Dubenion-Smith, Shannon. Forthcoming. “Clausal postpositioning in German regional language.”
Journal of Germanic Linguistics.

Evans, Christine M. 2023. Variation, Change, and the Left Periphery: Dislocation phenomena in contemporary northern German varieties. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Patocka, Franz. 1997. Satzgliedstellung in den bairischen Dialekten Österreichs. Frankfurt am
Main & New York: Peter Lang Verlag.

Schmidt, Jürgen Erich & Joachim Herrgen. 2011. Sprachdynamik: Eine Einführung in die modern Regionalsprachenforschung. Berlin.

Wöllstein, Angelika. 2014. Topologisches Satzmodell. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter.

This poster presents results of a corpus study of variation in clausal initial embedding and clausal left dislocation in German regional language.

The German clause is traditionally divided into three fields (prefield, inner field, postfield), which are separated by the left and right brackets (Wöllstein 2014):

prefield | left bracket | inner field | right bracket | postfield

In independent clauses, the left bracket houses the finite verb, and (the) non-finite verb(s) or the verb particle, when present, is/are located in the right bracket. Non-clausal constituents such as nouns, adverbs, and prepositional phrases may appear in the prefield, inner field, and/or (as postpositionings) in the postfield:

(1)
prefield | left bracket | inner field | right bracket | postfield
heute | möchte | ich in die Stadt | fahren | mit dir
today | would.like | I into the city | to.go | with you

‘Today I would like to go into town with you.’

In addition, a dependent clause (e.g., <wenn ich Zeit habe> ‘if I have time’) may occur in the prefield or postfield of a matrix independent clause as shown in 2a-b:

(2)
a. Wenn ich Zeit habe | möchte | ich heute in die Stadt | fahren.
b. Ich | möchte | heute in die Stadt | fahren | wenn ich Zeit habe.

‘If I have time, I would like to go into town today.’
‘I would like to go into town today if I have time.’

Finally, it is possible for a dependent clause to appear as a left-dislocated structure with a correlate in the prefield, as in 3 (<dann> ‘then’ serves as a correlate to the clause <wenn ich Zeit habe> ‘if I have time’):

(3) Wenn ich Zeit habe | dann | möchte | ich heute in die Stadt | fahren.
‘If I have time, then I would like to go into town.’

This study provides a typology of initially-embedded and left-dislocated clauses and correlates to left dislocations in German base dialects and regiolects and, as well, offers a comparison to clauses located in the postfield, building, for example, on work by Dubenion-Smith (forthcoming), Evans (2023), and Patocka (1997). The analysis is based on 11,027 clauses in 60 spoken texts from the Zwirner and Pfeffer Corpora, accessible online through the <Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch> ‘Databank of Spoken German’.

Results indicate that initially-embedded and left-dislocated clauses occur predominantly in the form of non-relative temporal and conditional clauses, followed by relative clauses and – in regiolects only – infinitival constructions. Furthermore, <dann> ‘then’ and <da> ‘there’ are the most common prefield correlates to left-dislocated clauses. Finally, clauses are embedded in the prefield at very low frequencies, between ca. 1-2%, and there is no statistically significant difference between regiolects and dialects with respect to frequency of embedding. This finding stands in contrast to the frequency of occurrence of dependent clauses in the postfield, ranging from ca. 11-18%, and the statistically significantly higher frequency of such placement in regiolects than in dialects. On the whole, the results offer new perspectives on variation in German clausal embedding through a comparison of these phenomena in German varieties in the vertical-social dimension (cf. Schmidt & Herrgen 2011).