German universal concessive conditionals with wh-clause-initial and wh-clause-medial marking

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These are the data analysed in Chapter 6 of Vander Haegen's dissertation entitled "Konstruktionsgrammatik und Variation. Eine Mikrotypologie universaler Irrelevanzgefüge im Gegenwartsdeutschen".

The dataset includes an annotated sample of N = 3000 German written universal concessive conditionals (e.g. "Was immer auch passiert, ich bin für dich da!" 'Whatever happens, I will be there for you!') from the German Reference Corpus DeReKo. Concessive conditionals (CCs) can basically be defined as conditionals with quantification, as they express a (usually exhaustive) set of antecedent values in the protasis, instead of only one antecedent value as in prototypical conditionals. In universal concessive conditionals (UCCs), the antecedent set is evoked through a combination of a free-choice-expression (here: the complex particle "immer auch" '-ever') and a variable in the guise of a wh word (here: "was" 'what').

German UCCs can either be marked wh-clause-medially (using the particles "auch" and/or "immer" as above – both mean '-ever') or wh-clause-initially (with an expression of irrelevance like "egal" 'no matter', "gleichgültig" 'no matter', "wurscht' 'no matter (lit.: sausage) etc.). The wh-clause-initial and -medial marking strategies are in near-complementary distribution.

The dataset was compiled in the context of a doctoral dissertation project which sought to, inter alia, determine functional and formal differences (apart from the position and lexical specification of the free-choice marking) between wh-clause-initially and -medially marked UCCs in contemporary German. It comprises n = 1500 tokens of wh-clause-initially and n = 1500 tokens of wh-clause-medially marked UCCs. The data are annotated for over 20 formal and functional variables.

The full dataset (including the corpus data) and a dataset including only ID numbers and annotations (to facilitate processing with statistical software) are shared in two 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 dataset is a random sample from from two larger datasets, which are analysed in the following publications:

• Bossuyt, Tom, Ludovic De Cuypere & Torsten Leuschner. 2018. Emergence Phenomena in German W-immer/auch-Subordinators. In Eric Fuß, Marek Konopka, Beata Trawiński & Ulrich H. Waßner (eds.), Grammar and Corpora 2016, 97–120. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing. http://books.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/heiup/catalog/book/361. (30 September, 2018).
• 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.

All data were 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 this source 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 function "C.score.R" originates from the digital appendices of Gries (2021) and has been uploaded here with the author's permission.

Gries, Stefan Th. 2021. Statistics for linguistics with R. A practical introduction. 3rd revised ed. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter.