Investigating lexical competition - An Empirical Case Study of the German Spelling Reform of 1996/2004/2006

The German spelling reform of 1996/2004/2006 triggered the introduction of new or thographic variants in the German spelling system. These were the products of dif ferent kinds of modi cations enacted by the reform. They could be a result of a `mu tation'-like change of some of the characters of a word (as, for example, the change from Biographie to Biogra e), due to a writing as two words of a word form formerly written as one word (as in kennen lernen vs. kennenlernen), due to the introduction of a hyphenation (as in 17-jährig vs. 17jährig) or due to a change in the lower or upper case writing of words (as in im Allgemeinen vs. im allgemeinen). The goal of the current study is to present a transferable methodological framework in which the developments of the German spelling reform can be studied more precisely, the reactions of the language users, as representable by language corpora, to the speci ca tions purported by the reform. Particular interest lies in the distribution of competing forms; the spelling reform in general caused the simultaneous co-existence of two or, occassionally, more (semantically equivalent) forms, and the current survey tries to sketch the relative status of these competitors over time. The methods of analysis we thereby choose are general enough to be not only ap plicable to the particular situation of the German spelling reform, but to every state of a airs where two linguistic features are (partially) synonymous and are hence strict alternatives ( competitors ) of which the language user may choose. This encompasses for example the competition of a `native' and a `foreign' form in a particular natural language for example, in German, many modern English words are rivalling with traditional forms such as user vs. Benutzer, Band vs. Gruppe, etc. or the compe tition of other alternatives of varying origins such as in German indicative imperfect gewänne vs. gewönne, stünde vs. stände, etc., in English past participle shown vs. showed, simple past dreamed vs. dreamt, etc. or as in British versus American English labour vs. labor, bath vs. bathe. The structure of the current work is as follows. In Section 2 we give a short intro duction to the German spelling reform and the changes in the German orthographic system it entailed. Section 3 presents an overview over the data we use, which is based on DeReKo, the German reference corpus at the Institute for the German Language (IDS). Before illustrating the results of our analysis in Section 5, we detail various as pects of our methodological approach in Section 4; these comprise besides a time series representation of our data principal component analyses and clustering techniques for