Publikationen

Om du talar ett nordiskt språk, så är oddsen höga att du har yttrat ett lågtyskt ord under de senaste tio minuterna (och läst två till i den här första meningen). Lågtyskan är i dag ett regionalt språk i norra Tyskland och en del av Nederländerna. Men den har ett storslaget förflutet som sjöhandelns språk omkring Nord- och Östersjön. Och det har avsatt spår i grannspråkens ordförråd. I denna språkprat kommer vi att titta närmare på hur lågtyskan har påverkat de nordiska språken.

North Germanic has been in constant contact with other languages since prehistoric times. Early contact scenarios include the contact with Uralic languages within Scandinavia itself. Increasing contact with Central Europe from the Early Middle Ages onward entailed the spread of a wider range of linguistic innovations from (or through) Romance and West Germanic languages, while few traces of the Viking Age expansion are found in the lexicon. However, the most significant contact-related changes are due to the Late Medieval contacts between Continental Scandinavian and Latin as well as, crucially, Middle Low German. The increasing integration of Scandinavia into political, economic, and cultural networks within Europe, most notably the influence of the Hanseatic League, resulted in a high number of lexical loans and grammatical innovations but also contributed to a massive simplification of the inflectional system of Continental Scandinavian. From the Early Modern period onward, the Nordic languages went through the same type of contact (with Latin, German, French, and English in particular) as other European languages. A specifically Nordic trait is the linguistic hegemony of Danish which had a considerable impact on the development of the West Nordic languages. In addition, several waves of immigration have resulted in contact-related innovations and the emergence of a new type of urban varieties.

This volume presents eight studies of linguistic phenomena in Nordic languages (notably Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) from a construction grammar perspective. The contributions both deepen and widen the focus of construction grammar applied to Nordic languages by dealing with a variety of topics, such as the constructional network, pseudo-coordination, additional language learning and emerging multilingualism, prototypical semantics in argument structure constructions, and domain-specific discourse and language behavior. The volume showcases the vibrant research activity within part of the construction grammar community dealing with Nordic languages, contributing to the knowledge about the structure, use and learning of these languages, as well as to the field of construction grammar as a whole.

Dialektologisk forskning har traditionellt fokuserat på individuella språk. Tvärspråklig areallingvistik har å andra sidan sällan tagit hänsyn till inomspråklig variation. Projektet GrammArNord (Grammatisk arealitet i Norden och norra Tyskland) kombinerar ett dialektologiskt med ett arealtypologiskt och ett kontaktlingvistiskt perspektiv. Det syftar till att identifiera och kartlägga grammatiska drag som är gemensamma för både nordiska och nordtyska varieteter (både standardspråken och icke-standardspråkliga varieteter såsom dialekter och regiolekter) samt att identifiera typiska areala mönster som återspeglar karaktäristiska historiska språkkontaktscenarion. Projektet bygger på ett arealitetsbegrepp som innefattar inte bara den geografiska utan även den sociala och den situationella dimensionen. Dess empiriska bas utgörs av befintliga grammatiska dialektbeskrivningar och andra dokumentariska resurser. Artikeln presenterar projektets teoretiska och tekniska bakgrund samt diskuterar ett exempel på vilken typ av analys det möjliggör.

Swedish swearwords are predominantly religious in origin (e.g. fan ‘the Devil’, helvete ‘hell’, and jävlar ‘devils, demons’). The former taboo status of swearing is still reflected in the existence and productive use of taboo-avoiding strategies, most notably phonological modification (e.g. fasen < fan ‘the Devil’, helsicke < helvete ‘hell’). This paper discusses such taboo-avoiding strategies from the perspective of usage-based Construction Grammar. It argues that taboo-avoiding relies on schematic swearing constructions in combination with radical coercion in general and on submorphemic coercion in particular: The meaning of a taboo-avoiding expression is entirely constructional, and the lexical semantics of the slot-filling items is irrelevant. Evidence for the cognitive reality of phonologically schematic swearing constructions is found in a corpus-based analysis of selected taboo-avoiding patterns, which shows that swearing constructions are not only instantiated by lexicalized variants, but also used productively, as illustrated by infrequent types.

