The Report Committee for Margaret Marie Blevins Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report: Auxiliary tun in Texas German APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Hans C. Boas, Supervisor Marc Pierce Auxiliary tun in Texas German by Margaret Marie Blevins, BA Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin August 2014 Abstract Auxiliary tun in Texas German Margaret Marie Blevins, MA The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Hans C. Boas This report explores the functions of auxiliary tun (‘to do’) in Texas German over the past 40 years using data from Gilbert (1965, 1972), Guion (1996), and the Texas German Dialect Project (Boas et al. 2010). It also compares auxiliary tun’s uses in present-day Texas German with its uses in German dialects spoken in the regions from which the original Texas German settlers emigrated. The findings in this report suggest that auxiliary tun in present-day Texas German is used in many of the ways that it is used in Low and West Central German dialects. The broad use of auxiliary tun in Texas German could be due to the wide variety of uses of auxiliary tun in its donor dialects. Auxiliary tun’s widespread usage may also indicate that Texas German is replacing synthetic with analytic forms as part of language death. The observations in this report can further our understanding of the functions of auxiliary tun in present-day Texas German and contribute to our understanding of language decay and language change within speech islands. iii Table of Contents List of Tables ...........................................................................................................v List of Figures ........................................................................................................ vi 1. Introduction .........................................................................................................1 2. Standard and Non-Standard Functions of Auxiliary tun in Germany .................3 2.1 Tun as a Lexical Verb ...............................................................................3 2.2 Tun as an Auxiliary Verb ..........................................................................6 3. Texas German: An Introduction .......................................................................10 3.1 Texas German .........................................................................................10 3.2 Previous Research on Texas German .....................................................12 3.2.1 Auxiliary tun according to Gilbert (1972) ..................................12 3.2.2 Auxiliary tun in Guion (1996) ....................................................15 4. Auxiliary tun in Texas German: Then and Now ...............................................18 4.1 Auxiliary tun According to the Texas German Dialect Archive ............18 4.2 Functions of Auxiliary tun in the Donor Dialects of Texas German ......23 4.2.1 Auxiliary tun accordinng to Langer (2001) ................................25 4.2.2 Auxiliary tun accordinng to Elspaß and Möller (2011) ..............27 4.2.3 Auxiliary tun according to Brinckmann and Bubenhofer (2012)30 4.3 Results .....................................................................................................33 5. Conclusion ........................................................................................................36 Appendices ...........................................................................................................39 Appendix A Duden (2013) entry for lexical tun ...................................................39 Appendix B Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS) entry for lexical tun ......................................................................................................40 Appendix C Eikel (1967:98ff.) Uses and examples of auxiliary tun ....................41 Appendix D Auxiliary tun in TGDA Open Interviews .........................................42 Appendix E Auxiliary tun in TGDA Open Interview – Categorization ...............65 Appendix F Example sentences to exemplify Table 7..........................................91 Works Cited .............................................................................................................. 93 iv List of Tables Table 1: Standard uses of lexical tun in Duden (2013) and DWDS .................4 Table 2: Non-standard uses of lexical tun in Duden (2013) and DWDS ..........5 Table 3: Instances of auxiliary tun in Gilbert (1972) ......................................14 Table 4: Comparison of Gilbert's (1965, 1972) and Guion's (1996) findings.16 Table 5: Comparison of Gilbert's (1965, 1972) findings, Guion's (1996) findings, and TGDA data ..................................................................22 Table 6: Dialect areas according to Langer (2001:58) ....................................25 Table 7: Abridged summary of Langer (2001:58ff.) ......................................26 Table 8: Comparison of auxiliary tun in Low and West Central German dialects and Texas German ............................................................................34 v List of Figures Figure 1: The distribution of auxiliary tun according to the Atlas zur Alltagssprache (3. Runde: tun (I) (Frage 8b)) (Elspaß / Möller 2011) .....................................................................................28 Figure 2: The distribution of auxiliary tun (täte) according to the Atlas zur Alltagssprache (2. Runde: täte probieren (Frage 18c)) (Elspaß / Möller 2011) .....................................................................................29 Figure 3: The distribution of auxiliary tun (täte) according to the Atlas zur Alltagssprache (3. Runde: tun (II) (Frage 8c)) (Elspaß / Möller 2011) .....................................................................................30 Figure 4: The distribution of three uses of auxiliary tun accordinng to the Deutsch Heute corpus (Brinckmann/Bubenhofer 2012) ...................32 vi 1. Introduction This paper investigates the functions of tun (‘to do’) as an auxiliary verb in Texas German. Tun and its English counterpart do occur in a diverse range of grammatical functions (Langer 2001:12), including those in (1) and (2) below. Tun is a useful test case when investigating English’s influence on Texas German1 and when comparing Texas German to its donor dialects in Germany2 to see how time, distance, and language contact can influence dialects and languages. (1) Habitual aspect (TGDP, 1-61-1-9-a.eaf)3 ... die Wurscht mir ham hier die uh ... Neu Braunfels [Schmok] Haus. … the sausage we have here the uh … New Braunfels Smoke House DIE dun Wurscht machen. they do-PRS.3PL sausage make-INF ‘… the sausage we have here, the uh … New Braunfels Smokehouse. They make sausage.’ (2) V-topicalization (Duden 2013, glosses, translations, and emphasis mine)4 singen tut sie gerne sing-INF do-PRS.3SG she gladly ‘She likes to sing.’ 1 Texas German is not a homogeneous dialect or language. “What has traditionally been called ‘Texas German’ should […] be regarded as a collection of various subvarieties that share a limited set of linguistic features, such as reduced case marking and heavy lexical borrowing from English” (Boas 2009:99). This paper focuses on uncovering the breath of uses of auxiliary tun in Texas German in general. Thus, the Texas German data are investigated as a whole rather than attempting to compare how different Texas German subvarieties use auxiliary tun. 2 Identifying the exact donor dialects of Texas German is problematic (Boas 2009:88ff.), see section 4.2. 3 Each recording in the TGDA is given a unique file name. This file name, for example, indicates that interviewer #1 conducted this interview with informant #61. This is the first interview with this informant, and this file is the ninth copy of the master file. The “a” indicates that this is an audio file (Boas et al. 2010:285). 4 Throughout this paper, there are examples from various secondary sources. Different authors have different transcription and glossing methods. The glosses and translations in this paper come from the original source, unless otherwise indicated. All TGDP glosses and translations are mine. 1 This paper therefore explores the changing functions of auxiliary tun in Texas German over the past 40 years and compares the uses of auxiliary tun in present-day Texas German to its uses in the German spoken in the dialect regions from where the original settlers emigrated. Studying language contact varieties such as Texas German and how they change over time contributes to the study of transcultural linguistics, language attrition contact linguistics, and language death (Földes 2005:293f.; Putnam 2011:3f.). For example, it can reveal which aspects of language may be more susceptible to change or loss when a speaker or language community progressively uses a language less, or is in contact with another language community for an extended period of time. Such information can contribute to our understanding of how “the brain deals with language and the structure of language itself” (Jones/Singh 2005). The structure of this report is as follows: Section 2 provides an overview of the functions of lexical and auxiliary tun in standard and non-standard German. Section 3 introduces Texas German and gives an overview of the functions of auxiliary tun in