Did the colleague send or send the e-mail? Are classes canceled because of the holiday or because of the holiday? Is the yogurt in the shopping cart? When such uncertainties arise, researchers speak of linguistic doubts. Linguist Renata Szczepaniak from Leipzig University explains how this happens and how teachers can deal with it in the classroom. Her book ,,Sprachliche Zweifelsfälle: Definition, dimensions of consideration and research" was published recently.
Professor Szczepaniak, one of the topics you deal with in your research is linguistic doubt. What exactly do you mean by this and can you give some examples?
Linguistic doubts are present in our everyday lives. The language system actually provides routine procedures in the form of grammar that run in the background. Who thinks about the fact that in Nimm heute lieber den Regenschirm mit! the noun in the accusative case has no inflectional ending? For some nouns, however, grammatical knowledge offers two accusative forms, e.g. Don’t play the hero or the hero! If we think about the grammatical correctness of such variants and then argue and evaluate them, we are dealing with a linguistic case of doubt. Other examples are because of the rain or because of the rain, waved or waved etc. The Zweifelsfälle-Duden provides a good overview: It contains almost 6000 entries on linguistic doubts in the areas of grammar, style and spelling.
To what extent can such cases of doubt be explained in terms of linguistic history?
As a language historian, I am naturally interested in the emergence of variants and the changes in their use. We also observe how evaluations by speakers influence change. One example: until the 19th century, the preposition dank was used with the dative case, meaning thanks to the contract. Later, the use of the genitive was added, which was considered stylistically superior. This so-called stigmatization of the dative case contributed to the change, so that in the 20th century - contrary to popular opinion - the use of the preposition with the genitive case increased: people now heard and read dank des Vertrags more and more often. Today, both variants sound familiar to us. So you could say that anyone who doubts shows a keen sense of language and linguistic variants.
How can teachers use this knowledge in the classroom?
Cases of linguistic doubt are a valuable resource in the classroom, as they encourage reflection on language. In "Praxis-Deutsch", issue 264, among others, we have designed teaching models in which they are used to discover linguistic structures. They are used to raise awareness of the fact that language changes and that it is rich in variety. Pupils can use language corpora to question common assessments of variants, for example when they observe that the supposedly colloquial variant is often used in national newspapers or in fiction . In teacher training, we therefore promote an understanding of the difference between linguistic doubts and clear grammatical errors.
Renata Szczepaniak is Professor of Historical Linguistics of German at the University of Leipzig. Her textbook "Sprachliche Zweifelsfälle: Definition, observation dimensions and research" . She is one of more than 250 experts at Leipzig University whose specialist knowledge you can draw on with the help of our expert network.