Georg Wenkers Sprogatlas over Det Tyske Rige er et klassisk dialektologisk projekt fra slutningen af 1800-tallet, hvor der blev samlet data ind fra (næsten) alle skoledistrikter i hele det daværende Tyskland. Projektets data bruges stadig inden for tysk dialektforskning, og spørgeskemaerne er efterhånden blevet publiceret digitalt. Mindre kendt er, at materialet ikke kun indeholder tysk, men også mindretalssprogene, der blev talt inden for datidens tyske grænser. Blandt disse er også danske, dvs. sønderjyske, data fra i alt 287 skoledistrikter i det forhenværende hertugdømme Slesvig, der i dag er opdelt mellem Danmark og Tyskland. Traditionelt har man inden for dansk dialektforskning ikke anset de danske Sprogatlas-data som særligt interessante, først og fremmest fordi man mente, at de i høj grad var præget af metodiske artefakter, idet de består af skriftlige oversættelser fra standardtysk til dialekterne. Afvigelser fra de forventede danske strukturer er således tit blevet forklaret med primingeffekter i oversættelsesprocessen. Nyere forskning har dog vist, at materialet trods alt kan bruges til undersøgelser af autentiske sprogkontaktfænomener, dvs. tyskpåvirkede træk i de sønderjyske dialekters grammatik. Denne artikel diskuterer de sønderjyske data ud fra et kontaktlingvistisk perspektiv. Dette indebærer både en metodisk diskussion og fire korte casestudier af udvalgte grammatiske træk. Studierne viser for det første, at materialet bør anses som en værdifuld dokumentarisk ressource, der med fordel kan bruges i kontaktlingvistiske analyser. For det andet demonstrerer de, at tyskpåvirkede grammatiske træk i en vis udstrækning må anses som autentiske og etablerede i 1800-tallets sønderjysk.

The last few years have seen a steadily increasing interest in constructional approaches to language contact. This volume builds on previous constructionist work, in particular Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) and the volume Constructions in contact (2018) and extends its methodology and insights in three major ways. First, it presents new constructional research on a wide range of language contact scenarios including Afrikaans, American Sign Language, English, French, Malayalam, Norwegian, Spanish, Welsh, as well as contact scenarios that involve typologically different languages. Second, it also addresses other types of scenarios that do not fall into the classic language contact category, such as multilingual practices and language acquisition as emerging multilingualism. Third, it aims to integrate constructionist views on language contact and multilingualism with other approaches that focus on structural, social, and cognitive aspects. The volume demonstrates that Construction Grammar is a framework particularly well suited for analyzing a wide variety of language contact phenomena from a usage-based perspective.

German and Danish share a long, complex, and multifaceted history of language contact. Besides other contact scenarios, societal as well as widespread individual multilingualism has characterized the linguistic situation in the territory of the former Duchy of Schleswig (i.e. the northern part of the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany as well as the southernmost part of Jutland in Denmark) from the Early Middle Ages until the present day. In structural terms, this contact scenario has resulted in a range of areal features that are shared by a number of Danish and German varieties spoken in the border region, while diverging markedly from other varieties of at least one of the languages. The aim of the present article is twofold: Firstly, it discusses selected grammatical arealisms found in dialectal and regiolectal varieties within the Danish-German contact zone (e.g. a SHALL future, the use of AND words as infinitive markers in German varieties, and possessive linking pronouns in Danish dialects). Secondly, it attempts to demonstrate that such arealisms can be interpreted and, to some extent, explained within the framework of Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG), a usage-based constructionist approach to language contact situations that is centred around the idea of language-unspecific constructions used in multilingual communities. Even though present-day speaker communities in the contact zone might not be equally bilingual as, say, their predecessors in the early 19th century, it is argued that the reconstruction of common constructions can help to better understand contact-related developments that led to the emergence of linguistic areality in the past.

