2022-04-14, 15:30–16:00 (Europe/Vienna), Room 4
Within the so-called Central European Linguistic Area (CEA) Czech and German are considered the core languages (for an overview see Januška 2020). Empirical studies controlling for the factor of genetic affiliation, which leads to many cognate constructions in (West-)Slavic languages, support this claim (see Gaszewski 2020). While most contributions do not account for language-internal variation, Newerkla (2007, 2020) points to the fact that variants of German in Austria share even more features with Czech (and other languages in the CEA) than those used in Germany and/or Switzerland. He highlights the importance of the common history within the Habsburg monarchy, suggesting that the various constellations of bilingualism promoted by the common state lead to convergence on various linguistic levels.
The proposed presentation choses two constructions, namely the prepositional object with the equivalents of the verb ‘to forget’ (germ. vergessen and č. zapomínat/zapomenout, see Kim/Scharf/Šimko 2020) and the use of the equivalents of ‘to give’ (germ. geben and č. dát, see Lenz et al. 2020) as PUT verbs. Both constructions are
a) structurally and semantically equivalent in German in Austria and Czech,
b) not commonly used in variants of German outside of Austria, and
c) not known in Polish, a West-Slavic language often considered a peripheral member of the CEA, but
d) usual in Slovenian, a South-Slavic (peripheral) member of the CEA.
Due to these synchronic characteristics, diachronic investigations into the selected phenomena may provide insight into the development of “core similarities” in the CEA. The proposed contribution aims to close this research gap by studying the selected phenomena in available corpora of historical stages of Czech and German. It describes the emergence of the constructions in Czech and German as well as of the patterns of variation within German. Thereby, it tackles the question whether the two phenomena are transfers from one focus language to the other, or rather the result of convergent development.
- Gaszewski, Jerzy. 2020. Does Verb Valency Pattern Areally in Central Europe? A First Look. In: Areal Convergence in Eastern Central European Languages and Beyond, edited by Luka Szucsich, Agnes Kim, and Uliana Yazhinova, 13–54. Wien, Berlin: Peter Lang.
- Januška, Jiří. 2020. Central European languages as a complex research issue: summarising and broadening the research foci. In: Areal Convergence in Eastern Central European Languages and Beyond, edited by Luka Szucsich, Agnes Kim, and Uliana Yazhinova, 55–93. Wien, Berlin: Peter Lang.
- Kim, Agnes, Sebastian Scharf, and Ivan Šimko. 2020. Variation in Case Government of the Equivalent for the Cognitive Verb to forget in German in Austria and Czech. In: Areal Convergence in Eastern Central European Languages and Beyond, edited by Luka Szucsich, Agnes Kim, and Uliana Yazhinova, 139–175. Berlin, et al.: Peter Lang.
- Lenz, Alexandra N., Fabian Fleißner, Agnes Kim, and Stefan Michael Newerkla. 2020 [currently in print]. GIVE as a German PUT verb – Analyses on Slavic-German language contact. Journal of Linguistic Geography 8(2).
- Newerkla, Stefan Michael. 2007. Areály jazykového kontaktu ve střední Evropě a německo-český mikroareál ve východním Rakousku. Slovo a slovesnost 68. 271–286.
- Newerkla, Stefan Michael. 2020. Linguistic Areas in East-Central Europe as the Result of Pluridimensional, Polycentric Convergence Phenomena. In: Areal Convergence in Eastern Central European Languages and Beyond, edited by Luka Szucsich, Agnes Kim, and Uliana Yazhinova, 207–228. Wien, Berlin: Peter Lang.