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Article
A Questionnaire Study of Two-Verb Clusters in West Central German
Folia Linguistica
  • Shannon A. Dubenion-Smith, Western Washington University
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-1-2013
Keywords
  • verb clusters,
  • dialect syntax,
  • West Central German,
  • questionnaire study
Abstract

Until recently, the West Central German dialect area was largely neglected in investigations of verb clusters. The article presents the results of a questionnaire study of two-verb clusters involving 55 participants in 17 localities in that dialect area. These results indicate that the occurrence of particular orders is subject to interspeaker, intraspeaker, and areal variation as well as morphosyntactic constraints. Furthermore, a comparison of these results with those from a corpus study of the same dialect area suggests diachronic stability in the relative areal distribution of verb clusters over the roughly 50 years since the spoken data for the corpus were collected. Finally, results for the Hessian region of West Central German point toward this area as a particularly promising locus of further research.

Subjects - Topical (LCSH)
Language and languages--Variation; German language--Verb; German language--Verb phrase; Sociolinguistics
Genre/Form
articles
Type
Text
Language
English
Format
application/pdf
Citation Information
Shannon A. Dubenion-Smith. "A Questionnaire Study of Two-Verb Clusters in West Central German" Folia Linguistica Vol. 47 Iss. 1 (2013) p. 1 - 33
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/shannon_dubenion-smith/1/