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in applying Construction Grammar to additional language (AL) acquisition as well as in constructionist approaches to language contact and multilingualism, in particular Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG; Höder, 2018). This paper combines both perspectives by proposing a usage-based constructionist model of AL acquisition as emerging multilingualism. In line with earlier work on DCxG, we assume that multilingual speakers store and process all of their languages in terms of constructions that are organized into one common constructicon. From that perspective, AL learning amounts to an extension and reorganization of the constructicon, resulting not only in the gradual entrenchment of new constructions that represent (a learner variety of) the AL, but also in modifications of previously acquired constructions and the links between them. The model is illustrated by examples from different kinds of AL acquisition scenarios and also discussed in relation to current key concepts within non-constructionist research in the field of AL acquisition.

Die nordischen Länder gelten als gesellschaftlich progressiv, nicht zuletzt auch bei der Gleichstellung der Geschlechter. Dies schlägt sich auch im schwedischen Sprachgebrauch nieder. Der Beitrag skizziert das, was heute als allgemein akzeptierte Sprachpraxis beschrieben werden kann. Entscheidend für deren Akzeptanz sind dabei vor allem grammatische Eigenschaften des Schwedischen, dessen Genus- und Pronomensystem sich hier entscheidend von dem des Deutschen unterscheidet. Thematisiert werden nach einer kurzen grammatischen Diskussion die heutige Verwendung von Berufsbezeichnungen und der Gebrauch des sexusneutralen Pronomens hen, das sich in den letzten Jahren in bestimmten Bereichen etabliert
hat.

Die deutsch-dänische Grenze von 1920 durchschneidet heute einen traditionell mehrsprachigen transnationalen Kommunikationsraum. Der Beitrag stellt die sprachgeschichtliche Entwicklung Schleswigs im Kontext der Grenzziehung dar und fokussiert dabei die Frage, welche Auswirkungen diese auf den Wandel der regionalen Varietätenrepertoires im Sinne von Auers (2005, 2011) Modell zur Repertoiretypologie hat.

Die Diasystematische Konstruktionsgrammatik (Höder 2012; 2014abc; i. Vorb.) geht in Anlehnung an moderne kontaktlinguistische Ansätze davon aus, dass das Sprachwissen Mehrsprachiger ein sprachübergreifendes Repertoire (Matras 2009, 308–309) konstituiert. Dieses Repertoire wird im Rahmen einer gebrauchsbasierten konstruktionsgrammatischen Beschreibung als mehrsprachiges Konstruktionsnetzwerk modelliert, in dem – spezifisch für die jeweilige Sprechergruppe – sprachspezifische und -unspezifische Konstruktionen (‚Idio-‘ und ‚Diakonstruktionen‘) miteinander vernetzt sind. Auch in der Produktion interagieren folglich beide Konstruktionstypen miteinander. Zunächst vor allem mit Blick auf kontaktbedingten Sprachwandel entwickelt, eröffnet dieser Ansatz neue Perspektiven für die Analyse mehrsprachiger Äußerungen, die traditionell als Transferenzen beschrieben, hier aber als Ausdruck interlingualer Produktivität verstanden werden, d. h. der spontanen Bildung nichtkanonischer Äußerungen auf diakonstruktioneller Basis.

Late medieval Sweden was a multilingual society. At least three languages – namely Old Swedish, Low German, and Latin – were in use, beside other regional languages. While the influence of Low German is easily detectable in all parts of the Swedish language system and has been investigated rather thoroughly from a historical sociolinguistic point of view (cf. Braunmüller 2004), the role of Latin has been rather marginalized in traditional Swedish language historiography, focusing on the earlier stages of Old Swedish, which are described as its classical form (cf. Pettersson 2005). Starting out as the language of religion, administration, diplomacy and, to some extent, trade, Latin was the dominant language of text production in Sweden until the 14th century, which saw Written Old Swedish gain some domains as well, resulting in a more balanced diglossic relation between the two languages. The emerging written variety of Swedish, however, was heavily influenced by the multilingual practices of scribes, in large part clerics who were used to using at least Swedish and Latin on a daily basis for a variety of communicative purposes (Höder 2010). These multilingual practices, ranging from ad hoc translations via code-switching to the application of Latin stylistic, textual, and syntactic norms in Swedish text production (Höder 2018), had a lasting impact on the later development of a Swedish proto-standard, and are still reflected in conservative text types today. This contribution approaches this development from a historical sociolinguistic and contact linguistic perspective, concentrating on the establishment of multilingual practices.

