented in an online version of the handbook on Variational Grammar. This handbook provides an empirically founded and detailed description of regional grammar use and will fill a gap in grammar as well as in variational linguistics. The handbook addresses scientists as well as professional writers and interested laypersons. Furthermore, the handbook is of didactic relevance, as it can be used as a reference book for teaching German as a first, second or foreign language. The variants that were documented in this research project are regarded as regional alternatives; this also has an influence on language policy. Therefore, this project is relevant not only in research and didactics but also in public discourse, aiming to raise awareness for linguistic differences within the German speaking area and emphasize the equality of standard varieties.