Standarddeutsch messen?
Measuring Standard German?

Frequency and Variance of Negative-Conditional Connectors

Summary/Abstract: Among the German negative-conditional connectors in the range of consequens markers there are the prototypical cases sonst and ansonsten. Morphological alternatives (sonsten and ansonst) are rarely mentioned in contemporary grammars and dictionaries but they actually occur with considerable frequency. The four connectors are used in two functions: as a conjunctional adverb which can occupy various positions within the sentence or as a specific kind of subordinating conjunction (Postponierer). The large IDS corpora allow us to reveal specific distributions of the lexemes and of their different ways of use. Comparing the frequencies and the distributions can indicate to which extent the phenomena are part of the standard language. The paper will report on the results and demonstrate how the findings can be deduced from the corpora. It will draw conclusions for assessing the acceptability of the variants and the extent to which they can be considered standard language additionally testing statistical instruments to visualise and calculate the variance of phenomena as association plots and DPnorm.

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