Globalization and linguistic diversity in contemporary society have led to the appearance of linguistic phenomena that are sometimes quite difficult to characterize as phenomena of language contact or contact-induced variation and change. This contribution will discuss the usage and spread of German phrases like Gemma Kino ‘let’s go cinema’ that seem to become more frequent in spite of being considered “ungrammatical“ by most speakers of German. Several studies have discussed these “prepositional phrases without prepositions” (Siegel 2014) or “mere noun-phrases” (Wiese 2012) as one of the characteristics of so-called ethnolectal varieties (e.g. Füglein 2000, Auer 2003, Auer/Dirim 2003, Canoğlu 2012) spoken by urban youth with migration backgrounds in multilingual contexts. However, empirical evidence of the non-use of prepositions in these constructions in colloquial German (Lenzhofer 2017, Author 2019) shows that their occurrence cannot simply be treated as a contact-induced phenomenon and ethnolectal marker since it is not restricted to the language use of young urban migrant speakers but is also found in Southern-Bavarian dialectal varieties in Austria. Here, “Gemma X” phrases will be discussed as “compact constructions” (Author 2019) being part of the mental constructicon and bearing social meaning. It will be argued that these compact constructions should be considered to be diatopic and stylistic variables that occur under specific formal, lexical, pragmatic and meta-pragmatic restrictions.
The aims of this contribution are two-fold: (a) to provide empirical evidence that the non-use of prepositions in Austrian German is not restricted to urban migrant youth, and (b) to give a critical review of the theoretical linguistic discussion about these constructions and to argue that they have acquired an emblematic status in linguistics as well as in media discourse (Auer 2003, Auer/Dirim 2003, Eckert 2012, Androutsopoulos 2011, 2019).
The linguistic discussion is based on (1) a sample of collected phrases, (2) on a survey with 200 university students in East and West Austria (Vienna and Innsbruck), and (3) on a sample of media texts discussing the phenomenon. From a sociolinguistic approach, compact constructions will be reviewed here as embedded in a social-semiotic landscape, “an imagined array of social types, distinguished on the basis of social issues and grounding linguistic variability in ideology“ (Eckert 2019: 4), where they are taking on social meaning and referring to specific speaker-types or even –more generally – to linguistic diversity and (migration-induced) language change.