The choice of prepositions (p-choice) in local, directional or prepositional arguments in variants of German as used in Austria is of interest from at least two perspectives:

a) Amongst other phenomena, accounts on (the variation of) German standard varieties highlight p-choice in certain constructions as a main difference of the Austrian standard variety from the German one (e.g., De Cillia and Ransmayr 2019, Ebner 2008, Muhr 1995, Wiesinger 1996). The list of constructions includes local and directional, e.g., (1) as well as prepositional arguments, e.g., (2).
b) Interestingly, most of these constructions are mentioned in the context of the Central European Linguistic area and/or historical Slavic–German language contact as well (e.g., Newerkla 2007, Schleicher 1851, Schuchardt 1884). In these cases, Czech is regarded the most important Slavic contact language of German in Austria due to historical reasons. Noteably, in all relevant constructions the prepositions selected in Czech are equivalent to those used in German in Austria.

(1) (a) A[ustria] auf Besuch sein/kommen
G[ermany] zu Besuch sein/kommen
C[zech] být/jít na návštěvu
‘to visit somebody’
(b) A in die Schule gehen
G zur Schule gehen
C chodit do školy
‘to go to school’
(2) A etwas vergessen AND auf etwas vergessen
G etwas vergessen
C zapomínat/zapomenout něco AND zapomínat/zapomenout na něco
‘to forget something’ AND ‘to forget about something’ (Kim/Scharf/Šimko 2020)

In local or directional arguments as exemplified by (1), the prepositional phrase (PP) semantically specifies a region related to its inner argument (e.g., Besuch ‘visit’, Schule ‘school’). Therefore, p-choice is determined by semantic aspects of that inner argument (Grießhaber 1999). In prepositional arguments, on the contrary, p-choice is determined by the verb and therefore less variable.
The proposed poster focuses on local and directional arguments with selected nouns as the PPs’ inner arguments. It contrasts comparable corpora of print news from Eastern Austria, North-Western Germany (both in German, parts of the DeReKo) and the Czech Republic (in Czech, parts of the SYN corpora) in order to quantitatively verify the described patterns of variation within German and the equivalences to Czech. In a second step, the presented study seeks to go beyond the linguistic surface. Using statistical methods (cluster analysis, multiple logistic regressions) on manually annotated corpus data it tests, how the contextually evoked semantics of the inner argument (e.g., school as institution vs. school as concrete place) correlate with the used prepositions, thereby identifying semantic and syntactic factors for p-choice.
The results indicate that, regarding p-choice, different (standard) varieties of German do not only differ from each other on the linguistic surface. They are – in some cases – rather able to highlight different semantic nuances of the same inner argument. Additionally, the results show that Czech in some cases corresponds to the Austrian standard variety of German, whereas in other cases it exhibits characteristics found in both investigated varieties of German.