Project B6

3rd Phase - The Kiezdeutsch Corpus. Analyses at the Periphery

The project builds on the results of B6 “Grammatical Reduction and Information-Structural Preferences in a Contact Variety of German: Kiezdeutsch”, concentrating on corpus research. In the first funding period of B6, we developed a corpus of Kiezdeutsch, a multiethnolect spoken in urban Germany, which contains naturally occurring speech based on self-recordings of adolescents, available as audio files with transcriptions in EXMARaLDA. In addition to adolescents from a multiethnic area, Berlin-Kreuzberg (main corpus, approx. 48 hours of recordings, and 228,000 tokens), we also included adolescents from a largely monoethnic area with comparable socio-economic indicators, namely Berlin-Hellersdorf (supplementary corpus, approx. 18 hours of recordings, and 105,000 tokens). This provides a basis to identify phenomena that are specific to Kiezdeutsch, that is, for a multiethnic, in contrast to a more monoethnic, population. The corpus is introduced as the “Kiezdeutsch-Korpus” into sociolinguistic and language-variation research contexts.

In the current project phase, the corpus is further developed in a way to support automatic searches and more comprehensive quantitative analyses that can also address syntactically complex constructions. A major focus is on the left sentence periphery in Kiezdeutsch; this will be complemented by analyses of the right periphery. Further preparation of the corpus will provide a basis for the identification and the fine-grained syntactic and information-structural categorisation of distinct patterns in Kiezdeutsch, providing new insights into the role of information structure in syntactic variation and the emergence of non-standard varieties. The second central goal of the project is to legally open the corpus compliant with such issues as data privacy, which will make it accessible for other research groups and thus will provide a new ressource for investigations into language contact, language variation, language use, and language structure, which to our knowledge is unique in the German-speaking area.

2nd Phase - Grammatical reduction and information structural preferences in a contact variety of German: Kiezdeutsch

The project deals with the connection between grammatical and information-structural aspects in a contact language. The subject of investigation is Kiezdeutsch, a variety of German that has been developing as an urban youth language in residential areas with a high proportion of migrants, especially in those where young people of Turkish and Arab origin dominate since the mid-1990s. However, Kiezdeutsch is not “Turkish German” (or “Arab German”), but a multiethnolect that develops in joint activities of young people of different origins, for example in the context of school attendance, and as a contact language especially in ethnically mixed groups, by speakers with and without a migration background , is spoken. Kiezdeutsch shows typical contact language characteristics; In particular, in addition to the integration of expressions from the native languages ​​of some speakers, there is greater variability in the organization of linguistic expressions, phenomena of morphosyntactic reduction, some of which are serve as a basis for the development of new constructions, and a strong contextual dependence of the interpretation. These characteristics indicate a weakening of grammatical restrictions and - related to this - greater access to extra-linguistic aspects.

Such a variety is therefore particularly suitable for illuminating the connections between grammatical and information-structural aspects and the status of the information structure within the linguistic architecture. We take the following general model as a basis: For the information structure, general cognitive aspects such as the organization of conceptual representations and the extra-linguistic conditions of the communication situation are initially relevant. Information-structural preferences that result from this for the organization of the message find their way into the linguistic system as a result of filtering through the grammar: Information-structural preferences reflect communicative strategies of the speaker, who makes use of the grammatical and lexical conditions of a language to determine these preferences to implement.

Against this background, the question then arises whether in a contact language such as Kiezdeutsch, given the weakening of grammatical restrictions, there is a more original mapping of information structure on the linguistic level: Does grammatical reduction lead to greater permeability of the linguistic system and thus less control over information structure Preferences through trained grammatical correlates? Kiezdeutsch thus offers an excellent empirical domain for investigating the interaction between grammar and information structure, especially in those areas in which there are violations of grammatical restrictions in German (whereby primarily phenomena are relevant that are not in comparable spoken, informal language usage occur). The information-structural perspective can also make it possible to unify allegedly incoherent linguistic characteristics of Kiezdeutsch, which from a purely syntactic point of view can only be linked unsatisfactorily, on the level of the information structure.

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Principal Investigators

• Prof. Dr. Heike Wiese

Former Staff Members

• Ines Rehbein PhD
• Nadine Lestmann
• Lars Döhling
• Ulrike Freywald
• Tiner Özçelik
• Sören Schalowski

Student Assistants

• Oliver Bunk
• Sophie Hamm
• Banu Hueck
• Anne Junghans
• Julia Kostka
• Jana Kiolbassa
• Marlen Leisner
• Charlotte Pauli
• Gergana Popova
• Nadja Reinhold
• Emiel Visser

Interns

• Franziska Rohland
• Tjona Sommer

Student Theses

Activities