4 Analysis of selected areal features
4.6 Dative external possessor construction
Dative external possessors are defined as oblique (often ‘dative’) noun phrases that encode possessors, but occur independently within a clause, i.e. outside the noun phrase that contains the possessum (Haspelmath 1999; 2001; König 2001).
Semantically, dative external possessors typically express that the possessor is somehow affected by an action or a situation that involves the possessum; more-over, the possessor is prototypically animate (Haspelmath 1999: 112–114). Dative external possessors are illustrated in (20):
(20) a. Standard German
‘She broke her boss’s nose once.’
b. Low German
‘A stone fell on my head.’
Constructionally, dative external possessors are a component of a dative ex-ternal possessor construction that could be formalised as in (21):
(21) Dative external possessor construction [possessor.npcase:obl, possessum.np]
As an areal feature, dative external possessors are typically said to occur in the core area of Standard Average European (cf. Haspelmath 2001: 1498, map 107.7), including Continental West Germanic, but excluding the north-western, northern, and eastern peripheries of Europe, with Insular West Germanic as well as the Nordic languages lacking similar constructions.
While information about non-standard syntactic features in specific areas is often hard to come by, the South Jutlandic data collected for Wenker’s dialect
11An almost (but due to structural differences not totally) parallel development can be assumed for the spread of the possessive linking pronoun construction into Norwegian via Low German-Norwegian contact (Höder 2016a: 119; Nesse 1998).
survey (Linguistic Atlas of the German Empire, collected 1876 and 1887, original questionnaires accessible via http://regionalsprache.de/; cf. Fleischer 2017) is a valuable source, particularly for the now extinct and under-documented dialects from the southernmost part of the then Danish-speaking area in present-day South Schleswig.12
One of Wenker’s sentences (Sentence 8 in the questionnaire used in Northern Germany) contains a dative external possessor in Standard German, shown in (22):
‘My feet hurt very much, I think I’ve worn them out.’
Since Danish varieties normally do not have a similar construction, the first clause translates into Standard Danish into something similar to (23), i.e. a clause that contains a straightforward possessive construction with a possessive pro-noun:
‘My feet hurt very much.’
Indeed, we do find this type of construction in the South Jutlandic question-naires, as exemplified in the translation from Asserballeskov (German Atzerbal-ligholz; Questionnaire 46882) in (24a), but we also find German-type dative ex-ternal possessor constructions in the South Jutlandic data, as in the translation from List (on the northernmost tip of the North Sea island of Sylt; Questionnaire 47006) in (24b).
12The data consists of 287 questionnaires with handwritten translations of forty Standard Ger-man sentences into local dialects, transcribed in a non-standardised quasi-orthographic way by unsupervised laypeople. As should be expected with data gathered in this way, Wenker’s data is not altogether unproblematic (with priming effects, possible interferences caused by some transcribers’ unfamiliarity with the local dialects, and so forth). However, it is possible and often useful to exploit the data in search of insights into contact-related morphosyntactic phe-nomena. As shown in Höder & Winter’s (2020) discussion on the general validity of Wenker’s material, the data has to be considered as, by and large at least, representing authentic dialect features. Also, it cannot be rejected out of hand as being contaminated by methodological artefacts due to Wenker’s admittedly error-prone use of data collection by proxy.
(24) South Jutlandic
Such findings suggest prima facie that the dative external possessor construc-tion as given above was used as a diaconstrucconstruc-tion in historically bilingual com-munities, presumably as a result of pro-diasystematic changewhich turned an originally German construction into a language-unspecific one.
However, Wenker’s data also allows for more fine-grained analyses. In a recent study, Höder (2021) finds that, in a subset comprising the southern half of the area included in Wenker’s survey (n= 179), both constructions are about equally fre-quent in the data, with 53.1% of the informants choosing a prototypical Danish possessive construction in their translation and 45.3% using a German-type da-tive external possessor (1.7% chose a structurally different translation).13In prin-ciple, of course, the German-type translations could be due to priming effects, but in that case one would expect there to be no areal differentiation: Priming effects should be approximately equal across the whole area. On the other hand, if dative external possessors are a contact-related, but genuine, feature of dialect grammar, then one would expect a higher number of German-type translations in regions where contact with German is (and traditionally has been) more intense, i.e. in re-gions closer to the German-dominant area. This suggests the hypothesis, firstly, that dative external possessors are more frequent in the south than in the north and, secondly, that they are less frequent on the island of Als, which is separated from the German-speaking area by the Flensburg Firth. Indeed, statistical analy-ses confirm both predictions. As “distance from the German-dominant area” can be conveniently operationalised in terms of geographic latitude, the negative correlation of latitude with the use of dative external possessors (point-biserial
13Up to now, data from the districts (Kreiseas defined by the Prussian administration in the 1880s) of Tondern, Apenrade, Sonderburg, Flensburg, and Husum has been transliterated manually and included in the analysis (DanishTønder, Aabenraa, Sønderborg, Flensborg, Husum). The data from the district of Hadersleben (Haderslev) further to the north still awaits transliteration.
correlation coefficient:𝑟 = −0.258, 𝑝 < 0.001)14 reveals an areal pattern with a tendency to use dative external possessors more in the south than in the north.
Similarly, dative external possessors are significantly less frequent in the district of Sonderburg, where the island of Als is located, than in the other districts (chi-squared test:𝜒2= 5.7,df= 1, 𝑝 = 0.017, 𝑟 = 0.18).15
In cases where such quantitative analyses are possible, they support the idea that the cognitive advantage of diaconstructions is higher the more a speaker community actually uses different languages or is, at least, exposed to bilingual input.
5 Conclusion
German and Danish have been in close contact in the former Duchy of Schleswig for more than one thousand years. However, while the contact situation has re-mained more or less stable from a macro-perspective, an inextricable multitude of micro-settings with different contact varieties has been shaped by different language ecologies, including various scenarios of language change, language shift, and the emergence of new varieties. The overall outcome is the formation of varying patterns of grammatical areality, with some areal features originat-ing in the Nordic languages and spreadoriginat-ing into regional varieties of German and vice versa. While some of these arealisms are long-established, others can be observed, as it were, in statu nascendi at different points in time.
While describing and mapping arealisms is a challenging (but also gratifying) task in itself, a constructionist approach is useful not only as a descriptive tool, but also for explanation. Diasystematic Construction Grammar, developed as a framework for analysing multilingual practices and subsequent contact-induced language change in contact situations, proves to be applicable in this context as well: Reconstructing areal features in the Danish-German contact zone in terms of (emerging) diaconstructions bridges the gap between an areal linguis-tic view, which is mainly based on contrastive analyses of relevant structures in the contact languages and varieties, and a usage-based perspective on the socio-cognitive reality of multilingualism.
14Point-biserial correlation coefficients are used to measure correlations between two variables if one of them is dichotomous. The coefficientris mathematically equivalent to Pearson’s𝑟 (Kornbrot 2014).
15In total, dative external possessors were used in 13 questionnaires from the district of Sonder-burg as opposed to 30 translations using prototypical Danish possessive constructions. In the other districts, the ratio was 68:65.
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