Functional Variation of German Also across Registers and Speaker Groups

Abstract

This study investigates the variation of the polyfunctional linguistic item also across registers and language contact settings. I present findings from a corpus study using the corpus of the Research Unit Emerging Grammars, RUEG for short (Wiese et al., 2019), which provides comparable, register-differentiated data of bilingual and monolingual speakers of German in Germany and bilingual heritage speakers of German in the US. The data suggest that functional variation of a specific lexical item reflects the use of functional features in specific communicative situations. The data further indicate an impact of the societal status that a language occupies in the larger society (majority vs. heritage language) on the distribution of such functions.