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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 545

Part of Session 104: Microlinguistics and language planning (Other abstracts in this session)

Talk about standard vs. standard in use: Reflection on norms and orientation to norms in speaking in interview data

Authors: Deppermann, Arnulf; Knöbl, Ralf
Submitted by: Knöbl, Ralf (Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany)

The linguistic definition of ‘standard language’ is a much disputed matter. In our paper, we will discuss which methodological points of departure are available in order to discover what language users themselves take ‘standard language’ to be with respect to their everyday linguistic practices. We will lay out that there are at least three orders of linguistic practice which matter to an understanding of what native speakers take ‘standard’ to be and how it matters to their own linguistic choices and assessments:

1.      Spontaneous, reflexive statements and ratings concerning different realizations of linguistic variables which speakers consider to conform with or to deviate from standard. Speakers’ accounts of why they consider certain forms as belonging to standard or, to the contrary, as being non-standard (i.e. socially restricted, dialectal, restricted to in-group genres etc.) offer insights into speakers’ linguistic ideologies, their situatedness and their conceptions of variational space and its normative ordering.

2.      The linguistic realization of the same variables in talk with strangers in at least semi-formal, everyday settings displays to which norm of realization of speech speakers orient to in situated speech production.

3.      Self- and other-repair, situated metalinguistic comments and other forms of metalinguistic stance-taking are devices to show how linguistic forms are monitored and rated (self-)responsively in linguistic online-production in terms of their congruence with (situationally relevant) standards.

Our paper will present findings regarding these three sources of speakers’ conceptions of 'standard' as it matters to them in everyday language use. The phenomenon dealt with will be clitization of V+PRO (ham=we, ham=mer) and DET (so=ne), which is very common in colloquial German. We will compare the three orders of orientation to “standard” concerning individual speakers, pointing to contradictions between the three levels and their possible causes. We will also compare reflexive statements about standard norms with corpus-wide (regional and genre-related) distributions of the same variables. Our paper will conclude with reflections on what our findings yield with respect to an empirically founded reconstruction of ‘standard’ as a members’ notion and as to the opportunities and pitfalls of a methodologically rigid approach to studying ‘standard’ as a members’ notion.

Our study draws on biographic interviews of 830 speakers from the corpus ‘German today’ (Deutsch heute). Since speakers recorded come from all German speaking countries and all major dialectal regions, regional factors affecting conceptions of ‚standard’ are taken into account.