Variation in the use of competent writers

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Kristian Berg
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 285666547

In the proposed project, variation in the use of competent writers shall be investigated. Variation is taken seriously on almost all levels of linguistic description. This does not hold in the same way for graphemics. There is hardly any work on variation in written Standard German. This is regrettable because taking an inventory of graphemic variation should be fundamental to formulating an orthography. In our project, variation in Standard German shall be investigated systematically. The data basis is a corpus of German final secondary school examinations (Abiturarbeiten) from the last 90 years. The choice of this kind of texts has three major advantages: First, the authors are maximally trained writers. They will probably not receive any further orthographic training, at least not institutionally. Second, the influence of aids for spelling can be controlled for. Note that this neither holds for texts written on a computer (spellcheckers may - sometimes even automatically - correct these texts) or published texts (correctors and/or editors may correct these texts). Third, these examinations have been written under very comparable conditions over the last decades. In a pilot study, 1.397 exams were compiled. These exams shall now be digitalized, edited, and morphologically and syntactically annotated. The project has three major goals: First, the synchronic graphemic variation shall be described, leading to an inventory of where in the writing system how much variation is attested. Second, the diachronic development of this variation shall be investigated. Third, a corpus shall be built with which the two former goals can be pursued. A lower ranked goal is the investigation of the relationship between variation in use and the respective norm.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants