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Needles in Haystacks: Semi-Automatic Identification of Regional Grammatical Variation in Standard German
Abstract This paper lays out a semi-automatic approach to identifying regional variation in the grammar of Standard German. Our approach takes as input manually defined templates of grammatical constructions that are automatically instantiated over a corpus collected from regional newspapers. These instantiations are automatically ranked by a metric that quantifies how specific an instantiation is for a region. Ranked lists of instantiations are compiled that contain instantiations specific to a region and are scanned manually by linguists to identify those that denote grammatical variants of Standard German. This approach enabled us to discover variants that so far have not been documented. With respect to research on variation within standard languages as seen from a more general perspective, we aim to contribute towards research strategies that clearly rely on empiricism rather than on intuition or bias.1
Keywords Association measures, corpus-driven approaches, diatopic variation, grammatical variation, standard language
