Abstract:In this paper we introduce a corpus based variationist approach to the study of language change, which hinges on the definition and explicit coding of variables and variants, or competing 'ways of saying the same thing', within their usage in corpus data. We use multiple extensible annotation levels to examine variants in the development of relative clauses from Old High German to Modern German, using four comparable deeply annotated corpora of different German language stages. We compare the frequencies of di… Show more