Diachronic emergence of German universal concessive conditionals with wh-clause-initial marking

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These are the data analysed in Chapter 7 of Vander Haegen's dissertation entitled "Konstruktionsgrammatik und Variation. Eine Mikrotypologie universaler Irrelevanzgefüge im Gegenwartsdeutschen" (for a full reference, see "Related Publication" metadata field). The dataset contains German construction types in which an expression of irrelevance such as "egal", "gleichgültig" or "wurscht" (all: 'no matter') is followed by the wh word "was" 'what' or "wer" 'who', including the oblique forms of the latter ("wessen" 'whose', "wem" 'to.whom', "wen" 'whom'). The construction types under scrutiny can be arranged along a cline with two end points, illustrated in 1. and 2. below:

1. Es ist egal, was ich bin, ich bin ich.

   'It doesn't matter who I am, I am me.' Lit.: 'It is no.matter who ...'

2. Egal was ich bin, ich bin ich.

   'No matter who I am, I am me.'

In 1., the irrelevance expression "egal" 'no matter' appears as a predicative within a copular clause that embeds a wh interrogative. The copular clause is paratactically linked to the clause 'I am me'. In 2., however, the irrelevance expression functions as the introduction to an adverbial subclause, which is hypotactically linked to the clause 'I am me'. The construction type in 1. will henceforth be referred to as a "clause complex with an irrelevance predicate" (cf. Leuschner 2006: 77); the construction type in 2. is known as a "universal concessive conditional" (or UCC for short, cf. inter alia Haspelmath/König 1998: 563f.).

The dataset was compiled in the context of a doctoral dissertation project which sought to, inter alia, trace the macro- and microdiachronic emergence of German UCCs as in 2. from clause complexes with irrelevance predicates as in 1. To this end, two samples were exported: a macrodiachronic sample covering the time period 1609–1948 and a microdiachronic one covering the time period 1947–2018. The macrodiachronic sample consists of N = 1463 tokens from the DWDS historical metacorpus; the macrodiachronic sample consists of N = 24,113 tokens from the German Reference Corpus DeReKo that were originally collected by Vander Haegen (2023).

The full samples (including the corpus data) and the samples including only ID numbers and annotations (to facilitate processing with statistical software) are shared in four separate .csv-files. An R Markdown file with the data analysis and an html file with the R code and output are shared as well.

The macrodiachronic sample stems from the metacorpus Historische Korpora provided by DWDS, the Digital Dictionary of the German Language.

The microdiachronic sample was extracted from the "W – Archiv der geschriebenen Sprache" from the German Reference Corpus DeReKo, which can be searched using the online concordancer COSMAS II.

Insubstantial parts of both sources are reused in this dataset under exceptions and limitations to intellectual property protection for databases in regulations, such as the Norwegian Copyright Act and the EU Database Directive.

The microdiachronic sample was originally described by myself in:

Vander Haegen, Flor. 2023. Ein neues Mitglied der irrelevanzkonditionalen Konstruktionsfamilie: universale Irrelevanzkonditionale des Typs [IRR w-] im Gegenwartsdeutschen. In Fabio Mollica & Sören Stumpf (eds.), Konstruktionsfamilien im Deutschen (Konstruktionsgrammatik IX), 353–388. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.

The data source of the macrodiachronic sample is publicly available without log-in via https://www.dwds.de/d/korpora/dtaxl.

The data source of the microdiachronic sample is publicly available after logging in on https://cosmas2.ids-mannheim.de/cosmas2-web/ or https://korap.ids-mannheim.de/.