Das Korpus des Projekts "Mischphänomene zwischen Dialekt und Standardsprache in der Deutschschweizer Diglossie". Über die Schwierigkeit, selten vorkommende Phänomene zu dokumentieren

Abstract

An ongoing research project at the University of Fribourg/Freiburg (Switzerland) investigates relatively infrequent forms of usage of the dialect and the standard variety of a language. The project focuses on verbal realisations in which both varieties exist side by side but which do not constitute cases of code-switching in the traditional sense; that is, the code changes do not serve a local pragmatic function and/or their salience has diminished as a result of their high frequency of occurrence. Furthermore, the mixing occurs at conspicuous syntactic positions, and the transferred linguistic elements do not rank among the typical resources for code-switching. Moreover, the resulting realisations – if decontextualised – may tend to be judged as impermissible by autochthonous speakers. Such phenomena are unexpected in Swiss German diglossia and contradict not only lay conceptions but also an assumption underlying many scientific investigations which states that speakers of Swiss German keep the two varieties strictly distinct in their usage. This contribution will shed light on several aspects of corpus design, with a special focus on the difficulties involved in compiling a corpus for the documentation of rare phenomena.