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Variation is an essential feature of Early New High German orthography. I attribute this phenomenon to the exhortation to pursue stylistic diversification, a striving for which rhetoricians like Erasmus expressed support. The segmentation and transformation of written words in the 16 th century shows that variation led to conditions favorable for an analysis that contributed to the establishment of new—morphological and syllabic—principles for spelling words. Examples such as <darvon> (instead of <daruon>) and <bisher> (instead of <biſher>) demonstrate morphological segmentation of the written word form. Distinctive syllabic features in historically unfounded spellings like <mehr> and <Jhar> call attention to a syllabic analysis. Both new spelling principles document a process of turning away from the segmental-phonographic practice that had prevailed prior to that time. These new spellings refer to a fundamental change in how the written word was perceived.

Based on a corpus of conversational German, I will show that the standard view of extrapositions with es (‘it’) as bi–clausal sentence patterns cannot be supported by actual data from spoken interactions. In spoken interactions, speakers make use of extrapositions with es as bipartite constructions, with the first part (“segment A”) functioning as a projector phrase, anticipating and framing the upcoming utterance (“segment B”). Segment A has a relatively fixed structure; it is sedimented as an evaluative, epistemic or evidential framing device, primarily serving pragmatic functions in projecting ‘more to come’. Segment B can take various forms in spoken interactions, depending on interactional contingencies. Instead of a simple clause, segment B generally extends over several turn construction units as well as prosodic units. Furthermore, everyday uses of it -extrapositions in German show striking parallels to related constructions, such as “ es ist so ” (‘it is such’) patterns as well as “ADJ, dass ” (‘ADJ, that ’) patterns (“klar, dass er es schafft!” ‘ obvious, that he'll make it! ’). These also consist of a projective evaluative, epistemic or evidential phrase, framing a (mostly) complex discourse segment. The analysis will show how a grammatical construction changes its nature when it is examined from the perspective of everyday usage in spoken interaction.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, a far-reaching change took place in the language of Southern Germany and Austria. This change from the traditional baroque Upper German written language [oberdeutsche Schreibsprache] to modern High German occurred not only in the language of printing, but also in private letters. One result of this transition is a broad variety of linguistic forms. The extensive correspondence between members of the Mozart family (father, mother, daughter, son) is an extremely useful object for the investigation of this language variation. After a series of introductory sections, the usage of written language by the different members of the family will be analyzed in part one of this paper. The range of variety reaches from Leopold Mozart's modern, educated German to the traditional, partly colloquial language of Mozart's mother. A separate chapter deals with W. A. Mozart's creative use of language (and varieties), his fancy for artificial jokes und word play [Sprachspiele]. Part two deals with the question of what we can learn from the written language of the letters about how the Mozarts spoke with each other and with other members of their society.

In a lexeme based syntactic theory (e. g., valency theory) fusion of constructions and heads (e. g., verbs) is licensed by the head of the construction. In construction grammar fusion is regarded as a process from the perspective of the construction. An important argument for this view is the existence of constructions that are not licensed by the lexical entry of the verb. Types of constructions motivating this approach are constructions with free datives in German and resultative constructions (constructions with directives or predicatives). The occurrence of this kind of constructions demands an expansion and a revision of current assumptions in valency theory and lexeme based theories in general. (1) It is necessary to add processes of coercion by means of pragmatic implicatures. (2) These coercions take place on the basis of existing constructional patterns built with verbs already fitting these constructions. (3) The non-licensed free datives, directives, and object predicatives are arguments. As arguments they are not captured by the valency criteria of complements versus adjuncts (arguments versus modifiers). The widespread postulate of invariance has to be abandoned in favour of a dynamic kind of prototypicality.

This study deals with the conceptualization of language distribution in space. Based on an examination of two generations, parallels and differences in the localization of active knowledge become apparent. Further, parallels and differences in the localization of speech samples are also demonstrated. The results show not only that 16-year-old pupils possess distinctive knowledge about language in space, but also that the conceptualization of dialects may dependent on specific stimuli. Obviously, knowledge about dialects is connected to individual experience. But at the same time it is indicated that the media, widely held responsible for the disappearance of dialects, have, at least in part, generated new regional knowledge.