„Ich geh Kino“ oder „… ins Kino“?

Abstract

This paper analyses usage restrictions on such noncanonical local expressions as Ich geh Kino 'I go cinema' compared to canonical full PPs with DP complement (… ins Kino 'to the cinema'). In public discourse, bare local NPs have become emblematic for Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking from multiethnic urban Germany, although they also appear in informal language elsewhere. We present results from two studies investigating the use of noncanonical versus canonical options.Study 1 targets grammatical restrictions, based on a corpus of peer group conversations among adolescents. We show that noncanonical variants have the form of bare NPs with or without preposition and appear in both multilingual and monolingual speech communities, following the same syntactic and semantic patterns. While there is a quantitative advantage for the multilingual group, noncanonical variants generally constitute only a minority compared to canonical full PP [DP].Study 2 targets usage restrictions across communicative situations, based on a corpus of elicited productions by adolescents from a multilingual urban neighbourhood. Comparisons show significantly more noncanonical local expressions in informal, peer-group situations than in formal ones for both spoken and written modes.Taken together, results indicate a selective, grammatically restricted and register-bound choice of noncanonical local expressions.

Grammatical Gender in the German Multiethnolect

“…According to Siegel (2018), the participants' speech showed typical multiethnolectal syntactic features occurring with considerable frequency, which suggests that they did not monitor their language for grammatical correctness according to Standard German rules during the recordings. 8 Although our corpus is restricted to speakers from Stuttgart, the features reported in Siegel 2018 are also attested in the speech of similar speakers in other German cities (see, among others, Wiese 2009, Wiese & Pohle 2016, Wiese & Rehbein 2016. Note that none of the participants in our study spoke a Swabian dialect (see Auer 2020).…”

Syllable rate and speech rhythm in multiethnolectal Zurich German: a comparison of speaking styles

“…This appears to be indeed a constant multiethnolectal feature across speaking styles in Zurich German as we did not find a significant interaction of speaking style and nPVI-V in our model. Arguably, it might be the case that multiethnolectal phonetic features might be less controllable than syntactic structures (see [33]) and therefore less prone to vary with respect to communicative context.…”

“…There is reason to believe that multiethnolectal features are more pronounced in spontaneous speech than in read speech, as the communicative situation may have an impact on the use of certain features. Wiese and Pohle [33], for example, found a certain syntactical feature of multiethnolectal German significantly more often in informal peer-group situations than in formal contexts. However, a preliminary analysis [34] of a subset of 24 out of the 48 speakers involved in the current contribution showed similar trends both in read and spontaneous speech.…”