Explaining the Dynamics and Stability of Dialects: A Representational Approach

3.1 Presence – Presentation – Representation

Humans are in the world; they are ‘there’ (cf. Wiesing 2020: 108). Through my body, I am bound to a specific, fundamentally variable place in the world (cf. Wiesing 2020: 108). Through existence we are ‘integrated into the flow of changing environments and situations’ (Schwemmer 1997: 25). This is accompanied by a diversity and dynamism of experiences; we are present. This presence arises because we are in an input-output relation (more concise: impression-expression relation) with the world. Contact with situations and their variability (cf. Ünal, Ji & Papafragou 2021: 234) leads to positioning because they involve us affectively (cf. Section 3.2). For us to be present, certain cognitive abilities, including symbolic and cultural functions, are necessary. We find ourselves in manifold situations and recognize an event as affecting us (cf. Section 3.3). Recognition takes place via differentiation (cf. Westerkamp 2020: 18–21), via the separation of a foreground from a background (trajector-landmark). The perceived objects and aspects thus become meaningful (‘bedeutsam’) (cf. Schwemmer 1997: 105). An abstraction takes place via making a difference, which leads to our presence, in which we are exposed to concise features (prägnante Merkmale). As a result, only certain aspects or features are present to us, while others are faded out and in the background. The dynamics of experience as the triggering moment of presence controls this perspectivity. This presentation of objects is therefore different from the ontological appearance of the objects themselves (cf. Schwemmer 1997: 67). This shows that not only are we as human beings present in the world – at least if the conditions of presence just described apply – but that the world presents itself with its impressions and situations, which are absorbed and processed by the present human being. For example, the reflection of the setting sun on the mirror-smooth Baltic Sea, the smell of freshly mown grass that pervades the new housing estate on a Saturday afternoon, another traffic jam on the main traffic route at the end of the day, the slowly opening early bloomers, the praise of a loved one for my new dish I have finally cooked, etc. For the development of representations, impressions in quantity and especially in quality are central, as empirical studies show (e.g., Leybaert 1998). We need representations as visualizations of these objects of the world and their situations and moments in order to develop a ‘situation-invariant identity’ and to be able to react to other objects and future situations in an adequate and resource-saving, i.e. routinized, way (cf. Schwemmer 1997: 78). For example, by letting the sun shine on our face or taking a photo, by remembering that we also have to mow the lawn, by tuning into a radio channel that relaxes us when we get stuck in a traffic jam, by buying a bunch of tulips from the florist for the dining table, by being very happy about the praise and adding the dish to our recipe book. The world impresses itself, the person expresses himself.

This is the fundamental context of symbolic interaction. It is in this context not the interaction of two individuals with symbols (communication), but more fundamentally with goal-oriented actions (including attitudes, ideologies, motives, etc.) as the results of being confronted with such situations and objects which is the foundation. In its impressions, the world presents us with problems and tasks whose solution is not only our responsibility, but an absolute necessity. The problems include basic phylogenetic needs such as obtaining food and protection from environmental influences such as cold and heat, but also cultural evolutionary ones such as crossing a road safely, finding a way, forming, and maintaining social communities and much more. The basis of any solution to these problems is cognitive performance, including first recognizing that there is a problem to solve (cf. Section 3.3) and then planning and executing actions. Representations are formed so that this can be done without the actual situatedness and thus in a situation-invariant and routinized manner and with reduced cognitive effort. The basic function of our mental abilities lies in their applicability. Representations function as visualizations of the environment that enable people to coordinate actions aimed at the environment, even when the environment is not present (cf. also Grabarczyk 2021: 339). From this characterization, Grabarczyk derives two theses that must apply to such representations. The first thesis follows logically from the input-output relation:

3.2 The Human Being as affectively involved by Language

In Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology, humans are considered to be fundamentally affectively involved. I cannot and do not want to go into this fundamental affectedness in depth here, but rather show why we should understand people as affectively involved by language. This enables us to gain a deeper understanding of the impression relation in the circle of memory described in Section 3.1.

