Subjunctive 2 Usage in Relation to the Preterite in German
Advised by Dr. Anna Grotans
“Introduction: My project focuses on the question: ” Is there a relationship between the historic loss of the preterite verb form in southern German dialects and the use of the present subjunctive 2 in these areas?” Because the two verb forms are related morphologically, I wanted to explore if the loss of one had affected the use of the other.
Methods: I am using a corpus of German newspapers to look at the synchronic usage of the synthetic and subjunctive 2 and preterite verb forms for ten irregular verbs in the first/third person singular conjugation and comparing usage frequencies between regionally and nationally distributed newspapers.
Results: The data was analyzed using a two-tailed z-test where the Big Paper information was the population data.
Synthetic: The Big Paper data was statistically significantly larger than all other states’ data
Preterite: The Big Paper data was statistically significantly smaller than the data from Bayern and Hessen but had no statistically significant difference with any of the other states.
Conclusions: The subjunctive 2 form is used less in general by local newspapers than nationally circulating papers, which is difficult to explain. It is possible that synthetic subjunctive 2 forms are a hallmark of a specific writing style used by the nationally circulated papers (perhaps a more prestigious form) and the local papers employ a different writing style (maybe more informal). The preterite form is used at relatively the same frequency (for the words chosen) across the board, with the surprising exception of it being used slightly more frequently in Bayern and Hessen, the first of which I would have expected a much lower frequency from because of the historic loss of the preterite form in the dialects of the region (parts of Hessen are reported to have preterite loss too). Overall, the loss of the preterite is not evident in formal writing. I would recommend further research into subjunctive 2 use and its distribution across different registers, as opposed to geographic distribution.
What an interesting project! Great work!