Horizontal and vertical variation in Swiss German morphosyntax

Abstract

Tis paper deals with the question of how areas with diferent syntactic variability can be identifed. It uses data from the Syntactic Atlas of German-speaking Switzer- land (SADS) which uses multiple informants in each survey location. As a starting point the well-known doubling construction with the verb aafange ‘begin’ is used to illustrate how the diferent regions difer with respect to inter-personal varia- tion and how the diferent variants can be mapped in terms of predominance, i.e. to what extent they co-occur or compete with the other variants. As a quantitative measure, the intensity value of the dominant variant (i.e. the agreement rate be- tween those informants providing the dominant variant as their variant) is used as the basis to create a so-called “variation index”. Tis technique is applied to a larger set of SADS data, and the results are mapped onto the survey points indicating the syntactic variability for each location. To assess the validity of the method, sev- eral subgroups are created which turn out to correlate with the whole data set at a signifcant level. By performing a hot spot analysis, regional clusters of high/low syntactic variability can be identifed.