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.

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.

DOI: 10.1515/9783110571110-004

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.

DOI: 10.1075/cal.24.01boa

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.

DOI: 10.1075/cal.24

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.

DOI: 10.1075/cal.24.02hod

DOI: 10.1515/ejss-2017-0017

DOI: 10.21941/publ/1323_mod

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.

DOI: 10.1075/bct.82.04hod

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.

DOI: 10.1075/silv.16

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.

DOI: 10.1075/slcs.154.07hod

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.

DOI: 10.1075/silv.16.03hod

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.

DOI: 10.1515/9783110346992.305

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.

DOI: 10.1075/cf.6.2.04hod

DOI: 10.1515/zrs-2013-0038

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.

DOI: 10.1075/hsm.14.17hod

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.

DOI: 10.1075/hsm.13.17hod

DOI: 10.1075/hsm.12.01bec

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.

DOI: 10.1075/silv.7.14hod

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.

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Aff Joan prest aff India land. PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation JP).Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Birgitta-autografen A (Cod. Holm. A 65, SFSS 1.58): PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation BA).

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Handlingar på svenska rörande ’Vårfrupänningen’ till Vadstena klosters byggnad och underhåll. Texts 3–8: PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation VF).

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Heliga Birgittas uppenbarelser, book 4, chapters 1–20 and 40–60 (Cod. Holm. A 5a, SFSS 1.14.2): PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation BK).

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Heliga Birgittas uppenbarelser, book 7 (SFSS 1.84): PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation BL).

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Heliga Mechtilds uppenbarelser (Cod. Holm. A 13, SFSS 1.32), chapters 1–20: PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation MU).

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Herr abboten (Cod. Holm. D 4a, SFSS 1.28): PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation HA).

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Ordning vid val af Confessor Generalis i Vadstena kloster (Cod. Ups. C 74): PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation CG).

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Pentateukparafrasen. Genesis (Cod. Holm. A 1, SFSS 1.60): PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation PP).

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Sermones sacri Svecice (Cod. AM 787 4°, SFSS 1.86): PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation SS).

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Själens tröst. Introduction and Second Commandment (Cod. Holm. A 108, SFSS 1.59): PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation ST).

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Stadga af år 1443 för Vadstena klosters ekonomi (Cod. Ups. C 46): PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation VE).

Höder, Steffen (Hg.). 2011. Upplandslagen. Ärvdabalken and Manhelgdsbalken (Cod. Ups. B 12, SSGL 3): PaCMan-encoded digital version (The Hamburg Corpus of Old Swedish with Syntactic Annotation UL).

hdl.handle.net/11022/0000-0000-9D16-7

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.

DOI: 10.1075/hsm.12.02kra

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.

DOI: 10.1075/hsm.12

„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.

DOI: 10.1075/hsm.8.04hud

DOI: 10.1075/hsm.7.10hod

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.