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.
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