Being affectively involved by language is a direct consequence of a person’s presence in the world; it refers to the fact that someone is affected by something and is haunted by it, to quote Schmitz:

Someone is affectively involved by something when they are so affected by it that they cannot help but feel themselves and in this sense become aware of themselves, even if they do not think about it at all, do not reflect on it at all, but are completely naive like an animal or an infant. (Schmitz 2019: 13)

People are therefore present in the world and are confronted with a variety of impressions in their stream of experience. These impressions are worldly, i.e., components of the world, and they can be both linguistic and non-linguistic. Here and in the following, I will focus in particular on linguistic impressions. These impressions have an affecting quality, that is they can captivate the listener or reader in such a way that he or she feels emotions (joy at a word that has not been heard for a long time, astonishment at a word that has never been heard before, anger at a supposed linguistic fashion, etc.). Affective involvement is thus the primary relationship between the subject and the world. The connection to speech acts is obvious here. As a decisive bodily state, affective involvement is a necessary condition for the choice of action and thus both for the action itself and for refraining from it:

Our imaginative life, and this includes the processes of association, categorization and schematization, is fundamentally shaped by our own bodily exploration of our environment. Our imaginative life is action-shaped, and our actions are bodily. (Kasper 2020: 259)

Because affective involvement is “primarily and originally bodily, a bodily impulse” (Schmitz 2014: 37), it is initially impossible to distance ourseves from it. As a ‘bodily impulse’, it is an element of human dynamics. So that we do not get lost in all the situations or in the continuous stream of experiences in which impressions confront us and which trigger affective involvement, and so that the diffuseness can be transformed into an order, structuring elements are created through association, categorization, and schematization (synchronization thesis, Section 3.1), which have a similarity to the impressions (isomorphism thesis). These structuring elements are mental representations. Mental (linguistic) representations are facts of affective involvement and “the facts of affective involvement [are] subjective facts […] which in their mere factuality, apart from their content, bear the stamp of ‘myness’” (Schmitz 2014: 31). This ‘myness’ arises from the situatedness of the human being in the primitive present. This primitive present consists of these five moments: (I) I (the own/foreign), (II) here (space), (III) now (time), (IV) being (Sein/Nicht-Sein), (V) this (relative identity). Even if Schmitz (2014: 55) places the I in the last and final position, it is so central, especially in the context of affective involvement, and also so relevant for the linguistic considerations of the human being as speaker, that I would like to place it here at the beginning when I show how these five moments of primitive presence are effective in the concrete situation of being confronted with a new linguistic variant. The I (I) as the moment of the “consciousness-holder entangled in the [subjective] facts of affective concern” (Schmitz 2014: 61) is confronted with something new, challenged, stimulated to cope, shaken, burdened; here, concepts of salience and pertinence become central (cf. Purschke 2011: 2014; Kasper 2015: 2020; Kasper & Purschke 2023). For example, say I hear a new variant that I have not come across before, e.g. the lexical variants in low german Feudel for Wischtuch [wiping cloth] or Trecker for Traktor [tractor] or the prosodic elongation at a phrase boundary (as in [Es hört gleich auf zu schneien]_IP [dann wird das Wetter wieder besser]_IP, english: [It’s about to stop snowing]_IP [then the weather will get better again]_IP, for this phenomenon of pre-boundary lengthening, cf. Spina & Lameli in prep.). The present is meaningful (bedeutsam) for this person (cf. Kasper 2020). All aspects of this meaningfulness are subjective, i.e., related to a person.