This article discusses the role of intra-word phonological schematicity in multilingual constructicons from a Diasystematic Construction Grammar perspective. It argues that, in particular with communities that use two or more typologically similar and/or closely related languages, many lexical elements (e.g. cognates) exhibit regular sound correspondences that can be analysed as consisting of different types of phonological schemas. In this view, there is a division of labour between schematic constructions that specify the words’ referential meaning and others that specify their belonging to one of the ‘languages’, with language-specificity defined as a pragmatic property of constructions. The focus is on the question whether generalizations at this level of schematicity and abstraction are cognitively real and what can count as evidence for their existence from a usage-based perspective.

The last three decades have seen the emergence of Construction Grammar as a major research paradigm in linguistics. At the same time, very few researchers have taken a constructionist perspective on language contact phenomena. This volume brings together, for the first time, a broad range of original contributions providing insights into language contact phenomena from a constructionist perspective. Focusing primarily on Germanic languages, the papers in this volume demonstrate how the notion of construction can be fruitfully applied to investigate how a range of different language contact phenomena can be systematically analyzed from the
perspectives of both form and meaning.

Mainstream grammatical theory and traditional grammaticography concentrate on single languages or varieties, which are conceptualised as pre-existing, distinct entities and analysed in terms of coherent, static, ideally variation-free language systems. This is in stark contrast to actual language usage, where various kinds of structural contact phenomena are the rule rather than the exception. In line with recent insights from contact linguistics, Diasystematic Construction Grammar assumes that multilingual speakers and communities organise their grammatical knowledge on the basis of the available input via processes of interlingual identification, abstraction, generalisation, and categorisation, regardless of language boundaries. This results in a community-specific multilingual constructicon, comprising both language-specific constructions (restricted to certain communicative contexts associated with a particular language) and constructions unspecified for language.

Usage-based CxG approaches share the central assumption that any grammar has to be acquired and organised through input-based abstraction and categorisation. Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) is based on the idea that these processes are not sensitive to language boundaries. Multilingual input thus results in multilingual grammars which are conceived of as constructicons containing language-specific as well as language-unspecific constructions. Within such systems, phonological structures play an important part in the identification of schematic constructions. However, the status of phonology in DCxG, as in CxG in general, yet remains unclear. This paper presents some arguments for including phonological elements systematically in the construction-based analysis of (multilingual) constructional systems.

The contribution addresses the problem of reconstructing the spoken language of the Old Swedish period (13th–16th c.) on the basis of written corpora. It proposes two approaches: an operational one (via identifying specifically written features) and an indirect one (via fictional orality).

Uriel Weinreich (1926–1967) was one of the founding fathers of both contact linguistics and sociolinguistics. Among his best-known works are his 1953 monograph Languages in contact, his 1954 article Is a structural dialectology possible?, and the seminal paper on Empirical foundations for a theory of language change (co-authored with William Labov and Marvin Herzog, published posthumously in 1968). Besides giving a brief biographical sketch, my contribution concentrates on two aspects that make Weinreich’s classical texts worth re-reading as well as relevant for my own work dealing with a construction grammar model for language contact phenomena. Firstly, there is no fundamental difference between language contact and dialect contact; both can be tackled with the same theoretical and analytical tools (in contrast to the later establishment of contact linguistics and sociolinguistics as rather autonomous subdisciplines). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Weinreich’s work emphasises the systematicity of language contact, both in its relation to the social parameters of the language contact situation and in the inter-systemic relations between the different languages involved, which are represented by diasystematic links.

