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Article published In:
Variation and Grammaticalization of Verbal Constructions
Edited by Dániel Czicza and Gabriele Diewald
[Constructions and Frames 14:1] 2022
► pp. 150–180

Emerging into your family of constructions

German [IRR was] ‘no matter what’

| Research Foundation – Flanders | Ghent University
| Research Foundation – Flanders | Ghent University
| Ghent University

Starting from the term “family of constructions”, the present article investigates lexical and syntactic variation in a subtype of German concessive conditionals which is marked by was (‘what’) in combination with expressions of irrelevance like egal (‘no matter’). 12,894 examples from the DeReKo corpus (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) are analysed manually for seven variables. Both the quantitative and the qualitative results suggest that combinations of was with an expression of irrelevance, or “[IRR was]” for short, form part of a recently entrenched constructional schema [IRR w-] of concessive-conditional subordinators which are emerging into the family of concessive-conditional constructions in present-day German.

Keywords: concessive conditionals, construction grammar, grammaticalisation, corpus linguistics, family resemblance, family of constructions, prototypicality, desententialisation, intersective gradience, schematicity, lexical specification, German
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Concessive conditionals between discourse and syntax
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Expressions of irrelevance: Frequencies
    • 4.2Matrix clause ellipsis
    • 4.3Expressions of irrelevance and degree particles
    • 4.4Use of commas
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1The desententialisation cline, revisited
    • 5.2From entrenchment to secondary grammaticalization
  • 6.Conclusion and prospects
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 August 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00058.hae
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