If all or some of these aspects are called into question and contrasted with other aspects, for example, if something new or different arises, something that is foreign also arises (cf. Schmitz 2014: 101). For example, imagine that I always use the standard linguistic expressions Wischtuch [wiping cloth] or Traktor [tractor] and am now hearing the regional variants Feudel or Trecker for the first time. This newness, as something (initially) foreign, has the potential to involve us affectively (e.g., rejection because of incomprehension or positive reactions because it triggers curiosity) and will subsequently constitute a “sphere of one’s own” (Schmitz 2014: 61) as a kind of lifeworld contrapunctus. What was previously normal is only now recognized as a variant alongside other equally possible variants. It is obvious that this is also accompanied by an “absolute identity through self-attribution” (Schmitz 2014: 61) – this point will be discussed in more detail in Section 4 below. The moment of the here (II) constitutes the spatiality of the primitive present. The intrusion of the new also plays a central role here, as the new is able to relate different places to each other: one’s own place, where Traktor and Wischtuch are spoken of (High German), the place of the stranger, which is the place of Trecker and Feudel (Low German) and all references. I establish a reference between Traktor and Trecker as well as between Wischtuch and Feudel; this creates a “system of relative places” (Schmitz 2014: 55). The body, and thus also the person, is bound to a place. In the confrontation with the new and its place, the previously absolute personal place becomes a relative place that only exists in a correlative relationship (cf. Schmitz 2014: 55).

In addition to the absolute place, the moment of the now of the primitive present (III) is the “absolute moment of the sudden in the irruption of the new” (Schmitz 2014: 55). This moment of now separates the past from the future and manifests itself complementary to the system of relative places as a “series of relative moments” (Schmitz 2014: 55; cf. also Köller (2019) on the connection between time and language in general). This creates a temporal flow consisting of past (I only know Traktor or Wischtuch), present (the existing: I hear Trecker or Feudel for the first time) and future (the imminent: All two/four variants are known to me and I understand them).

All this finally condenses in the penultimate moment of the primitive present, the moment of being (IV). Being describes the specifically human cognitive capacities such as “planning, expecting, remembering, hoping, fearing, fantasizing, playfully identifying with something” (Schmitz 2014: 57) and so on. This means that humans also have the ability to distance themselves from an object, which is necessary for orientation in the world (cf. Schmitz 2014: 57f.). Humans therefore do not exist as instinct-driven beings that simply react, but as acting beings. The This of the primitive present (V) functions as the moment that structures being; it shows the difference from everything and in its referential function as a means of referring to something and thus not referring to something else (cf. Schmitz 2014: 60). With planning, we focus on certain options, refer to them through our planning and neglect other options (I am writing this sentence and no other because I consider it necessary at this point). When we remember, we remember just this one situation or event, others remain forgotten (This one trip to the USA. This one visit to that fantastic restaurant). When we express an expectation (Please take out the garbage), we expect exactly that action and no other (I have now cleaned the windows instead). Or we expect this one linguistic variant (e.g., Traktor). In this way, the moment of this leads directly to the as-relation of recognition and understanding.

3.3 The symbolic-hermeneutic as-Structure of Recognition and Understanding

The description of the hermeneutic relevance of the as-structure (als-Struktur) goes back to Martin Heidegger (cf. also Graeser 1993). In general, the as-structure there concerns both interpretation and assertion (cf. Guidi 2021: 64). However, interpreting and asserting presuppose cognitive processes, namely recognition and understanding. Now, one might sarcastically remark that while interpreting requires understanding, this does not apply to asserting. I can certainly assert something without having even the slightest understanding of it. What we are talking about here are propositional statements about the world that make an assertion that follows truth claims. So we leave out such moral dubiousness.

