Grammatical reduction and information structural preferences in a contact variety of German: Kiezdeutsch
Project B6 within the Collaborative Research Area 632 ‘Information Structure’ of University of Potsdam and Humboldt University Berlin
- 2008-2011; funded by die DFG
- PI: H. Wiese
The project is concerned with the relationship between grammatical and information-structural aspects of ‘Kiezdeutsch’, a multiethnic variety of German that emerged around the mid-1990s as an urban youth language in neighbourhoods with a high proportion of migrants. Based on an corpus of spontaneous data, we investigate whether in contact languages such as Kiezdeutsch, we find a more direct mapping of information structure onto the linguistic plane due to weaker grammatical restrictions.