Naslov
Areal-horizontal and social-vertical variation of reflexive and reciprocal constructions in rural and urban Austria

Autori
Pavlinušić Vilus, Eva ; Kim, Agnes ; Korecky-Kröll, Katharina ; Pluschkovits, Markus ; Dressler, Wolfgang Ulrich

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
Sociolinguistics Symposium 24

Mjesto i datum
Gent, Belgija, 13.07.2022. - 16.07.2022

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
reflexive constructions ; reciprocal constructions ; areal-horizontal variation ; social-vertical variation

Sažetak
Austria is an interesting testing ground for the sociolinguistic variation of first-person plural reflexive and reciprocal constructions (e.g., Marinica 2020): Whereas the highest written Standard German register favors unambiguous reflexive vs. reciprocal constructions (e.g., wir waschen uns ‘we wash ourselves’ vs wir treffen einander ‘we meet each other’), the formally reflexive, but functionally reciprocal variant wir treffen uns ‘we meet us’ is widespread in many base dialects but also in near-standard spoken registers. However, the reflexive variant wir waschen sich ‘we wash oneself’ as well as the reciprocal variant wir treffen sich ‘we meet oneself’ is common, but socially marked for lower oral registers in Eastern Austria and has frequently been attributed to language contact with Slavic languages, particularly with Czech in Vienna (e.g., Müller 1971). We investigate recent naturalistic conversational data of 240 adults (180 rural participants from 13 locations, 60 urban participants from Vienna) of three age groups (18–30, 31–59, 60+) and two educational backgrounds (+/– high school diploma). Settings involve informal conversations with peers or young children and formal sociolinguistic interviews with researchers. In addition, 32 of the urban participants were investigated in language production experiments (in Standard German and in the local dialect). Results show striking areal-horizontal and social- vertical variation: Most occurrences of first- person plural sich are found in informal conversations of younger rural participants in Eastern Austria, whereas formal interviews contain more uns tokens and the einander variant is almost exclusively limited to prepositional constructions (e.g., miteinander ‘with each other’). sich is very rare in Western and nearly non-existent in Southern regions – despite substantial influence of Slovene in that region. Based on our results, we will thus critically discuss the language contact approach and compare it to the grammaticalization approach by Gast/Haas (2008) to tackle the sociolinguistic variation of this socially marked phenomenon.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

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