Following Guidi (2021: 64), we can state that the as-structure in general is “a constitutive feature of every experience of entities in the world – namely, the way they always present themselves in terms of a ‘for something’”. But we now want to deal with a specific form of the as-structure, namely the as-structure of cognition and understanding, the necessity of which follows logically from the this of the primitive present (cf. (V) in Section 3.2). Westerkamp (2014: 68) describes to understand [verstehen] as a two-valued verb (I understand your statement.), which, however, has a three-valued relation (I understand your statement as ironic.). This shows that conceptual understanding is “always an understanding of something as something” (Westerkamp 2014: 68). Recognition works in the same way: Recognizing is syntactically two-valued in the sense of ‘someone grasps something with the mind’ (Uli recognizes the situation. https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/verbs/view/400526/1, last accessed: March 12, 2024), but here, too, a three-valued relation is evident: Uli recognizes the situation as dangerous. In the negation of these relations – both of recognizing and understanding – the difference that was already mentioned at the end of Section 3.2 becomes apparent: In the sentence Uli does not recognize the situation as dangerous, it is not the recognition itself but the modal adverbial that is negated (as dangerous), which means that “this is not actually about a non-understanding, but about a different understanding of something” (Westerkamp 2014: 68). Taking this thought further, we can state the following with Kasper & Hoffmeister (in prep.): “Something perceived is only insofar determined as something as it is determined for something (cf. Cassirer 2009: 145), and it is determined for something through the aforementioned motor practices.”

4.1 West Central German Lambdacism

The West Middle German lambdacism (cf. the fundamental study by Lenz 2003 on the general language situation in West Central German), can be understood, for example, by the standard German word Bruder (brother). The phenomenon discussed here is about the following: It “refers to a historical substitution phenomenon in which – in the wcg. area of interest here – germ. Þ or ohg. d are represented as dialectal l” (Lameli 2015: 66). In concrete terms, this means that the standard-language Bruder (in the southern area, cf. Fig. 1) is contrasted with the dialectal Brurer in the northern area. In a border area, there is now an intended adoption of the dialectal form, but this fails, so that the people there produce Bruler instead of Brurer (recognizable in the center, Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

The distribution of Bruder – Bruler – Brurer in wcg (conf. also Lameli 2015: 66).

The transitional area in which the intended adoption of the dialectal variant Brurer fails and in which the variant Bruler is produced instead can be defined as the region of West Central German lambdacism. Three questions are obvious: 1. Why do people try to adopt the dialectal variants? 2. Why do they not succeed? 3. What are the consequences of the failed adoption process? Lameli (2015) offers the following approach: Even if the conditions of emergence have not yet been fully clarified (cf. Lameli 2015: 66), some approaches can be traced back to the linguistic-geographical situation. Apical r allophones are generally predominant in the northern area, while uvular r variants predominate in the southern part (cf. Lameli 2015: 66). Lameli interprets the existence of lambdacism with reference to Wenker (2013 [1886]: 942) as an “effect of an intended adoption process […] in which speakers of the uvular r region strive to imitate apical rhotacism (Lameli 2015: 66–67).

Apart from a few exceptional cases, Lameli can show that the lambdacisms are all “directly at the rhotacism boundary” (Lameli 2015: 67), so that it can be assumed that this is a language contact phenomenon (cf. Lameli 2015: 68). In addition to this system linguistic explanation, Lameli also offers a sociolinguistic approach that focuses on the reasons for the lambdacism variant and is particularly interesting for the question described here. Metapragmatically, the phenomenon is the subject of evaluation processes; the speakers are stereotyped, and lambdacism is evaluated negatively (cf. Lameli 2015 with reference to Post 1992: 94). This is accompanied by a social positioning and demarcation of the speakers from the rhotacism or standard-equivalent region, which is an identity-securing measure for speakers outside the lambdacism region. It is even more surprising, however, that although the lambdacism variant is the subject of negative evaluations, there are no synchronization processes between speakers (see term (2) in footnote 17) that lead to the adoption of the d or r variant.

I would like to take these two explanatory approaches, the linguistic system on the one hand and the sociolinguistic on the other, as an opportunity for a further interpretation that places the speakers themselves at the center of the considerations and reflects on their situations and options for action. Three aspects that have already been theoretically developed above will be added to Lameli’s already very plausible explanation. What’s going on is firstly about speakers as affectively involved by language (1), then about the relation of presence, presentation, and representation (2) and finally about the symbolic-hermeneutic as-structure of recognition and understanding (3).

