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Connectives are words or phrases, often conjunctions or adverbs, that indicate semantic relations between propositions such as causality (e.g. weil ‘because’) or contrast (e.g. aber ‘but’) (Pasch et al. 2003; Breindl et al. 2015). Along with other elements that contribute to cohesion, they are of paramount importance in (argumentative) writing. While a host of studies have investigated the emergence, use and function of connectives in various text types, one area that has largely been neglected is regional variation in their use.  Parenthetical mentions in the relevant literature concern both the absolute use of lexemes as well as a specific semantic or syntactic variant of an element otherwise shared by German varieties. Examples of the latter would be the causal use of temporal nachdem (‘after’) in southern varieties or the use of the adverb trotzdem (‘nevertheless’) as a subjunction in central German dialects (Volodina 2015: 129). Connective elements claimed to be specific for or especially frequent in one variety include the concessive subjunction obschon for Switzerland and the additive connective adverb weiters for Austria (Ammon et al. 2001: 540, 870).

Given the limited amount of empirically supported results, the present paper focuses on regional variation in the use of connectives, considering frequencies as well as syntactic and semantic patterns. It is part of a larger-scale study dealing with students’ writing skills and, therefore, our data consists of argumentative texts written by secondary school students from four German-speaking regions. In 2011, 1503 hand-written texts (811’330 tokens) were collected in Thuringia, North Tyrol and South Tyrol (Abel & Glaznieks 2017). Currently, the Swiss sub-part of the corpus is collected at the University of Fribourg (n = 600). We expect variation for two main reasons. Firstly, German is known to be a pluricentric language whose standard varieties show considerable variation on various linguistic levels (Dürscheid & Businger 2006). So-called Helvetisms or Austriacisms, i.e. lexemes which are restricted to one of the standard varieties, are relatively well-known as content words, and Ammon et al. (2001) show that they also occur with function words. Secondly, the different sociolinguistic situations in the relevant areas need to be considered. While the spoken language of many students in Thuringia is close to the standard variety, children in South Tyrol and Switzerland are primarily socialized in a local dialect considerably departing from it, an arrangement typically termed diglossia (Ferguson 1959; Haas 2004). In fact, many Swiss people do not consider Standard German to be their first language (Ender & Kaiser 2001; Hägi & Scharloth 2005). These differing relationships to the written language might have an influence on its structure that has so far only marginally been investigated. For instance, range and specificity of vocabulary, including connective items, could vary as a function of this relationship.

Based on our corpus analyses, we can show some interesting distributions. For instance, a number of rather sophisticated and rare connectives seem to be more frequent in the Thuringian data than in the North and South Tyrolian (e.g. des Weiteren ‘moreover’, dennoch ‘nevertheless’, allerdings ‘however’). In the course of the project, the Swiss texts will be incorporated in the analysis and compared to the existing data. Furthermore, the frequency counts will be supplemented by in-depth analyses of syntactic and semantic variation in the use of connectives.