Salience and Evaluation of Morphosyntactic and Semanto-Structural Variation

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an online survey studying both salience and evaluation of specific morphosyntactic and semantic features in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The study, for example, addresses weil ‘because’ clauses with main clause word order, nachdem ‘after’ clauses with causal meaning, and erinnern ‘remember’ selecting an accusative object. The salience of the phenomena that were studied differs considerably depending on whether the feature has been subject to metalinguistic discourses or not and on how widespread the variant is across language regions. Especially features that have been subject to metalinguistic discourses and features that are restricted to relatively small language regions appear to be highly salient. Features that are common in a broader linguistic area are less salient to all speakers.