Convergence, i.e. the increase of inter-systemic similarities, is usually considered the default development in language contact situations. This volume focuses on the other logical possibilities of diachronic development, namely stability and divergence – two well-attested, but under-researched phenomena. The contributions investigate the sociolinguistic and structural factors and mechanisms that lead to or at least reinforce both types of non-convergence, despite of language contact. The contributions cover a wide range of language contact situations, including standard and non-standard varieties.

From a global and historical perspective, multilingualism or at least multilectalism is the rule rather than the exception. However, linguistic theory continues to focus on the idea of a prototypically coherent, static, and monolingual language system. A more realistic approach can set out from the notion of ‘diasystems’, i.e. linguistic systems including more than one variety. Apart from being theoretical constructs, diasystems are also an important component of multilectal speakers’ linguistic knowledge. Within a usage-based construction grammar approach, this paper argues that multilectal speakers (re-)organise their grammars by generalisation over individual constructions and across language boundaries. Therefore, the multilectal system can be modelled as an inventory of constructions that are partly language-specific and partly unspecified for language.

Convergence and divergence are usually defined as changes in opposite directions – convergence increases, divergence decreases interlingual similarities between two given languages or varieties. Additionally, convergence is often explained as the ‘natural’, expectable process in language contact, whereas divergence is associated with psychosocial mechanisms. Based on observations from the recent development of Low German in its present intense contact with High German, this contribution argues that the distinction between convergence and divergence is not as straightforward as it seems and that it is not convergence as such that can be explained without the involvement of any extralinguistic factors, but rather pro-diasystematic change (as opposed to counter-diasystematic change) – i.e. innovations that facilitate the establishment of language-unspecific structures in a common constructional system.

This contribution claims that Modern Low German (as represented by North Low German dialects) is a rather prototypical word language according to the model provided by Auer (2001) and others. The interaction between syllable structure, stress, and phonemic alternations in different contexts is better explained as a consequence of word-related as opposed to syllable-related rules and restrictions. Apart from the relatively high complexity of possible consonant clusters at word boundaries, this view is supported by (a) the stress sensitivity of vocalic and consonantal syllable nuclei, including a highly differentiated vowel system, (b) word-level phonological processes such as word-medial obstruent voicing, and (c) the existence of a word-level suprasegmental phenomenon similar to a pitch accent. On the whole, Low German is even closer to the word language pole of the continuum between word and syllable languages than Standard German. The findings are also relevant in a wider perspective. First, it is of general importance to include dialectal or non-standard varieties in cross-linguistic typological studies and theoretical models. Second, some of the features found in Low German are also found in other non-standard varieties of (Northern) Germany as well as in neighboring languages, such as Danish (including South Jutlandic) and other Scandinavian and Circum-Baltic languages, which suggests an areal or contact-induced relation.

Usage-based CxG approaches share the central assumption that any grammar has to be acquired and organised through input-based abstraction and categorisation. Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) is based on the idea that these processes are not sensitive to language boundaries. Multilingual input thus results in multilingual grammars which are conceived of as constructicons containing language-specific as well as language-unspecific constructions. Within such systems, phonological structures play an important part in the identification of schematic constructions. However, the status of phonology in DCxG, as in CxG in general, yet remains unclear. This paper presents some arguments for including phonological elements systematically in the construction-based analysis of (multilingual) constructional systems.

The synchronic and diachronic variability of historical texts poses substantial difficulties in the annotation and analysis of historical corpora. One main problem is that ongoing language change and particularly grammaticalisation phenomena lead to syntactic ambiguity. This contribution shows how such issues are dealt with in the TEI-based Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation (HaCOSSA). The focus is on the development of strictly operational, explicitly defined, largely theory-neutral, language-specific and diachronically broad annotation categories.

Language contact phenomena are often described with reference to their effect on the monolingual systems of the varieties involved, both in historical and in contact linguistics. This contribution argues that an essentially multilingual perspective on these phenomena is more adequate. Bilingual speakers in stable bilingual groups create a common system for all their languages, incorporating both interlingual links and language-unspecified elements along with language-specific structures. In a construction grammar analysis, such systems as well as changes within this type of system can be conceptualized as interlingual constructional networks, which are established, stored, and processed in exactly the same way as monolingual grammars.

