Metalinguistic Awareness of Standard vs Standard Usage: the Case of Determiners in Spoken German

Abstract

Language planning and language codification try to define what is to count as ‘standard language’. However, codified norms as macro-level phenomena are often at odds with the micro level of people’s linguistic usage, even in situations in which speakers can be expected to use standard variants and sometimes contrary to what language users themselves consider as standard usage. Spoken German is a case in point: for a considerable number of linguistic variables, speakers overwhelmingly prefer non-canonical over canonical forms in semi- and even highly formal speech genres (König, 1989; Deppermann et al., 2013). This chapter deals with two methodological questions concerning the relationship between the macro level of codification and the micro level of people’s autochthonous concepts of standard usage:

• (a) How do language users’ metalinguistic judgements of acceptability match with actual use of linguistic variants as attested in large corpora?

• (b) How does codification impact on language users’ metalinguistic judgements, depending on properties of linguistic variants and on written vs spoken modes of presentation of linguistic stimuli?