4.2 The Variation of bringen (to bring) in Rhine-Franconian

Now we come to the second example, the variation of standard German bringen (to bring) in Rhine-Franconian. This phenomenon is also observed in the greater region south of Frankfurt am Main to the west of Mannheim and Heidelberg – including the Kaiserslautern area (cf. fig. 2).

Fig. 2

The variation of standard linguistic bringen (to bring) in Rhine-Franconian (Schmidt & Herrgen 2011: 452).

In their standard work on language dynamics, Schmidt & Herrgen (2011: 153–167) analyze in detail the three inflectional classes of bringen, namely the weak, the strong and the mixed inflection. With this analysis, which Schmidt & Herrgen present for the verb bringen, the linguistic development “can be traced and explained precisely for the first time for large dialectal areas over a century using empirical data” (Schmidt & Herrgen 2011: 154). In standard German, the verb bringen is inflected as follows: Infinitive: bringen (to bring), 1st pers. sg. past tense: ich brachte (I brought), past participle: gebracht (brought). In the Wenker map of 1880, the dialectal variant brung is documented in Rhine-Franconian for the standard participial formation gebracht, among others. These forms “are highly salient for speakers of the standard language and other dialects and are commented on derisively” (Schmidt & Herrgen 2011: 155). However, a real-time comparison of different data sets shows “that the highly salient brung forms do not degrade” (Schmidt & Herrgen 2011: 156), even though this feature should degrade quite quickly as a primary dialect feature. Quite the opposite, Schmidt & Herrgen (2011: 156) show that the feature not only does not degrade, but even spreads. The unique observation here is that

those born later […] have changed inflectional class with (ge)brung(en) (= strong inflection) compared to their ancestors and have thus morphologically distanced themselves both from the old dialect and from the standard language. (Schmidt & Herrgen 2011: 156)

According to Schmidt & Herrgen, the explanation for this phenomenon is quite simple: the initial situation is that standard-language bringen – brachte – gebracht with the ablaut of i to a in addition to the dental suffix represents a system linguistically unique case in the German ablaut system (cf. Schmidt & Herrgen 2011: 159). In child language acquisition, either *gebringt or *gebrungen are used before the standard variant of the participial form with a dental suffix is produced (cf. Schmidt & Herrgen 2011: 160). Since the standard variant is a singular exception, it takes a certain amount of time before it is mastered without errors. The spread of the different (ge)brung(en) variants can now be explained by the fact that there is no “correction of brung forms during child dialect acquisition in the language area in question” (Schmidt & Herrgen 2011: 161) on the part of the primary caregivers in linguistic socialization processes (cf. general Nilsson 2015). The (micro-)synchronization processes that are effective are such that passive competence is modified and the brung form is understood (relevance) and recognized (conciseness) and accepted as equivalent to other dialectal variants (cf. Schmidt & Herrgen 2011: 162). According to Schmidt & Herrgen (2011: 163), the fact that the brung variant does not spread beyond structural boundaries (e.g., into Moselle Franconian) is because speakers are clear about which forms belong to their own (we identity) and which belong to the foreign way of speaking (they identity). While the strong inflection has thus stabilized in Rhine Franconian, a reverse process is evident in Moselle Franconian. From 1880 onwards, there is no longer any evidence of a previously detectable weak inflection, but only evidence of the mixed inflection (except for one individual case), although it can be assumed that this individual case is being reduced in favor of the general. The fact that the weak inflection was reduced in Moselle Franconian is because the mixed inflection, which is present in the standard language anyway, was dominant and the weak inflection as an exceptional case led to negative feedback, which in turn triggered mesosynchronization processes in favor of the mixed inflection.

Let us now look again at our starting points and bring them together with the explanations for the variation of standard-language bring in Rhine-Franconian.