Recent studies in typology and historical linguistics have yielded new insights into the geographical distribution and diffusion of linguistic phenomena. Within Europe, several linguistic areas of different types and sizes have been proposed and discussed, including a European area (Standard Average European, henceforth SAE). Such claims are largely based on the grammars of the respective standard languages. In this contribution, I argue that we need (a) to focus also on intralingual variation in order to fully understand both the synchronic facts and the diachronic processes behind the formation of linguistic areas, and (b) to systematically include non-standard dialects or varieties in areal linguistic studies in order to gain a more representative empirical basis. Moreover, we have to take (c) dialect convergence across language boundaries into account, which I consider to be an important contact linguistic process in the emergence of areal phenomena. This view is supported by three case studies on areal phenomena in Northern European languages and dialects, investigating non-standard verbal constructions, dialectal phonological features, and medium-specific syntactic traits.

Das Niederdeutsche hat im 20. Jahrhundert massive Veränderungen durchlaufen, die sich in Zukunft eher noch verstärken dürften, und zwar vor allem im Hinblick auf seinen sprachsozialen Status, aber auch in sprachsystematischer Hinsicht. Diese Entwicklung hat im Wesentlichen mit dem hochdeutsch-niederdeutschen Kontakt zu tun. In diesem Beitrag möchte ich deutlich machen, dass dieser – aus puristischer Sicht gewiss bedauerliche – Wandel sich aus der Perspektive der bilingualen Sprecher als ökonomisch und damit als vorteilhaft verstehen lässt. Zugleich möchte ich zeigen, dass das Niederdeutsche dabei gerade in jüngster Zeit demselben Typ von Sprachwandel ausgesetzt ist, der sich zuvor bereits bei der Ausprägung des norddeutschen Hochdeutschen ausgewirkt hat.

Language contact through translation (LCTT) is a particular source of contact-induced language change. While investigations into individual scenarios have shown its importance, major works on language contact have largely neglected this type of language contact. In particular, no attempt has been made so far at establishing general principles and mechanisms for LCTT situations. This contribution presents a tentative typology for the study of LCTT and analyzes two different situations from that perspective, namely the contact between Latin and Old Swedish in the Middle Ages and between English and German today.

This volume presents discourse production in multilingual contexts as a specific type of language contact situation. Translation may be seen as the prototypical type of multilingual discourse production, other types would include parallel text production in different languages (e.g. for websites) or the production of versions more loosely connected with the source text. When divergent communicative norms and conventions come into contact in any of these types of text production, one may find that such conventions transcend established language boundaries, potentially leading to the emergence of new genres. This volume represents the first collection of papers that focus on the specific properties of language contact through multilingual discourse production. It brings together approaches by historical linguists, language contact researchers and translation scholars, thus presenting the topic in its full variety and providing valuable suggestions for further research in this emerging field of study.

„Subordination“, ein grundlegender Begriff für syntaktische Fragestellungen, wird häufig ohne genaue Definition gebraucht. Dieser Beitrag zeigt Möglichkeiten einer Operationalisierung für die Analyse eines altschwedischen Korpus. Dabei erlauben die gewählten Merkmale eine Annäherung an die Komplexität möglicher Subordinationstypen und -grade. Berücksichtigt werden sowohl strukturelle Eigenschaften der Nebensätze selbst als auch die hierarchischen Relationen zu den in Frage kommenden Matrixsätzen. In einer detaillierten Untersuchung auf dieser Grundlage zeigt sich die altschwedische Subordination dabei als sehr heterogenes Phänomen, dem ein dichotomer Subordinationsbegriff nicht gerecht wird.

