'Egal wer/was'-Gefüge im DaF-Unterricht : eine Unterrichtsreihe anhand der pädagogischen Konstruktionsgrammatik

In this article, I present a series of five lessons designed to help advanced learners of German improve their argumentation skills using so-called ‘concessive conditionals’(CCs). CCs are complex sentences in which the subordinate clause strengthens the argument of the main clause by presenting potential conditions on it as irrelevant. My contribution seeks to improve on existing didactic representations of German CCs by taking into account recent linguistic research on their discourse-functional properties (Leuschner 2006; Vander Haegen 2019). To this end, I make use of Pedagogical Construction Grammar (PCxG; Herbst 2016), which conceives of grammar instruction as the teaching of constructions, i.e. entrenched form-function pairs. The series presented here is the first fully fledged implementation of PCxG for the instruction of German. It goes beyond previous applications of PCxG to the instruction of English by systematically addressing the discourse-functional properties of the constructions to be taught in both speaking and writing. The final section of the article provides concrete lesson plans; the corresponding didactic materials can be found on the website of the journal

Die Emergenz irrelevanzkonditionaler Subjunktoren des Typs egal was : Variation und Grammatikalisierung anhand des Deutschen Referenzkorpus

Abstract: Building on earlier research on the grammaticalisation of concessive conditionals (Irrelevanzkonditionale), the present article investigates lexical and syntactic variation in a subtype of German concessive conditionals which is marked by the WH-word ‚was‘ (‘what’) in combination with expressions of irrelevance like ‚egal‘ (‘no matter’). More than 12,800 examples from the German DeReKo corpus (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) were analysed manually for eight different variables. Both the quantitative and the qualitative results suggest that combinations of ‚was‘ with an expression of irrelevance constitute part of an emergent paradigm of concessive-conditional subordinators in contemporary German. The on-going grammaticalisation of the paradigm is motivated by discourse-functional factors and proceeds through synchronised processes of deassertion and desententialisation. As a result, a new layer of concessive-conditional markers is emerging beside the older layer, which consists of a WH-word and the irrelevance particles auch and/or ‚immer‘ (‘-ever’) and does not show a corresponding range of variation between discourse and syntax

Emerging into your family of constructions : German [IRR was] ‘no matter what’

Starting from the term "family of constructions", the present article investigates lexical and syntactic variation in a subtype of German concessive conditionals which is marked by was ('what') in combination with expressions of irrelevance like egal ('no matter'). 12,894 examples from the DeReKo corpus (Deutsches Referenzkorpus) are analysed manually for seven variables. Both the quantitative and the qualitative results suggest that combinations of was with an expression of irrelevance, or "[IRR was]" for short, form part of a recently entrenched constructional schema [IRR w-] of concessive-conditional subordinators which are emerging into the family of concessive-conditional constructions in present-day German