Das Schwedische wird im Spätmittelalter zur Schriftsprache ausgebaut und zwar in einer mehrsprachigen Gesellschaft, in der Latein und Niederdeutsch einen prägenden Einfluss haben. Zugleich ist im Schwedischen dieser Zeit erheblicher Sprachwandel zu beobachten. Welche Rolle spielt der Sprachkontakt zum Lateinischen für die syntaktische Entwicklung des Altschwedischen? Wie wirken sich die kommunikativen Rahmenbedingungen der Schriftlichkeit im Wandel aus? Wie interagieren beide Faktoren miteinander? Wie lässt sich diese komplexe sprachliche Situation aus der Perspektive moderner kontakt- und soziolinguistischer sowie sprachtheoretischer Modelle erfassen? Diese Studie behandelt solche Fragen einerseits in einer theoretischen Diskussion des Sprachausbaus im Altschwedischen, andererseits in einer detaillierten quantitativen und qualitativen Analyse syntaktischer Sprachwandelphänomene auf der Basis eines eigens erstellten digitalen Korpus altschwedischer Texte mit syntaktischer Annotation.

In the Late Middle Ages, when Old Swedish develops into a written language it acquires simultaneously several innovative syntactic features, such as new relativisation patterns. On the basis of an annotated digital corpus of Late Old Swedish texts, appositive relative clauses and the pronominal relativisation strategy are singled out as the typologically most salient innovations. In this contribution the author argues that the emergence of these features has to be explained as a grammatical replication of Latin features in a process of language Ausbau. Furthermore, it is argued that these changes affect only the emerging written variety of Old Swedish and mark the beginning of a medial split, with the written language converging towards Latin and diverging from the spoken varieties.

Sprachen verändern sich im Laufe der Zeit. Gerade der Lautwandel ist seit dem 19. Jahrhundert in der historischen Linguistik intensiv erforscht worden. Wir verfügen deshalb heute über enorme Kenntnisse in der Lautgeschichte einzelner Sprachen. Aber wie können lautliche Veränderungen adäquat beschrieben werden? Wodurch werden sie ausgelöst? Wie laufen sie im Detail ab? Welche Rolle spielen dabei inner- und außersprachliche Faktoren? Kann Lautwandel erklärt werden, und wenn ja, wie? Bei solchen Fragen bestehen noch immer erhebliche Differenzen zwischen Vertretern unterschiedlicher Theorien, eine Synthese ist derzeit nicht in Sicht.
Der Autor vertritt den Standpunkt, dass einander widersprechende Theorien nicht einfach koexistieren können, sondern miteinander konkurrieren. Es muss also ein Vergleichsmaßstab entwickelt werden, der nicht nur eine Gegenüberstellung, sondern auch eine Bewertung verschiedener Modelle erlaubt. Daher wird in diesem Buch eine Annäherung an entsprechende theorieunabhängige Kriterien versucht. Dies geschieht anhand einiger klassischer Theorien zum Lautwandel.
Die Modelle werden zunächst kontrastiv aus einer wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Perspektive dargestellt. Dabei werden Lautwandeltheorien von den Junggrammatikern über strukturalistische und generative Ansätze bis zur modernen Variationslinguistik diskutiert. Anschließend wird analysiert, wie der Wandel jeweils beschrieben und wie er erklärt wird: Wie verhalten sich die Beschreibungskategorien der einzelnen Modelle zu den phonetischen Daten, auf welchem Abstraktionsniveau wird also operiert? Welche Rolle spielen jeweils Beschreibungssystem und Fachterminologie? Welches Verhältnis besteht zwischen Erklärungsanspruch und Erklärungswert? Was sagen einzelne Modelle tatsächlich aus? Wie verlässlich sind diese Aussagen? Nach welchen Kriterien kann man die Vor- und Nachteile einzelner Theorien bewerten? Und schließlich: Welche Forderungen an die künftige Forschung zum Lautwandel lassen sich aus der Analyse ableiten – und richten sich diese Forderungen nur an einzelne oder an alle Forschungsrichtungen?
Als Einstieg in das Thema des Laut- bzw. Sprachwandels ist dieses Buch auch gerade für Studierende geeignet. Sprachwissenschaftliche und phonetische Grundkenntnisse sind für das Verständnis ausreichend.